What Does the Pagecount Say?

When I'm thinking of buying an RPG, the first thing I do is look at the table of contents.  The table of contents tells you a lot about a game.  It tells you what the game is about:  A game with a magic system is about magic, a game without one, isn't.  A book where half the book is about game mechanics, with the other half sharing GMing tips, setting stuff, and character creation is going to give a very different feel than a game where one tenth of the book is about mechanics and character creation and the rest is an overview of the setting.

Look at the player's handbook for Dungeons and Dragons sometime:  There's less than twenty-pages of setting material, and extensive rules for spells, equipment, character creation, skills, feats, and combat.  From that I know what the game is really about:  It's about characters who use spells, equipment, skills, and feats to fight things.  Where they do it isn't that important.  On the other hand, Talislanta's five hundred page tome with all the rules crammed into fifty pages or so, is a game about a strange alien world where the differences between magic schools are shaped as much by social opinion as by what the magic does.


This isn't intended to insult D&D or compliment Talislanta.  D&D gives a far more tactical and satisfying fight, whereas Talislanta gives you ancient magic automatons that pole skiffs down river to act as traders.  Neither one provides Humanoid ducks who are renowned for their xenophobia and blood-lust.  For that you have to play Glorantha (or find an old copy of Rune Quest).

I must note, again, that I don't say any of this to insult one system or another.  I note these things because what the game is about is important.  What the game is about shapes both the sorts of adventures one can run and the sorts of things that can happen during those adventures.  If you want to run a dungeon crawl, White Wolf Publishing probably doesn't make the best game for doing it, and if you want to run a game about the emotional consequences of dwelling in dark places, TSR's old Marvel Superheroes Game wasn't the place to do that.  Likewise, when you're thinking about making a character, consider the game you're playing.  A master swordsman is probably just as out of place in Call of Cthulhu as a nebbishy researcher who's afraid of his own shadow is in Dungeons and Dragons.

Why am I discussing this?  Because conflicts still arise in gaming groups over these sort of conflicts.  I'm on a listserver where gamers talk about gaming and discuss how they make homeless street urchins who build art out of garbage in a Mecha fighting game.  The game in question had no mechanics for building art out of garbage.  So, there was a problem.  The characters were made in the wrong game.  This may be the GM's fault:  He chose a game his players didn't want to play; or the players' fault:  They make characters who didn't fit the game.  Whose fault it is doesn't really matter:  the game broke, and the game broke because the characters didn't fit the system.

No one looked at pagecount.