Day 21: Which RPG does the most with the least words?

I'm not typically a believer that "older is better" but in the case of this category ... it's going to be a lot of old stuff I suspect. So much of the RPG scene is caught up in 300-400 page giant core books supported by 10 - 100  supplements that it's hard to believe how little entire product lines used to be! I looked around my library and checked some page counts before I started writing this and it's amazing how book sizes and book numbers have crept up.

Ignoring D&D as the one example everyone knows about, here are some others:

• Gamma World 1st-2nd-3rd editions are all right around 64 page booklets. The later two add in an intro adventure that adds some page count. It's incredible the amount of time we spent playing in these. Years and years of fun from one 64-page book and some adventures plus a whole lot of imagination and paper.
• Original Traveller: three 48 page books that covered a fairly detailed character generation system, task resolution, combat, ship construction and combat, and system generation. We played for years with this just set and maybe an adventure. We did pick up supplements but the core box alone was a ton of material.
• Marvel Super Heroes: a 16 page intro book and a 48 page campaign book along with some stat cards for famous characters had us off to the races. That universal table covered everything in a short and sweet way. There were adventures of course, but most of the early supplements added official writeups for Marvel characters, not new rules. 

Looking at my shelves and thinking back most of those early games and adventures were under 200 pages total even with a full boxed set treatment. Most of the time the ideas was "here is how to play mechanically, here are some adventure ideas, and here are a few notes about a setting" and that was it! Nowadays though the books are better in a lot of ways I think you could trim a lot of them back by a third to a half and it would only improve them. 

In most cases you get a bunch of pages on character creation, but you're going to get "advanced" character creation a month or two after the book releases with even more options. This is not new, Traveller in particular pioneered the "extra book for each character type" approach in the early 80's. Why not make a conscious effort to go minimal on this if you're just going to redo it anyway?

You get a chapter on the setting in the core book, but you're going to get another big book on the setting anyway in most cases, plus you may get regional or era-type sourcebooks that go into far more detail as well. Can we separate rules and setting as a matter of routine?

My #1 example of a game that does the most with the fewest words is this:

The 1st & 2nd editions of Champions gave us a detailed system for creating and playing superheroes in 80 pages. The boxed set added a 16-page adventure that added some ideas on locations and plot, an ongoing enemy organization, and some additional villains but even counting that you had a complete superhero solution in under 100 pages. I think that's pretty remarkable. Later editions may have ballooned it up into far more than that but in the early days Champions was one efficient little game system.