One Book Games

There is beauty to a one-book game, and I can't stress this enough. The collectors are ruining the hobby, and my garage is filled with games going out the door and being sold—they are collector's books, all of them. And games built for collectors are fluff-filled, shelf-filling, unplayable messes.

Collectible books are killing tabletop roleplaying.

As much as I love Pathfinder 1e, I fell into that trap. Every game Paizo and Wizards have released is a collector's game, and this is their bloated business model. Other companies follow the same model, and finding a game with the guts to stick to one book and make it the game they support is challenging. Today, games are book after book of paid-by-the-word walls of text, poorly edited, art-filled tripe. I love the art, but there gets to be a point where a book crosses the line from a game to a coffee-table book.

One of the One D&D concept art pages covered 80% of the page with a beautiful 2-page landscape spread and four tiny paragraphs of rules shoved at the bottom, almost as an afterthought. That is not a rule book. That is a coffee table book marketed towards collectors. That type of book is not usable at a table and is too nice to ever be taken to a play session.

Games written for collectors' markets aren't games. Could anyone play them with all the books? I doubt it. I could never play Pathfinder 1e with all those rules, and it takes a computer program to sort out the mess. Books become worthless as reference guides when they are so full of art and fluff.

There is a massive difference between a rule book and an art book with a few rules.

Back in the day, TSR published a fully playable 64-page rulebook that provided years of adventures.

These days, big companies spend at least 1,000 pages in three core books to communicate the same idea and game. What is worse, these games are rarely complete, missing core classes introduced in full-priced expansion books. We are getting "20 times the game" with "20 times less playability."

And like someone with a substance abuse issue, these publishers can rarely admit they have a problem.

The problem gets passed down to the collectors, who turn the addiction into a hoarding issue.

Getting rid of these collector's market games makes me want to play the ones I have.

I know; this puts some of my sacred cows on the chopping block. I love Pathfinder 1e, GURPS, and a few others. But honestly, some games do everything GURPS does in a single book. The game isn't worth playing if you need software to figure out a character since computerized record sheets are often used to hide the addiction and extract more money from you.

But the big games, like 5E and Pathfinder 2E, are going out the door.

Games made for collecting are not for playing. Owning them gives me a feeling of never being able to read them all, so I don't play them and just give up - happy to have the books, but no way in heck I would ever play something that bloated.

Smaller games?

Very playable.

And they invite me in instead of keeping me out.