That Little Thing in RPGs

Maybe you've come across this, little thing. You've read through a new RPG loved every line, and then come to use it. You crack open the book and sit down to create characters, vehicles, homesteads, whatever, and then you find THE little thing.

In Scarlet Heroes the little thing I found was just the movement speed of Player Characters. I'd played two or three sessions when I wanted to work out if my halfling guy could outrun a hobgoblin.  I went back to the book, and well, I couldn't find the speed of a PC. Surely I was just missing it. I nipped online tried to DuckIt and came up without a straight answer. A few gallant attempts were made in posts referencing various spells and comparisons that could be found in the rules, but in the end it just wasn't laid out in the book in plain language.

In Traveller version 4 a.k.a. T4 there is a little thing. Having only had the 3LBBs version previously I was so delighted to get my hands on T4. When it came through the door I literally "whooped" with joy. I took it to work and read it at lunchtime I was so glad. It looked great, the art was nice, the new (to me) skill check system was good I liked that too. I knocked up a few practice characters to get the hang of it, then wanted to put together a ship to place these characters on.

[If this were audio, this is the bit where you'd hear the record scratch sound effect]

Only I couldn't build a ship. THE little thing here was the missing drive table in the ship building section. Literally an entire table needed to carry out a core action of the rules was missing. When I convinced myself I wasn't missing something I turned to DuckDuckGo, and low and behold there was official errata giving me the missing data. I was so disappointed.  Fortunately this "little" oversight was not repeated in Mongoose Traveller, or indeed in Cepheus Engine, and I still had the original Traveller to fall back on.

Another "little thing" I came across was with MERP. I've played a lot of MERP and simply ignored this little thing as it didn't get in the way, in fact it was kind of the opposite of the problems mentioned above. There was an additional spell-casting table printed right in there but no rules discussion of what the table was for or how to use it. Odd, and entirely possible that I've been playing Spell Casters completely wrong in MERP for years.