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January 05, 2004
The “Perfect” Size for Modern Games
We had this conversation today and I felt it was worth tossing it out to the world at large.
In the days of yesteryear, the bigger and fatter the game book, the better. A nice juicy 256-page game book crammed with 90,000 words or more of gaming goodness was the Holy Grail.
Gamers, as a whole, have aged. With age comes a whole bevy of time wasters: families, jobs, children, projects, other hobbies, and things that simply need doing. A million things take your time away from good, solid roleplaying game reading. No one has the time, or the patience, to wallow through a full sized book anymore.
I’ve been thinking about the optimum size for a more modern RPG, and am having a hard time deciding between 48 pages and 64 pages. Unfortunately, I lack the time to put together the outline for what a 64 page game would look like and how it would lay out, so comparisons are difficult. However, I have heard good things about the new d20 Grimm supplement, which packs a wallop of game in 64 tight pages.
I know what the game needs: stripped down, easy to read and remember rules, integrated world and game information, enough flavour to grasp the world and put together a session quickly. Anything that seems like padding – fiction, “in character” rules, many of the adventure seeds, anything not strictly game-related information --- would be left on the floor.
Do folks feel the time of the skinny game has come? Should the game industry be building quick to read and quicker to play games to cater to gamers with more money and less time? Are smaller, compact, ready-to-go games the way of the future? And if so, what are the essentials that need to go into those 64 pages?
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Comments
I can go either way on this. There are plenty of "gamers who have aged" who still devour gaming tomes the way that the young'ns do. Despite the aging of gamers, I don't think the modern gaming industry necessarily demands a slimmer, trimmed down game. Look at AEG's Stargate: SG-1 corebook, which clocks in at four hundred eighty-eight pages (and which I hear is selling quite nicely).
That said, I think that there is room for the stripped down approach you suggest. I think the unfortunately-defunct New Style line from Hogshead was a brilliant set of books of the type you suggest. Unfortunately, the market didn't really support them. Why? I'm not sure, though I suspect that a smaller RPG book would fair better as a PDF than as a print product. Of the top ten sellers at RPGnow, only two are more than seventy pages.
Posted by: Paul Tevis at Jan 5, 2004 8:30:37 PM
I think there are several local peaks of desirability.
One is the traditional big fat book. Exalted and its fatsplats do very nicely for themselves. So do big meaty D&D books. Outside the field, look at "the art of this or that books" and whole-season DVD sets and such.
Another is the manga digest volume, most closely approximated in gaming by Mind's Eye Theatre and BESM books.
The well-bound thin volume seems to be another - Savage Worlds and its supplements, Atlas' hardcovers, and the like.
One key thing seems to be that you should have a spine. What distributors and retailers most hate are books that look identical unless you display them cover out. You need enough thickness to allow for something easily recognizable on the spine, and if your manuscript is short, you should alter the format accordingly.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Jan 5, 2004 9:05:01 PM
Hmmm...
More content is better than more rules. (IMO as always)
The HERO system tips the scales at well over 400 pages. I am drawn to it like a moth to flame though I know full well, the system takes a slide rule to play and even if I could wade through it all, I'd never get anyone else to do it.
Delta Green Countdown -- also over 400 pages and while it could be argued that it can skip the rules altogether, it's a sheer joy to read. It's chockablock with info and ideas and content of all shapes and sizes.
Gimme a nice meaty book full of content and I'll be happy. Give me a meaty book full of wind deflection rates for various calibers of ammunition and I'll use it for skeet shooting.
As with anything else, jumbo-sized quality is always appreciated.
Tom
Posted by: Tom at Jan 5, 2004 9:12:13 PM
How about the balance between fiction and rules in a book? Some rules sets can now be expected to be large % story. Excellent for setting mood and tone, but sometimes it seems like filler if there's not enough meat on the bones. Some art is the same way.
It varies by game, too. With something like "Victorian Vampire", the Vampireness was effectively taken for granted and the book's crunchy bits were in the setting and the difference in mechanics. 213 pages I was very happy with. However, I expect to get a great deal of use out of Kobold!: The Charade (the new KAMB Larp rules) at 32 pages. They're the equivalent of Cheapass Games, fun, fast, and insane.
Posted by: Michael at Jan 6, 2004 12:02:08 AM
Tough one. As I've gotten older (that is, since I started gaming at the age of 8 until now), my tastes have gravitated strongly towards wanting more detail: more detailed descriptions, more detailed rules, more detailed histories, more detailed maps, etc. If I'm to get that detail, my choices are either to buy more and/or bigger books or make up my own. Having all the time-sucks to which adulthood is given, buying it saves me a bit of time, so getting more and bigger books is actually a more efficient use of my time.
