Ruminations II

I let my thoughts stew after my first set of ruminations and came back to this challenge in March. Here I'm going to ruminate on a few things related to RPG designs and writing proper in no particular order. My thoughts, such as they are, will be grouped by theme.

Game Styles

Most of the games I generated characters for in this challenge were what would be called “trad” games. This is to say that they are games where each player has a character and there is going to be a GM running the character through the world. Exceptions to this in my selected games were:

Both of these have mechanisms that flirt with giving players a greater say in the world building than is traditional.

So you prefer trad games over story games?

Well, no, actually, not in particular. Available to me physically on my bookshelf are story games like:

In electronic format I have several more including, but by no means limited to:

I do own more trad games than story games, but that's just an artifact of history. More trad games have been sold since 1978 (when I started in RPGs) than story games.

I like story games. (As long as they're not Powered by the Apocalypse or Blades in the Dark-descended; I can't stand those. They're just absolutely not for me and are thus out of scope for this.) I play them with as much glee as I play trad games. They're a nice change of pace for me and, in many cases, fit my tastes better for gaming.

So why the low representation?

Well, this is one of those areas where story games aren't really going to show their strengths. Some story games have such generic and formulaic characters that just generating a character introduces nothing of interest. (Presumably the interest comes later when actually playing.)

Even story games I like that have much more diversity of character types (FATE, Spark, etc.), however, have a problem: making a character in a vacuum is difficult. There's really not a lot there. The characters have a very small number of fixed defining attributes (Spark and Smoke in Sig, for example, and no fixed attributes in FATE) and everything else, practically, involves some kind of relationship that can't really come across in the vacuum of a character generation challenge. Puppetland could. Tomorrow City barely could (I hand-waved over some steps). The rest of the story games I owned would not work well in a challenge of this type.

Random vs. Design

I made sure to put a good mix of game types on this dimension. Some of the games I used are almost completely random in character generation with only a limited number of player choice points. Some games were 100% designed from the ground up with no random element of any kind. And finally some games had varying degrees in between.

All the 1PG games are mostly random generation. The only choice points are where to put a very limited amount of skill points. Of the rest, about half were pure design systems (e.g. CORPS or Tomorrow City or Talislanta) and the other half were hybrid systems with some random elements (usually stat generation) followed by mostly designs. The most interesting of these was Chivalry & Sorcery where you were able to select several options:

  1. Random design of almost everything except skill selection and the like.
  2. 100% design of the character from the ground up.
  3. An intermediate form where you could roll for some things, or pay for specific outcomes on the table.

And while I was making characters I came to a surprising (to me) conclusion: I like both varieties (plus the hybrids). Because of the toxicity of early D&D/AD&D I'd developed somewhat of a hate-on for random character generation. I always wanted to make the character I wanted to play. But it seems that over time this has mellowed. Indeed in my 31 characters, some of the more fun characters that came out of the system were pure dicely happenstance (like the character for Battleforce Bravo) that were just so perfect for a fun concept it felt like cheating to do it.

And this is why this rumination is so late in blooming. I mulled over why this was and how I decided which I preferred. The conclusion was this:

I would prefer to minimize the amount of randomness, mind. The near 100% randomness of the 1PG games works for the beer & pretzels nature of those games, but would likely upset me if I was to play a serious and long term game with them. But the small amount of randomness in HARP, or DragonQuest, or the selectable level of randomness in Chivalry & Sorcery (among other games) really did help me when trying to meet these tightly-scheduled challenges.

So in the end this challenge was valuable for me because it actually allowed me to see that my distaste for random systems has mellowed significantly over the decades and that it's not “which is superior” but rather “which is superior under what circumstance. That's an interesting outcome for me.

Game Writing

Here I'm going to get a bit mean, I think. Most RPGs are absolutely terribly written. There's a long history of this, naturally. D&D and AD&D were pretty much just whatever random thought crossed Gary Gygax's mind as he vomited out his rules. The result, predictably, was incoherence, often internal inconsistency (if not flat-out self-contradiction), and the rules were bizarrely incomplete for their sizable page count. On top of that they were written by someone who historically had the misapprehended notion that the deployment of excessively polysyllabic locutionary constructions was an unequivocal signifier of profound intellectual prowess. (E.g. “Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal).”)

But that's OK. It was the first game of an entirely new style. There's going to be missteps. This is all forgivable. What isn't forgivable is that here we are over half a century and literally thousands of games later ... and this is still a problem.

Basic rules

Here are a few rules that I use to judge RPGs. And believe me, I'm a very judgmental person when I spend money for things that are presumed to be for enjoyment!

  1. Rules writing is a form of technical writing intended to communicate complicated procedures in an accessible way. All other rules stem from this axiom.
  2. The vocabulary and register of rules should be appropriate to the intended audience and the subject matter. The use of dollar words in penny contexts is forbidden. (C.f. “antithesis of weal” above.)
  3. While flavourful text is an asset, if there is a conflict between flavour and clarity, clarity must prevail.
  4. Information design is a thing. We know how to write effective instruction manuals. The rules for making these clear and accessible have been known for all my life at least, and likely longer. Pick up a book on technical writing and browse it!
  5. Cross-referencing is essential when communicating complicated ideas. Use it. Frequently.

