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  • Re: Nickel and Diming

    From gbbgu@21:1/5 to Kyonshi on Mon Feb 10 11:16:26 2025
    Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

    It turns out I will have to buy a not yet published GM's book to make
    use of these "Core Rules". Or buy a previous edition, because Pendragon
    never changed so much that I can't use the previous edition for this.
    I find this quite annoying. Core Rules in my opinion are supposed to
    contain the actual core rules of a game that you need to actually play,
    not just a small subsection.

    And outside of Pendragon I recently learned that the new edition of
    Cthulhu by Gaslight also will be split into a Players' and a GM's book.
    That also used to be a single book. Something that already annoyed me
    with the 7th ed. Call of cthulhu rules.

    I know they want to make money, but Chaosium is lately overdoing it
    somewhat.

    It seems to be the way games are going. Pathfinder went from a single thick Core Rulebook to Player/GM/Monster Core.

    When I wanted to try out Cthulhu, I didn't know I only needed the Keeper Rulebook and bought the Investigator Rulebook as well.

    A lot of the indie games seem to stick to a single core book, Kevin Crawford "without number" games are nice standalone books. Shadowdark, Blades in the Dark, Monster of the Week, Kids on... Knave etc (too many to name) There's something nice about being able to play a game with just a single book, a couple dice, pens and paper.



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    gbbgu

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  • From gbbgu@21:1/5 to Kyonshi on Mon Mar 17 23:47:38 2025
    On 24 Feb 2025, Kyonshi wrote:

    On 2/10/2025 12:16 PM, gbbgu wrote:
    Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> wrote:

    It turns out I will have to buy a not yet published GM's book to make
    use of these "Core Rules". Or buy a previous edition, because Pendragon
    never changed so much that I can't use the previous edition for this.
    I find this quite annoying. Core Rules in my opinion are supposed to
    contain the actual core rules of a game that you need to actually play,
    not just a small subsection.

    And outside of Pendragon I recently learned that the new edition of
    Cthulhu by Gaslight also will be split into a Players' and a GM's book.
    That also used to be a single book. Something that already annoyed me
    with the 7th ed. Call of cthulhu rules.

    I know they want to make money, but Chaosium is lately overdoing it
    somewhat.

    I have a fondness for games that manage to actually present their core
    rules in a single book, in a way so you never actually need another
    book. There's something wholesome and nice about it.
    That's why I really got into OSR back in the day: I realized Labyrinth
    Lord (which basically was B/X) was a complete game in itself. Same with (Mongoose) Traveller, where it even contained the information how to
    create your setting in the game itself.

    I guess you make 3x the money by having to buy 3x the books. I used to want to buy all the supplements and additional stuff for any system I was interested
    in (and still have that completionist tendency), but lately I'm falling back
    to "simple is better". I don't have time to read books full of info, and can't remember it anyway.

    I'd rather a simple book that I can reference at the table and make the rest
    up on the fly. I've played enough that I can fill in any backstory of a random NPC with hooks if needed. A few decent random tables to glance at help too.

    Probably why my latest obsession is shadowdark, it seems like a really nice easy system... but of course if the players _really_ want to play DnD then
    I'll run that system.


    --
    gbbgu

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