I am most annoyed at n17 and following by the crappy gaming experience the rules offer most of the time. Yes orb got bit cray cray over time, but at least campaigns didnt snowball after 2 games like they inevitably do with N17 and successors (at least in my experience).
Up until last year I didn’t have any of the big rule books. I had only the N17 box set book and a few Gang Wars plus I picked up a House book here and there over time.
The vast majority of games I’ve played were played with a remarkable little document that’s only 4 pages long - it’s the Gang Leaders reference sheet! Released in either late 2018 or 2019 it covers most of the mechanics of the game and it’s still usable now if you just tweak a few things.
“But it doesn’t have X, Y and Z…”
True. Skills, Weapon Traits and anything campaign specific aren’t included as it’s a reference sheet. Funnily enough though those were in the other books I had.
So what’s the point here? Well its that the core of the game isn’t overly complicated. It can fit on 4 pages of A4.
I’d argue that Skills and Weapon traits actually complicate things a bit by making it so you have to constantly check and remember what they do - or you have to write out that text as a reference. Even so a second reference sheet of those would only be a few pages too.
Most campaigns could be condensed down to a few pages also. I’d also say you don’t really need them or the missions either. If you do how many pages are they? 6? 12?
The whole base game could fit into a softback book.
“There are no gangs…”
Shush hypothetical reader - the Hive War book whacks all six houses into the back of it no issue, all it lacks is the Juve and the extra fluffy characters from the house books.
Again all of those could be condensed into a single softback. As could the hireable fighters/characters.
The amount of books they throw out is key indicator that it isnt to great of a ruleset. Less is more!
It can be fine. The game can be fun. The reason there are so many books is to generate profit. Problem is it turns us all into Librarians rather than players. I don’t want to have to initiate the Dewey Decimal system to find where a specific rule is (and it’s often felt like you need to).
The amount of books required makes it poor precisely because they keep splitting by things across books! They started like that with Gang War 1-4 and are still doing it.
They could’ve put all of the Ash Wastes in one big expansion. It was far more profitable to make you buy a box set and 2-4 extra books to get it all though.
They will do the same again with Secundus. People will still comply and buy the stuff. There is no incentive for them to do anything else except a cleanup compilation of the main/core rules every 4-5 years.
Alessio Cavatore quoted a saying that goes along the lines of "I didnt have time so I wrote you a long letter", in the sense, it takes a lot more time and effort to produce a condensed one.
I get his point (this is waffling on after all) but equally he made 40k 3rd Edition which sucked all of the fun out of the game.
It was so paired down it took two more editions to put back in much of the stuff that was ripped out from 2nd. Even then I think it fails to be anywhere near as fun.
So just because you can simplify down doesn’t mean it’s the best approach.