So now that we have this out of the way, let's look at some prime offenders in each category. And, perhaps, too, some stand-out winners.

Vocabulary and register

In this place most recent games are actually very good. Some of the older games ... not so much. Some standouts for bad are:

These are, however, standouts. It's not all bad writing in this realm, and indeed most games are at least passably competent these days. One standout for good, however, was the Navigator game; lots of games had decent vocabulary and register in their writing but Navigator was a joy to read. I have to give the publisher of that piece kudos.

Flavour vs. Clarity

I get it. I really, really do. Most people making RPGs are creative people. They're playing RPGs. They're running entire worlds as game masters. And now they're taking this a step up and publishing rules! This is actually really impressive effort and they're going to want to bring that creativity to the rules writing.

Don't.

Just don't.

Rules, to be effective, should have the following traits: Clarity, Conciseness, Completeness, Correctness, and Courteousness. Let's deal with these in order:

Clarity

I've touched on some of this in addressing vocabulary and register. But clarity also involves consistent use of terminology (don't say “hit points” in one place, “hits” in another, “concussion hits” in yet a third, etc.: pick a lane and stay there). It involves using the right grammar to communicate concepts with a minimum of fuss. It involves knowing when to repeat yourself, when to paraphrase yourself, and when to stop talking. It also involves a uniformity of voice. The rules should sound like a single person wrote them, even if it was a writing team. (Fiction segments, or examples of play can break this rule, naturally.)

In this regard, most games published after about the mid-'80s are at least fine. The true standouts from the games I made characters in were Space Opera (again), and Gangster! (of course). Space Opera because it didn't consistently use terminology, while Gangster! tended to use tortured (or even incorrect) grammar to the point it was difficult to figure out what they were on about.

Oh, and if your rules are very complicated, there's this thing called “examples of play” that really help to keep things straight. Look no further than CORPS for some excellent use of these to make what would otherwise be very terse wording actually comprehensible.

Conciseness

I'm looking at you here, C&S. God damn was that opening section on medieval times a tedious slog to get through. Was it valuable information? Hell yeah! But was it well-written, engaging, or interesting? Well, maybe the last one was OK, but it was delivered in such a pedantic, academic way that it was a really hard slog ... and I'm a person who's been a fan of this game since 1982!

Other games also have this problem. Space Opera (because of course it does!). Mythras to a point. But Chivalry & Sorcery is the undisputed reigning champ of unreasoned loquaciousness.

CORPS again gets kudos, however. Greg Porter is (in?)famously terse in his rules, perhaps by some standards even a little too terse. But for me he hits the sweet point, because where he's too terse he at least has timely and well-placed examples that clarify those momentary patches of opacity.

Completeness

Everything you need to play a game should be in the book(s) containing the rules. Period. Unfortunately several designers seem to disagree. The original D&D, for example, was literally unplayable out of the box because it needed the rule book of another game from another publisher (!). But as before, this is forgivable because these guys were breaking new ground and best practices hadn't yet developed.

There's no excuse for this in any game written after about 1980. Having a game with incomplete rules (whether the incompleteness is in the design or a byproduct of printing issues is irrelevant) is inexcusable. And for this one DragonQuest gets the dungeon hat and stands in the corner.

The character I made for DragonQuest is a Namer. It's a very powerful college of magic in DragonQuest and it is also basically incomprehensible because, get this, when publishing the game they had to remove some sections and the full explanation of how Namers worked and where they fit in the milieu was cut from the text.

Nobody else in my 31 characters fell afoul of the completeness requirement. They weren't all well-written and clear, but at least they were complete.

Correctness

This comes in two flavours. Again, infamously, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons fell afoul of this because of internal contradiction. Quick question: how much does magical armour encumber and/or weigh in AD&D? It's a trick question because there are three answers: one in the Player's Handbook and two in the Dungeon Master's Guide. But again this gets a pass (even if it's an exasperated one) because they were inventing whole new kinds of games here. It's not good, but it's forgivable.

None of the games I made characters for fell afoul of this flavour of the rule. Yay! Unfortunately there's a second flavour.

Sometimes there's editing problems. MegaTraveller, for example, infamously had entire columns of tables shifted to the right by one with the final column missing. As a result there were large sections of the rules on starships that could not be used because the information needed was absent. I didn't make a character for that game, however, so I won't belabour the point.

Instead I'll belabour ... sigh ... God DAMN it C&S! I really do love you but sometimes you make it so hard to!