On the other hand, neither of those options is really a good one, since reading and internalizing all that stuff still takes a lot of time. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I *can* be satisfied with a conventional RPG of such reduced length. Therefore, when I get together with my old gaming friends, who mostly live elsewhere and are therefore hard to arrange roleplaying sessions with, we're more likely to play non-RPG games like Munchkin or stuff from Cheapass. Like Paul, Hogshead's brilliant, doomed New Style games immediately came to mind as I read the specifications (although my favorite, Baron Munchausen, was lavishly illustrated and written in a discursive fashion; a minimalist rewrite could easily convert it into a four-page pamphlet).
This leads me back to an idea that has been kicking around in my head for a while: one possible future for RPGs is in what might be called "parlor RPGs," games with a role-playing element but without the baggage of traditional RPGs. The aforementioned Baron Munchausen game falls into this category, as do the "how to host a murder" games. These are games that don't require a lot of prep work (no world-building, no character generation), have rules that don't even attempt to simulate character actions (no rules for determining successful attempts, for example, just rules regulating the course of play), and no worries about continuing campaigns, so the game can be completed in a single session. Such games require little time, so they can fit into grown-up schedules better, and they can be small and cheap, so they can fit into limited budgets as well. Sounds like a winner, doesn't it?
The problem, of course, is that so far as I can tell, they don't sell. I don't know a lot of gamers who like "host a murder" games. Having played in a few, I can see why. In my experience, they're rather tedious. And the New Style games? If the RPG industry ever does completely shut down, Hogshead's untimely demise will tell us a lot about why.
Posted by: Iron Llama at Jan 6, 2004 9:44:35 AM
Yes, Emily, I do think it's time. I'm putting my money where my mouth is with my next two games, Nine Worlds and Dreamspire.
Both books will weight in somewhere between 48-72 pages. They will likely have saddle-stich binding and be very comparable to My Life With Master.
I think Bruce's suggestions about spines are warranted, but only if one enters the "normal" distribution chain. I wlil not, at least initially.
As for what's essential, I don't have anything original to say: Clear, concise, well-written rules, attractive but useful design and layout, sufficient (but not overburdening) color and setting information to people "get" the game, and some useful bits like character sheet samples, useful game play samples, and how-to-make a character walk-thrus.
Posted by: Matt Snyder at Jan 6, 2004 9:49:19 AM
Hogshead already died once.
Bruce has an excellent point: retailers do not want to put games on the shelves without distinctive spines. If you cannot slide games onto a shelf and allow potential customers to browse them, you get the comics/magazine syndrome where older stock sort of falls to the back and never gets purchased. Comic stores get away with not having notations on the spines because they're expected to be short, single-issue. However, collections certainly do. That's a note in favor of either longer books or the GoO model of "Short Book, Strong Content."
One quick comment about the Stargate book and other licensed properties: when you buy a licensed property book, you get more than just the game. You get "fan guide" information -- stuff about characters, plots, art from the series, etc. etc. I'm not sure I would count licensed properties under the banner of "small games." They never will be, because they're trying to fill more than once niche while trying valiantly to please the fans of the particular media.
And Hero people are just crazy. :)
This does bring to mind a vague idea: the subscription game. Smaller, tighter games in extended comic book length of 48 or 64 pages. I know this gets banged around on the Forge every once in a while, and nothing ever comes forth from it. Would someone pay for 2 64 page games a year or 4 32 page games instead of 1 128 page supplement at the same cost? I have bought some wonderful material in comic form in my time.
Posted by: Emily Dresner-Thornber at Jan 6, 2004 9:59:00 AM
Emily, a friend of mine who runs a games and comics store thinks that a magazine-like format could do quite well for itself oncepeople knew it was there. My own take would be to do it as a newsprint anthology in something like the format of Shonen Jump, but the thinner version seems reasonably sensible too.
Matt: Sure, if you just do mail-order, then you make it any size you want. :) I know from other contexts, though, that spines are important to the book trade, too; it's not just a gaming thing.
One nice thing about formats that use smaller pages is that you have more of an excuse for really elegant layouts. My Life With Master looks great, and I want to see a digest-sized book that has the aura of classiness that James Wallis gave Nobilis.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Jan 6, 2004 10:47:42 AM
There are all sorts of issues here...
Part of it is audience-driven. But the audience is very split here. Many want just enough rules to get by with, just enough setting to whet the appitite, all in a durable package. Others want the opposite in either rules or setting or both. So there really is no "perfect" size, though a modular concept (initial set with minimist rules and setting, supplements to expand both rules and setting) seems to have potential...
