RPGaDay 2019 Day #15 One

Today’s theme is “One.”

You can tell a lot about a game’s quality by how much of the game they can fit into one book. Some games are not so much spread as smeared out across several books, with no single book really standing alone. This was one thing that really hurt Oz: Dark and Terrible in my opinion. Especially since the supplements that were necessary to make the game work never came out.

The size of the book can also be telling. On the small side, I keep coming back to Fate Accelerated. Only 48 pages and it feels complete. There’s no setting, but the variety of sample characters show what you can do with that simple little engine. On the big side, there are the 20^th Anniversary editions of the Classic World of Darkness games. They contain every rule and character type for each of the respective games. The 4^th edition of Talislanta is similarly a 400+ page beast (my wife lovingly calls it “The Big Blue Brick”), but the rules are simple, and the book is focused on presenting the elaborately detailed land known as Talislanta.

If I need a couple of books, that’s okay, too. If I’m using Fate Core or Savage Worlds, I’m going to have a core rulebook, a setting book, and maybe one or two supplements to round things out. But something like D&D 3e, which had myriad sourcebooks and supplements and players that insisted on using something from every one of them (a feat here, a spell there, a magic item from this one, etc.) is not something that my back forgives easily.

And then there are the games that stand alone out of necessity. All three games in White Wolf’s Aeon Trinity line were well received, but the pulp game Adventure! was a standout because it never got supplements. I’m sure that support was intended for the line, but money and politics got in the way (as they so often do). It also meant that Adventure! largely avoided being mired in metaplot like the other two games, so it came off a bit stronger for being only the one book.

When I wrote Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road, making sure that the game could stand alone in a single volume was important to me. I didn’t want to release half of a game. The flip side was that I wanted to be able to sell supplements should the market warrant it. My solution there was to include only setting information from within the borders of Oz, saving other areas from Baum’s writing for a potential supplement. (It’s still on my list of things to do. Now that I have a writing club, it might be my next project once I finish RPGaDay.)