The character I made had a background skill called “Wood Carving”. There is no skill called “Wood Carving”. There is no skill that is a renamed version of “Wood Carving”. Nothing really fits a skill with that specific a name. I had to presume some things (because of time limitations) and basically made up that skill. (Later, I received a response to a query I had had put in to the publisher: “This is covered by the Bone, Horn and Ivory skill as it states it covers the carving of hardwood items.” Because of course I would look up a skill that doesn't contain wood in its name as the name of “Wood Carving” skill...)

Courteousness

This is going to be a more general thing because none of the rules I read felt discourteous (aside from some low-grade sexism from earlier publications). I can't provide any examples from this set of games that are particularly good or particularly bad. Instead I'll just cast a bit of general advice based on my broader experience with games since the late 1970s.

  1. Don't talk down to your audience. Don't tell them, implicitly or (sometimes, shockingly!) explicitly, that if you don't play and enjoy games the same way you do that they're somehow inferior to you. That's how entire game lines with promise, mechanically speaking, die. You can think whatever you like. Don't say it. Don't even hint at it.

  2. Don't assume too much from your audience, and whatever assumptions you make of your audience, make sure they're stated up front. For example, don't assume that everybody knows how D&D works when you're explaining your rules. There's entire generations of people who've not played D&D because D&D wasn't a thing where they were or for other reasons of experience and access. (Japanese players, for example, are far more likely to be aware of Call of Cthulhu than D&D.) The same can be said for tropes like elves and dwarves and the fae and such. Different people have different ideas of what these are; make it clear what yours actually are in your rules.

  3. Pay attention to modes of address. In the early days of the hobby it was fine, for example, to say “we use the masculine as the generic pronoun” because that was the mode of the time. By the '90s this was no longer the case and people used many techniques to resolve this. By the 2020s it's become somewhat of a land mine and you may want to be extra careful about third person pronoun usage. There's no perfect answer, but there are answers that are going to land you in hot water of sufficient temperature to cook your game line.

  4. Be aware of the diversity of your readers. Don't use fonts that are too small. Don't use colours that are common among the color blind in your text. Don't try printing text over background graphics because that isn't something everybody can clearly resolve. Hire a UX expert or at least read a book on the topic.

Information Design

Hoo boy. So much bad information design. Again, as with vocabulary and register, most games are ... passable—if barely so!—but some really got hit with the ugly stick. Repeatedly.

Information design is definitely a weakness in this industry. I'm not sure I can call out any excellent examples of it. I can call out a couple of good efforts though: Mazes & Minotaurs (a free game!) is very easy to follow along with to make characters, and I also found HARP pretty good as well. Both of them start with what's important in an RPG: the character. Everything from the beginning onward is framed in terms of the character. You have to flip forward to details of each stage (and we'll talk a bit about that need in cross-referencing) but the actual design of information in these two made generating a character, even for the moderately high complexity of HARP, a breeze.

The rest ... well, they're passable. If only just, sometimes.

Cross-Referencing

Complex procedures live and die by navigation: tables of contents, indices, and cross-referencing. Tables of contents are easy and most games have decent ones. Indices are really difficult to get right, and having a bad index is often worse than having no index. RPGs being a very fringe field for most publishers means that a proper indexing editor is not within the means of most companies; it's probably better to not waste the time and page count on trying.

This leaves cross-referencing.

Above you noticed that I very “subtly” indicated that a good (not THE good, but A good) way of structuring information was by grounding it in the character, the point of interaction between player and rules. That two games in specific stood out in how they structured things, and that I foreshadowed cross-referencing as the magic tool that makes it all work.

So let me be explicit: my favourite rules organization as a player or GM is character-grounded. You start with the character and you specifically start by going through a checklist of character generation. For example HARP starts with, after the table of contents and a brief introduction, character generation. Choose a profession. Generate statistics. Choose a race/culture. Buy skills and talents. Etc. etc. etc. The terms needed get introduced so you know what's happening at each step.

This is extremely well done. The general overview is there, and details for the larger parts are located elsewhere in the text. Obviously they also tell you what page this information is on, right?

Wrong.

The organization is correct, but the lack of page (or even section) referencing knocks it down a peg. It means instead of flipping forward directly to the required information, I have to flip back, find that in the table of contents, then flip forward. It's irritating. It's annoying. And it's unnecessary. All this could have been solved by adding a page reference (or two or three or whatever you need) at the end of each of six steps of character generation.

I can't overstate this enough. Missing page references. The infamous “page XX” references that litter so many games. The use of section numbering in older games followed by a refusal to reference by section number. This is all bad and it's all unnecessary. Mazes & Minotaurs, a free game that started its life as a joke is better than this!

TL;DR Summary

I started this challenge for a lark. It was a fun way to test myself, and adding “31 different games” to the challenge was ... well, it turned this into a real challenge because that meant reading (or re-reading) 31 sets of rules.

A lot of what I discovered over that challenge was stuff I had in the back of my mind for decades. The challenge put it into sharp relief, however. This really was fodder for these extremely long ruminations.

With luck you'll find some value in my meandering thoughts as well.