Quote1. Unplayable without one or more of the sourcebooks?

RIFTS Ultimate Edition - I felt that this was totally unplayable out of the core book. It hypes on about all of these creatures from the rifts, yet there isn't a single one included in the book for you to use in your game. I felt that it was presented more like a player's handbook where there are plenty of player options, but not really any useful information for the GM to populate the world with enemies...except Coalition troops. :jerkbag:

To be quite frank, I didn't buy RIFTS so I could run a game using plain old human supremacists for enemies instead of all sorts of strange things that have invaded from the rifts. Afterall, if I wanted to play a Palladium game with evil human supremacists, I'd just play TMNT/After the Bomb, where the human supremacists are a better fit.

Quote2. Much worse with sourcebooks than it was a standalone book?

Dungeons & Dragons 3.X - The core books have enough fiddly bits as it is, but when you pile additional supplements on top of that, there just becomes way too much minutia to keep track of if you wish to keep your sanity.

Almost every game ever made falls into #2 for me. As Heidegger said, only beginnings are great.

An epic example of #1 is the Gardasiyal ruleset for Tekumel, which did not include any information on character generation with the forty-plus dollar boxed set. If you wanted to actually make a character for this game you just shelled out forty mid-nineties dollars for, you had to buy another fifteen dollar supplement.

I'll add my voice to those who list Rifts in category #2.  With the corebook it's a great basis for gaming (although I think the system sucks approximately 823 kinds of ass), and with a very small list of the early handbooks it's even better (Vampire Kingdoms, Rifts Sourcebook #1, plus maybe Atlantis).  Pretty much everything from Britain forward is death to the game.

For category #1, 7th Sea was originally designed under the "collectible rules" model in which stuff that a lot of people would consider core to the ostensible genre of the game (e.g. ship rules) was intentionally farmed out to supplements.  Ditto the Revised editions of the WoD games, especially Mage, although that was more an issue of space than a deliberate design choice.

KoOS

Of the games I've pllayed

Games better with sourcebooks.

Shadowrun 2nd-3rd Edition- All the guns and gear were a welcome addition in my book.

nWoD- There's some I don't care for, but there's a lot of good stuff for the new(er) WW Line. Since they emphasize the pick and choose aspects of it, it's very GM friendly.

Toon - There were only a couple, but the Tooniversal Tour Guide really drove the game to its peak of awesomeness. ACME Ace Catalog wasn't neccisary..but it was great for players without ideas.

D&D - Ptolus...nuff said.

Orpheus - A good game was in the corebook, with years worth of adventures and ideas. The Splats were so all pretty mind-blowing though, and deterred nothing from the game.

Games Unplayable Without Sourcebooks

Engel- ...and they never came out with the soucebooks you needed. A crying shame.

Scion - Feels incomplete, you can't play past a certain point in the game the way it's built without the next books in the series.

Games Made Worse by Sourcebooks

Vampire: the Masquerade - The ST's Guide was ok, the clanboks were cool. Everything else was crap and if you followed the wacky meta-plot in your games, you were dumb.

Mage: the Ascension - See above, although scratch the Tradition Books off the good list. All the Metaplot could do was wreck peoples campaigns.

Games Unplayable with Sourcebooks

Exalted - If you tried to play a game using all of the sourcebooks, you were screwed. If you didn't start off the game telling your players you "don't give a fuck what the soucebooks say", you were screwed.

Quote from: RPGPundit1. Unplayable without one or more of the sourcebooks?

Nephilim. The presentation of the setting in the core rulebook is a little too bare-bones, a little too confusing: it leaves you wondering what a Nephilim campaign is meant to be like. The supplements expanding the human secret societies, the Arcana (cliques of Nephilim), and other features of the setting really made it shine.

Quote2. Much worse with sourcebooks than it was a standalone book?

I am going to disagree with Moriarty and say that ParanoiaXP isn't really hurt by its sourcebooks, and they do greatly improve the game if you are going for a "Straight"-flavoured campaign.

Paranoia 2nd Edition, on the other hand... dear god.

First they published the Crash Course Manual and crashed the Computer, wrecking the entire premise of Paranoia.

Then they released a bunch of idiotic modules, Vulture Warriors from Dimension X, at the end of which they brought back the Computer.

Then they released the Reboot Manual, which encouraged the GM not to kill the PCs so often, encouraged PCs to work together, and entirely changed the premise of the game again.

