Lists, Lists and more Lists

Lists, lists and more lists

I've just finished reading the second of the Fading Suns 4 core rule books, the Character Book. It's the largest volume and it was a bit of a slog. Although the book is well written, albeit occasionally a little long-winded, it nearly killed my interest once it hit the lists.

The game uses traits as a broad descriptor and there are pages and pages of descriptions. I nearly game up as it bored me. It's the kind of thing that you won't see in play and I'm sure that players will have loads of fun working through and making choices about their character, but reading the book from a GM perspective it just disengaged me. I had the same issue with Old Gods of Appalachia (and I know I will with Numenéra once I dig into that). I've lost the passion I once had for reading spell lists, monster descriptions and all the various forms of list that certain flavours of roleplaying game.

It's strange, as I used to pour over these in detail, but now they bore me and I end up wishing for a hypertext linked character generation tool where you can just click through. At least the Cypher games abstract this all away for the GM when creating characters. I need to read the next book to see how Fading Suns deals with this.

I know that it all falls away when it's on the character sheet but it just doesn't excite me anymore. Is it a sign of age or perhaps a change of taste? How do you feel about this kind of approach?

8 November 2024