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Message: <blockquote data-quote="timbannock" data-source="post: 9345939" data-attributes="member: 17913">Short and concise. Looking back on 35+ years of gaming, I can say that while my players (in many groups) and I did a decent job of remembering rules, the fact is that "more rules" was never better for our playstyles. While some of the stricter systems did give some players the fun mini-game of character builds, I'd say the number of people that remembered or implemented rules incorrectly in those games, and/or who weren't there for the rules but for the "let's just play something and have fun!" element far, far outweighed the folks that really dug into the rules, much less the ones who did so and actually got the rules right more than 60-75% of the time.That said, I've seen many GMs who clearly needed more rules to help support them, especially early on. But a problematic element of that is that so many of them didn't realize that, and/or were so quick to house-rule a game that they never understand the mechanics as they were originally intended to be, and therefore made really bad house rules or really bad rulings in the moment. I'm very guilty of that, early on. I still default to tweaking a system very early on, and have to consciously dial it back and play a game RAW a few times.My suspicion is that Shadowdark could be a lot smaller already: cut all the inspirational and encounter tables, boil monsters down to a 1 or 2 page spread ala Sly Flourish's Forge of Foes, probably do something similar with magic items, and condense the procedures into numbered (or checkbox) lists, and you could probably cut that book into 1/3 or 1/2 the size it is now.And that's keeping it A5. It'd be even less if you then put all that into an 8.5x11 layout.</blockquote>

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