Over the course of all this the humour became more and more lowbrow, until you reach the nadir which is Paranoia 5th Edition.

Better with Sourcebooks:

Deadlands Classic, since most of the core book is authorial masturbation, saying how "we can't tell you anything yet, buy more books!" Though this is very annoying, once you add the sourcebooks, the game is great.

Warhammer RPG 2nd-Edition, because if you compare it to the completeness of the first edition book, there's a metric fuckton of stuff less - a complete bestiary and Old World information, basically.


Worse with sourcebooks:

AD&D 2nd-ED, D&D 3rd-ED, because both are a good, tight set of rules, and respond poorly when you start adding the kitchen sink.

Exalted, for reasons already mentioned in this thread.

- AN

Quote from: Claudius-Rolemaster, and here I mean the Companions for 2nd edition. They were awful, lots of power creep, new stupid character classes, new stupid rules, etc.

Good call, we had a ton of fun with this but the creeping power in the sourcebooks killed the game for us and it happened slow enough that by the time we realised the issue it was too late.

You may be right on Vampire, dunno, without supplements you had bugger all to fight but the supplements did also leach away the cool of the initial book.

Quote from: Atsuku NareBetter with Sourcebooks:

Deadlands Classic, since most of the core book is authorial masturbation, saying how "we can't tell you anything yet, buy more books!" Though this is very annoying, once you add the sourcebooks, the game is great.

Hmm, I disagree, but then I didn't like the setting part of Deadlands to begin with; and I felt like the sourcebooks only made it worse. At every turn they made incorrect decisions about their setting material, making it less and less "wild-west" and more and more PC.

The system itself was fine in the core book, and didn't really improve in any way with the sourcebooks.

QuoteWarhammer RPG 2nd-Edition, because if you compare it to the completeness of the first edition book, there's a metric fuckton of stuff less - a complete bestiary and Old World information, basically.

I'll agree with you on this one; WFRP2e is good by itself, but with the sourcebooks its spectacular!

RPGPundit

Quote from: WarthurNephilim. The presentation of the setting in the core rulebook is a little too bare-bones, a little too confusing: it leaves you wondering what a Nephilim campaign is meant to be like. The supplements expanding the human secret societies, the Arcana (cliques of Nephilim), and other features of the setting really made it shine.

Agreed.  Nephilim is a book that is sort of neat from reading the core book, but when you read some supplements and have that 'aha!' moment, it's just awesome.

And I say this as a minor contributer to the core book.  I wish we'd had another year to work on that game...

I think Exalted got worse as it went along, but that might be because I disliked the trend of the game. It started off with a balance between anime and the Iliad, and by the end of 1e, it was all anime, no Iliad. I'm pretty good at keeping a million subsystems straight, and I once ran a kitchen-sink Exalted PbP with 11 PCs and other NPCs from every major faction from Solars to Mountain Folk and Godbloods that worked out easily enough. It was a lot of book-keeping though.

I think Hunter: the Reckoning got a lot better as more sourcebooks came out. The in character fiction helped convey the feel the game writers were going for far better than the corebook's illustrations. They also had a ton of cool ideas for variations on the conventional WoD monsters and some neat story ideas too.

Quote from: Claudius...
-Rolemaster, and here I mean the Companions for 2nd edition. They were awful, lots of power creep, new stupid character classes, new stupid rules, etc.
...

I agree (almost) completely.  
:cool:
(I'd make an exception for the first companion, which had some nifty new things -- e.g. arcane magic, nightblades, etc. -- that did not involve too much 'power creep'.)

Quote from: RPGPunditHmm, I disagree, but then I didn't like the setting part of Deadlands to begin with; and I felt like the sourcebooks only made it worse. At every turn they made incorrect decisions about their setting material, making it less and less "wild-west" and more and more PC.

The system itself was fine in the core book, and didn't really improve in any way with the sourcebooks.

Apologies, I didn't completely state what was on my mind.

With Deadlands, I thought adding the character sourcebooks was key, like Fire & Brimstone for preachers, and Smith & Robards for mad scientists. These let the various special PC types have more complete options, and I can vouch that my preacher kicked much more ass once I had F&B.

The various books on the setting lost sight of the core coolness of the idea beyond that, culminating in the aliens in Devil's Tower stupidity.

Dunno if that helps or not,

AN