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General Tabletop Discussion
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RPG Writing and Design Needs a Paradigm Shift
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<blockquote data-quote="Swanosaurus" data-source="post: 9270980" data-attributes="member: 7044220"><p>I'm on the fence on this ... I buy most RPGs for reading, but I, too, prefer clarity and brevity. But honestly, on the other hand, I don't want my RPG books to read like "manuals". Only a fraction of the RPGs I read end up at the gaming table, anyway.</p><p>There's a lot of RPGs that achieve a good balance, IMHO. Troika! is both extremely economic in presentation and extremely evocative and fun to read. It doesn't read like a manual, but it works as a manual at the gaming table. I've recently reviewed <a href="http://swanosaurus.blogspot.com/2024/01/marvels-and-prodigies.html" target="_blank">Marvels & Prodigies</a>, which also finds a great balance between clarity and economy, evocative prose and being a manual (parts of the rules are already structured as player hand-outs, which should be a great boon at the table). On the other hand, I'm having big trouble getting into most versions of Traveller/Cepheus, because they just read too much like a manual.</p><p>And then there's the introductory set of Dreams & Machines, which, despite its glossiness, seems to be structured very consciously as an introductory manual which guides you only through the things you really need to know at the beginning and puts all the rest in an alphabetic index - and I hate it with a passion. It makes me feel totally lost. On the one hand, it's a manual, on the other hand, it makes me feel like it doesn't want me to know how things actually work.</p><p>What I agree to 100% is that I don't need tons of four-color art and fiction in the core books. I like a little art and a nice layout, but there seems to be a tendency towards four-color overkill, with a lot of sub-par or at least not very interesting art to fullfill the perceived need. Most of the time, I'd really prefer some quality line-art every three or four pages.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Swanosaurus, post: 9270980, member: 7044220"] I'm on the fence on this ... I buy most RPGs for reading, but I, too, prefer clarity and brevity. But honestly, on the other hand, I don't want my RPG books to read like "manuals". Only a fraction of the RPGs I read end up at the gaming table, anyway. There's a lot of RPGs that achieve a good balance, IMHO. Troika! is both extremely economic in presentation and extremely evocative and fun to read. It doesn't read like a manual, but it works as a manual at the gaming table. I've recently reviewed [URL='http://swanosaurus.blogspot.com/2024/01/marvels-and-prodigies.html']Marvels & Prodigies[/URL], which also finds a great balance between clarity and economy, evocative prose and being a manual (parts of the rules are already structured as player hand-outs, which should be a great boon at the table). On the other hand, I'm having big trouble getting into most versions of Traveller/Cepheus, because they just read too much like a manual. And then there's the introductory set of Dreams & Machines, which, despite its glossiness, seems to be structured very consciously as an introductory manual which guides you only through the things you really need to know at the beginning and puts all the rest in an alphabetic index - and I hate it with a passion. It makes me feel totally lost. On the one hand, it's a manual, on the other hand, it makes me feel like it doesn't want me to know how things actually work. What I agree to 100% is that I don't need tons of four-color art and fiction in the core books. I like a little art and a nice layout, but there seems to be a tendency towards four-color overkill, with a lot of sub-par or at least not very interesting art to fullfill the perceived need. Most of the time, I'd really prefer some quality line-art every three or four pages. [/QUOTE]
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