What percentage of roleplaying books you own have you actually read?
Posted by Mark on Oct 3, 2008 in Uncategorized |
Number of Views :245
On the most recent episode of Fear the Boot, the hosts posed a question: what percentage of roleplaying books that you own have you actually read?
This is an interesting and multi-layered question. The question arises: what do you mean by read? If you mean flipped through and looked at, then I’d say 100%. If you mean sat down and seriously read sections of, I would say 50%. But if you mean thoroughly read over, cover to cover, I would say less than 25%.
Yes, 25%.
Time to crack a cover and start reading…
Heh. I’m not sure whether this speaks well of me, but I have managed to read nearly all of my role-playing books. Altogether, I’d put the figure somewhere between 80% and 90%.
In my defense, my commute to work used to be an hour each way, via public transportation. The fact that it’s shorter now combined with having been on a D&D 4e kick for the last six or so months has meant I’ve accumulated something of a backlog.
I’m very much guilty of not reading my rule books. In fact I have never sat down and read my 3.5e books. They are for looking things up that my fellow players who have read the books cannot remember.
This I think is a flaw in the games design.
The 3.5e PHB is 316 pages long compared to the 1st edition page count of 125.
Sure, 3.5 is better game system and some of the extra pages comes from sensible, additional rules but there is a lot of waffle in there as well.
4e has cut down on some of this (as far as I’ve seen) but oddly in the wrong places. Spells descriptions, a major part of the D&D system, have been cut to 3 sentences. This may reduce page count and complexity but it also removes colour and flavour from the rules.
[...] This post originally appeared on October 3, 2008. [...]