And there are some customers who won't buy anything that doesn't have heft to it. And others who won't buy anything imposingly large. A hard market split to solve.
Of course, from a game producer's PoV, the one-time small package is a big loser. The markup on a small book isn't all that great, and there's less return custom. And smaller books are tricky because there are still flat costs. Yes, far less now, in the age of digital typesetting and even PDF distribution, but still some. As such, a micro-book (ala the justifiable praised Hogshead New Line series) has a niche, but then you almost need to get to 128 pages to next find a decent price-point to profit relationship.
This is part of the ever-recurring reason that adventure modules don't make money... too big a book for the micro-niche (there were some d20 players early on who found a way to produce modules in the mucro-niche... but they're mostly all gone now), too small for a real profit to be made. And they sell to only a fraction of gamers, as GM only products.
Segregating their market like that is a big problem for producers and expands well beyond adventure modules, as selling rules-heavy or setting-heavy supplements means selling only a fraction as many copies. Instead, they are better served to defy what the customers want and mix up the supplements, making each customer less pleased with the result but expanding the sales dramatically.
And then there's the work to produce... Tight, condensed products can take as much or more time as sprawling, unfocused ones, and usually can't be so readilly split over a group of authors. So, again, from the production side the advantage goes to bigger products.
So, the perfect size is a very tricky animal to hunt, simply because there are conflicting forces.
Posted by: Jack Gulick at Jan 6, 2004 10:59:08 AM
"Bruce has an excellent point: retailers do not want to put games on the shelves without distinctive spines. If you cannot slide games onto a shelf and allow potential customers to browse them, you get the comics/magazine syndrome where older stock sort of falls to the back and never gets purchased."
But isn't the majority of gaming material already on this model? From what I hear, and I don't own a store so I could be wrong, the big sales are in the first couple of months. I.e., while the game is face out on the new arrivals rack. With the exception of some perennials, backstock doesn't sell that well.
Posted by: Bryant at Jan 6, 2004 11:23:19 AM
> But isn't the majority of gaming material already on this model?
Most publishing is heavily front-loaded. It's a question of degree. Frex, you might expect a book to sell, say, half of the copies you're going to sell in the first month and fall off to near zero by the end of a year. A comic book, on the other hand, operates on a scale of days and weeks. If it hasn't sold by the end of a month, it probably won't leave the shelves.
Anyway, there are different scales of investment here. A few unsold copies of Stupendous Z-Men Xtreme! cost the retailer less money than a few unsold copies of The Tome of Misspelled Errata d20 (do game publishers accept returns like non-game publishers have to?). You have to keep the more expensive product visible and moving.
Posted by: Iron Llama at Jan 6, 2004 11:31:58 AM
Yep. What I'm saying is that RPGs that don't sell by the end of the month mostly don't leave the shelves.
And the whole question of price is exactly what Emily's asking about, I think...
Posted by: Bryant at Jan 6, 2004 1:06:49 PM
> What I'm saying is that RPGs that don't sell by the end of the month mostly don't leave the shelves.
'K. Here's the thing: they do. Many of the books that will leave the shelves will do so in the first month, but they will still have a respectable sales life for some time thereafter. Comic books, where old ones get covered up quickly by new issues, don't. Even if you're making half of your sales in the first month, you're making half of it *after* the first month.
Posted by: Iron Llama at Jan 6, 2004 1:19:30 PM
So, leaving aside the question of what the actual numbers are -- cause neither of us know -- what do you think the percentage is?
I.e., if 99% of your sales are in the first month, it doesn't make sense to worry about displaying back-catalog books spine out. If 50% of your sales are in the first month, then it probably does make sense. So what's the number?
Also, you have to look at it from the retailer point of view. Old books take up space, and space costs money. If you can turn new books over much more quickly than old books, then selling new books is far more cost effective. Put differently: it may cost a lot more to sell a given book after the first month, simply because it takes longer to sell it. All revenue is not created equal.
Posted by: Bryant at Jan 6, 2004 1:37:50 PM
Retail requires turns (I believe thats the term), basically how many times you turnover the stock of an item. The more turns the better. Chriss Aylott and John Tynes talk about it a lot more in this thread on RPG.net.
Posted by: Jere at Jan 6, 2004 2:28:57 PM
My thought ran something like this:
Put out a boxed set. Remember those? Yeah, I'm serious. A boxed set. It's got rules, setting info, color, and most importantly, a block of adventures which can be linked together to provide pre-made adventures for about 100 hours of gameplay (assuming one 4-hour session every week for six months).
