Player Vs Gamemaster Needs

One of the things I spend a great deal of time thinking about is presentation, and it's one of the things I think many tabletop publishers these days don't think enough about.

Many publishers accept that the hobby is small and mostly consists of people who have been playing tabletop games since the heydays. The only company who even tries to target people who have never played tabletop RPGs before is Wizards of the Coast, and every other publisher seems content to just try to steal away the D&D audience who learn the ropes from D&D but eventually want something more.

That is why their audiences are smaller than D&D; because they aren't trying hard enough to attract their own audiences who have never played D&D. You can't grow a hobby if the audience isn't growing.

So, I am looking to take a very different approach. I want to get people who have never played tabletop RPGs before and have no pre-conceived notions about what a tabletop RPG should be. I want to be the first impression. And that means presenting the game rules in a way that will allow people who have never played them to be able to understand the rules and run games without a more experienced player assisting them; which is the assumption that all other publishers make with these games, as indicated by the small amount of text their books devote to explaining what roleplaying is and how to run games, or even use the book as reference guides for rules.

I have a couple strategies in mind for presenting my system.

If I was to put all the "core rules" of the system into one book, that book would be well over 800 pages. This isn't because the rules are extremely complicated, but because the systems are detailed. I've known for a long time that the "monster manual" needs to be its own book and it is, but even with those rules out of the main rulebook, it's still looking to be over 600 pages when artwork is added into the mix. That's not acceptable.

The only person who needs to know EVERYTHING about a tabletop RPG system is the Gamemaster (GM). Players don't need to understand how items or NPCs are put together, or the detailed systems for item crafting, or anything like that. That is stuff the GM uses to run a game, and it is this stuff that makes up the bulk of the core rules.

The only thing players need is the information relevant to their playing experience. So, they need the rules for how to create a character and play the character. This means they just need to know what character Jobs and Specializations exist, what Races they can play as, the Weapon and Spell Techniques available, what General Skills characters can use, and some item packages to select so their characters don't start play naked but have weapons, armor and some basic adventuring equipment.

4th Edition D&D handled this with the "Essentials" line, which was basically a take on the AD&D player Handbook Rules Supplement books. For example, there was "The Complete Fighter's Handbook" that had everything someone playing a Fighter needed, along with information about how to replace some of the Fighter abilities with other more specialized ones. And the back of the book had all the tables a Fighter character needs, along with a detailed character sheet and a "combat sheet" to help the player keep track of their HP going up and down, and what ailments they had on themselves or other characters, etc

THAT is the kind of design I need.

So basically, my "core rules" needs to be divided into several books.

1. I need the "Game Master's Book" that has the Core System rules and has a detailed explanation for how everything works, why it works that way and how to run combat, along with advice on how to run a game for a first time GM.
2. Then I need a line of player handbooks that only include information relevant to a particular Job and what Specializations are best for that Job. For example, the Warrior Job book would have Specializations for being a Paladin, a Mercenary, a Champion or an Adventurer. 
3. Then there would be a book called "Arms and Equipment" which has all the rules for item creation, along with a large selection of pre-generated items for quick play. 
4. Finally, there would be the "Allies and Enemies" book that has all the rules for NPC generation and the list of monsters.

This should make it a lot easier for players to reference what rules they actually need, along with the GM. You shouldn't have to skip past all the pages devoted to items when you're just trying to find the skill information, and an enormous book of rules can be intimidating to new players of games.

The campaign setting will also be in its own book, but sporadic amounts of campaign flavor will be in all the books as my system isn't intended to be "universal" and is very much tied to the campaign setting. I've done this because I think it's easier for new players to get into a game that has been finely tuned to play in a specific world setting rather than try to have a generic set of rules that could be played in any world. Only experienced GMs who are bored of the official settings want to make their own worlds, and I'm targeting brand new players who need a pre-existing world they can play in.

Fortunately these don't have to be books either; they can be PDFs which the players can decide to print out or just read off a laptop. And I'll price them cheaply, like  99 cents or something.

Having said that, there will be people who want a nice copy of the rules that isn't black and white printer sheets stapled together.  So I'll have POD versions of the rulebooks available for purchase but the formats will be specific to the differing needs of the players.

The Player Guides will be 6x9 books, about the size of a manga. This is so they are easily portable; they fit compactly into a backpack or handbag, and sit on the bookshelf along with their other manga books. Basically it isn't a hassle for a player to get into the hobby and come to sessions at a GM's house.

The GM book, the Arms & Equipment, Enemies & Allies and campaign setting will be in the traditional large "coffee table" book format one normally expects a tabletop RPG to be. This is because these books will be bigger and referenced a lot more often than the Player Guides will be so the information needs to be quickly reached as fast as possible, so having big pages matters more. The GM is going to bring his maps and stuff anyway, so he will already bring a big book bag with him.

This is my current thought process. It might change the more I think about it, but I've been thinking about this for a long time and this is the conclusion I've come to. Having one big book everyone needs to have in order to play just doesn't seem to be the correct way to handle it in this day and age.