Intro Materials for RCFG

Removed

You asked for criticism in a different thread...

"In Raven Crowking’s Fantasy Game, characters so reliant upon their gear that they need a “Christmas tree” of “level-appropriate” magic items in order to function."

This sentence is missing a verb.

Also, this essay is lacking an intended audience. The first half is clearly aimed at people who actually need someone to explain to them what a pen and paper RPG really is, in comparison to the computerized RPGs with which they're apparently familiar. From there it devolves into a discussion of new and old school gaming, the relative merits of different styles of rule systems, and a bunch of technical stuff that's of no interest to anyone other than forum crawling regulars.

Pick one or the other. I'd suggest keeping the first half and tossing the second into some appendix or note from the author, but my tendency is to write to appeal to newer gamers, since experienced ones will probably skip this section of the book anyways.

It is my personal opinion that the Old School/New School divide is one more false dichotomy we gamers have inflicted upon ourselves.

And, in general, if your reader is so new to the concept that they ought to have a definition of "RPG", then the differences between Old and New are going to be lost on them. It is only relevant to people who are already trying to pick one style over the other, or who already has a grasp on the basics, and interested in deeper design philosophy.

Thus, I'd say either eliminate that section altogether, or keep it more conceptually separated from the, "What is an RPG?" section.

Or, instead of using "old-school" and "modern" as terms that themselves require defining before using them to help define other things, why not use something more like "rules-light" and "rules-heavy", or "structured" and "less structured", as these are more self-explanatory to begin with.

Minor note: where you list visual aids sometimes provided by a GM, I strongly suggest including "maps", as in those drawn on a chalkboard or whiteboard as the game goes along.

Lanefan

Cadfan is absolutely right about the intended audience being unclear. Empathize with your audience in order to communicate with them. Some general writing tips:

• Cut down on your use of abbreviations or at the very least capitalize them so that they are clearly abbreviations.
• Use a bold font instead of quotations to draw attention to a new idea. Your use of quotations in the second half is just silly. Look at how the sentence reads without any special emphasis on those words- in many cases the emphasis is completely unneeded.
• Review your ideas. Rephrase ideas that contradict themselves, like #3 on your list of RPG differences. Try to present just one clear idea per text break.
• Use a bullet list because people like them.

Removed

Leave out the stuff about crpgs, it is not relevant and if the reader is familar with the genre but cannot spot the differences then they probably cannot play your game.

You can reintroduce them when commenting on similarities in tips comments.