The adventures need to be good enough that they can be pulled apart and run in bits and pieces or scavenged to do other things. I doubt anyone will run them as written. But the idea is that most RPG campaigns never really last all that long anyway. The open-ended dynamic just doesn't mesh well with real life constraints. So build a game that can go for six months and then get put away. If people really like it, they'll go off and do more stuff with it (people endlessly kit-bash the official stuff anyway). If they want to try something else, they can, the campaign wrapped up so they can go off and try something different.
I think there's not enough understanding of how gaming groups form and how long they stick with any particular campaign. I'm certain everyone who's replied has at least 2 game ideas they'd like to run and probably more. Helping people manage their gaming by providing exiciting play with a definative end (or stopping point) could really help a lot.
my 2 cents
Tom
Posted by: Tom at Jan 6, 2004 4:18:52 PM
I'm split on the issue, too. I'm all for 48-64 page supplements, but there's a side to me that loves the hundreds of pages of rules and setting information, too.
Budget concerns for the moment preclude anything, though.
Posted by: Scott at Jan 6, 2004 4:34:17 PM
The budget I worry about is the time budget -- I want to be able to *play*, and I don't have time for massive amounts of prep work. There are short little games (like octaNe) that I can just pick up and GO, and there are huge massive games (like Mage: the Ascension) which I can do the same thing with. There are also short little games that are too elliptical for me to use (such as Grimm), and great big ones that just demand too much work from me (like D&D).
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Jan 6, 2004 4:48:39 PM
Tom -- that's one of the things Pinnacle is trying these days with Savage Worlds. It'll be interesting to see how it works out.
Posted by: Bryant at Jan 6, 2004 4:51:04 PM
I have some actual sales data in hand. I'm going to have be slightly vague here to avoid breaking NDAs, which I find silly in that I think secrecy about this stuff ends up doing more harm overall than good, but it's not my decision to make. For the major metropolitan publishing company :) whose figures I'm looking at, the first month's sales end up being anywhere from about a third to a bit less than three-quarters of total sales. There are some patterns in what has continuing sales, but anything beyond vague generalities would get me in trouble. Still, there's at least a bit of information from actual sales history of recent years.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Jan 7, 2004 1:53:18 AM
Back to Emily's original topic, I find myself preferring just the sort of game lengths she's talking about. Generally there's some thing about the game that excites me, and I think of everything not related to fulfilling the some thing to be extraneous. In MURPG, the ST is the resource allocation system (stones over panels and pages). The adventure structure stuff I actively dislike. But apart from the setting info, MURPG would probably fit in 64 (re-edited pages). In Trollbabe, it's the excellent account of how to play. There actually isn't anything extraneous in that text - everything is built to realize the ST. In the 9 Worlds playtest edition, it's the system that grabs me - the setting not so much. I expect that, as Matt's revisions tie the system more closely to the setting, as he apparently intends, I'll like the game less.
I like TROS Quickstart a lot. Having read about the differences between the Quickstart edition and the full package, I have no real desire to use the full package. The extra material in it - skill system, more damage tables, world background, extra maneuvers - would not, from what I can tell, further the ST for me. (It clearly would for others.)
Posted by: Jim Henley at Jan 7, 2004 1:08:06 PM
See, that's my point.
I'm very mechanical minded. I spend large amounts of my time thinking about the structure of things. I have a half-way decent grasp of what core bits an RPG actually needs, and I'm wondering how much of any given random sourcebook is actually game content and which is fluff, and how much time any given person has to sit down and figure out what is what.
What it comes down to is (like all things) a matter of design. Do we want 128 page sourcebooks because we can see the spine with 64 pages of actual game material? Would we prefer 48 page pamphlet games if they came with big bang for their buck? And if we want our games "tight," what is the best way to design a tight game? What do we essentially want out of our games, regardless of page count?
I think this is a new topic, but I'm extremely curious what people think.
Posted by: Emily Dresner-Thornber at Jan 7, 2004 1:27:08 PM
I hope I'm not being tedious in pointing out that either "we" don't want anything, or "we" want contradictory things. Whatever you do, if it pursues any goal thoroughly, will alienate some people who feel an entitlement to your labor, and some of them will complain. Quite possibly loudly and nastily. What you have to do is pick a goal that you wish to pursue that you see enough market to satisfy you, and ignore the rest.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Jan 7, 2004 3:22:53 PM
Random observation: Nobilis requires a lot of initial prep to run (such as Power, chancel, and Imperator creation), but almost all of that prep can be done by the group during the regular session. This feels qualitatively different than the GM sitting off alone somewhere drawing out maps on graph paper.
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Jan 7, 2004 5:01:10 PM
I think the real problem here isn't ideal size.
The issue, for me is the 'dollars to pages' ratio. I'm happy to spend $25+ on a book, but if it's much more costly than that, it had better be a very big book. The StarWars all-in-one manual is $50+, as is D20 Modern, but they're big books, so it's okay (not that I own either!).
There's also the PDF only games that are both big and cheap. Yes, you can't hand a PDF around the table unless you have a couple of lap-tops at the game (which is not as far-fetched as it sounds), but you can also access and search your manuals as you make characters or design encounters. It's almost the best of both worlds.
Posted by: orion at Jan 7, 2004 5:24:02 PM
I don’t have nearly as much time to play games as I’d like. I do find time to read, though, and I also find time to think about things I’ve read. One of the things I’ve found I like to read is game books: rules, background info, setting, etc. Sometimes things I read will eventually be incorporated into another game (one I actually play). Sometimes I read, enjoy what I’ve read, and that’s it.
Example: I have numerous GURPS books, most of which I've never used (read, but not used). I'll undoubtedly buy more in time. I like to read them, and the bigger they are, the more fun stuff I have to read.
Furthermore . . .
http://www.livejournal.com/users/animated_max/
Posted by: Max at Jan 7, 2004 8:20:45 PM
I'll be writing about this at more length on my weblog sometime soon, but if gaming is not to end up in the same sort of niche as small-press genre fiction is in now, then I think diversification will be the key note for the next few years. That is, I expect rolegames to look less and less like each other. Some will look more like books of various sorts. Some will look like magazines. Some will be in a variety of digital formats, and more of them than is now the case. Some will look like things I haven't yet thought of. I think it quite possible that in, say, five years, there will be no "the gaming market" as such, but rather that gaming will be an adjunct to a variety of other markets and at least two or three separate communities of interest which have no meaningful interaction at all.
Which gets back to the point: find something you'd like to do, and do that. There's no point in looking at market wisdom because there is no market wisdom to speak of.
Posted by: Bruce Baugh at Jan 8, 2004 1:22:08 AM
It was asked, "do game publishers accept returns like non-game publishers have to?"
The answer, in our case, is "yes, but only those that work through non-game distributors." WotC, WW, and Green Ronin returns are accepted through our book distributors, like Ingram or Baker & Taylor. It's been a big boon in some cases, and helps us to make big, riskier orders from those companies.
Posted by: Jadasc at Jan 8, 2004 10:56:28 AM
I think Wushu was a really neat idea because the rules are both short and sweet. All you need is a setting. There are even a few there for you.
Posted by: Ross Winn at Jan 8, 2004 8:12:09 PM
I don't know how many of you clicked through from Max's comment above to his LiveJournal comment on this topic, but this little ditty of his deserves to be read:
I like Big Books and I cannot lie
You other gamers can't deny
When a game gets made
Full of itty-bitty print
Setting, mood, and content
You get juiced
Wanna give your game a boost
...
Even when I need some feeding
I'm hooked and I can't stop reading.
Posted by: Rob at Jan 12, 2004 8:35:49 AM
Oh. My god.
I just fell right off my chair.
Posted by: Emily Dresner-Thornber at Jan 12, 2004 10:34:37 AM
Nice play with the Sir Mix-A-Lot.
What I'd like to see is smaller games with more plug-in bits. Jim Henley mentioned TROS Quickstart. If TROS was basically the Quickstart, with all the Spiritual Attributes (necessary for the game, IMO) and a little more world-overview, it would be the perfect game. Supplementary packs for the game that expanded combat, magic, and geography would be available for those that wanted them, and they'd allow mixing and matching of foci. If I'm playing a game about the death of elves and magic, I could use the magic expansion, and part of the geography expansion without making combat more intricate, and if I'm playing a game about mercenaries in Stahl, I could use the combat expansion without making magic more intricate.
It's a concept that I expect a d20 company - Mongoose, probably - to come out with soon: a "Lite-d20" with 10-20 page expansions to increase focus on certain system parts.
Posted by: Clinton R. Nixon at Jan 19, 2004 11:18:39 AM
When it comes down to time constraints, I think Paranoia has the best solution. Paranoia (XP) is a 250+ page hardcover book crammed full of charts and goodies and flavor and rules and rings in at $40. Then they have the Little Red Book: Short, sweet, all the rules you need to know to play the game. Enough flavor to keep you from being more confused than the game requires for $9. Have a core book, and a corebook lite. The rules, some setting and that's that. That way people of all sized time budgets can afford to invest their moments in learning the game.
Posted by: Sean Cox at Jun 17, 2007 12:17:28 AM
