Write this game for adults

pemerton said:

I read and reread a lot of RPG books, looking for new ideas, or reminders of old ideas, or trying to understand how some rule might work, or trying to work out how I might incorporate some mechanical or some story element into my game.

I seem to be in something of a minority in not finding the 4e books particularly juvenile or patronising. I mean, obviously they lack the personality and idiosyncracy of the best of Gygax, or Luke Crane in the Burning Wheel books, but they're no more anodyne (in my view) than say the HeroWars/Quest books.

For me, what stands out about WotC books (3E and 4e) isn't any particular tone. Rather, it's just their bad writing - and particularly their bad fiction.

Here is a passage from 4e's MM3 (p 12) that is completely typical:

Over the ages, a few spells of epic magnitude have reverberated throughout history. Spells that provide enough power to slay gods, bind primordials, annihilate empires, and create astral dominions leave behind some of their essence. In time, that essence can form a living spell, which stalks the universe and destroys everything in its path.​

That is just drivel. It's repetive ("over the ages", "throughout history", "in time"). It has poorly formed noun phrases. I mean, what the hell is this: "Spells that provide enough power to slay gods, bind primordials, annihilate empires, and create astral dominions "? And after that overblown thing, look at the boring verb phrase that follows it: "leave behind some of their essence". There is also an error of usage - I'm pretty sure that these things aren't stalking the universe but stalking through the universe.

Unfortunately, the amount of this sort of guff in Monster Manuals has been increasing over the lifetime of 4e. Hopefully, the D&Dnext books will be more tightly written, particularly where they include fiction.

And for the curious, here's my first pass at rewriting the objectionable passage:

[sblock]A few spells of epic magnitude reverberate throughout history: spells that provide enough power to slay gods, bind primordials, annihilate empires, and create astral dominions. These leave behind some of their essence when cast, forming a living spell that stalks through the universe destroying everything in its path.[/sblock]

Click to expand...

Eh. I'm not going to say that WotC's writing is good, but their version is fine for a non-academic audience. Phrases like "stalks the jungle" are normal in everyday language, and used in storytelling, which is what fluff text is for. Repetition is a tool used in poetry and speeches all the time. Communication and mood is far more important for creative writing than technical accuracy that 99% of the audience neither knows nor cares about.

Here are examples of the game designer writing to the reader as a peer.

Gary Gygax, Preface to AD&D Players Handbook:Gary Gygax, Preface to AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide:The 4e books don't even have forewords, never mind prefaces!

There are other considerations as well.

For example, D&D will be translated into multiple languages. I suspect that D&D written at an lower grade level will be more easily translated. And the resulting translations will be closer in intent to the English version.

Libramarian said:

Here are examples of the game designer writing to the reader as a peer.

...

The 4e books don't even have forewords, never mind prefaces!

Click to expand...

And thank goodness they don't! I was never a fan of Gygax's rambling writings.

I realize that some people might enjoy it -- because they imagine that they're Gary Gygax's good buddy, perhaps, and he's writing "just to me!!!1!" -- but it's not a style that I'd like to see again in D&D manuals.

Fortunately, those who like this kind of writing can just buy the AD&D reprints. I'm hoping for something less rambling and self-interested from 5e.

Kynn said:

Look it up here:

Tests Document Readability

Click to expand...

Thanks, I will now judge the validity of all posts and posters based on their scores. High score wins.

Libramarian said:

Here are examples of the game designer writing to the reader as a peer.

Gary Gygax, Preface to AD&D Players Handbook:

This latter part of the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS project I approached with no small amount of trepidation. After all, the game's major appeal is to those persons with unusually active imagination and superior, active intellect -- a very demanding audience indeed. Furthermore, a great majority of readers master their own dungeons and are necessarily creative -- the most critical audience of all! Authoring these works means that, in a way, I have set myself up as final arbiter of fantasy role playing in the minds of the majority of D&D adventurers. Well, so be it, I rationalized.
​

Gary Gygax, Preface to AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide:

As the creator and ultimate authority in your respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master equal to another. Pronouncements there may be, but they are not from "on high" as respects your game.

Naturally, everything possible cannot be included in the whole of this work. As a participant in the game, I would not care to have anyone telling me exactly what must go into a campaign and how it must be handled; if so, why not play some game like chess? As the author I also realize that there are limits to my creativity and imagination. Others will think of things I didn't, and devise things beyond my capability.
​

The 4e books don't even have forewords, never mind prefaces!

Click to expand...

We have blogs for this kind of thing now. We don't need it wasting page space.

Oni said:

Thanks, I will now judge the validity of all posts and posters based on their scores. High score wins.

Click to expand...

Why would you ever do such a thing as that? That's not what such a measurement is even for.

Ranganathan said:

Couldn't disagree more. Write the rules for teens, by that I simply mean write to the 8th grade reading level used for the evening news and newspapers. The easier it is to read, he easier it is to understand, and the more people who can potentially play the game.

Click to expand...

Also, given that the books are not traslated into many languages and often not all books are translated or with a huge delay, lots of people just buy all their D&D books in English.
And I've played with a number of people who can read english, but are not really good at it. Using a simple vocabulary and clear short sentences benefits them as well. But of course, you can still use such language to say intelligent things. The first chapters of the 4th Edition PHB made an impression that the rest of the book never could overcome.
Also, use yards instead of feet. A yard is roughly the same as a meter for the purpose of imaginary people moving at imaginary speeds. But outside the US and maybe the UK, nobody has any clue how much a foot is. Even though I think that Americans know what a meter is, yard still has that old-timey, outdated feel to it, but you can convert yards to meters 1:1 without really affecting the game. Everybody wins.

GSHamster said:

There are other considerations as well.

For example, D&D will be translated into multiple languages. I suspect that D&D written at an lower grade level will be more easily translated. And the resulting translations will be closer in intent to the English version.

Click to expand...

I'm not quite sure that's correct.

When I was 10 my aunt bought me for my birth day this box game that had a cool image of a dragon hurtling toward am axe wielding man and I've been salivating on it for months. That was an intreductionary box for D&D, it was basic D&D written for kids but without being condensending and had everything you need to play either by yourself or with a group, and it was written in Hebrew.

I quickly moved to the great book of D&D rules compendium, which was abut more challenging than the box set but very usefull and interesting, and played with that for a couple of years.

From there I moved to AD&D 2e (again, using the Hebrew translation) and played that until 3e came out, over the years we switched from the Hebrew books to the English ones mainly because the company that translated the books went out of buissneses.

Right before I joined the army, I had the fortune of playing with one of the guys who translated the game to Hebrew and between sessions we had some time to talk about how he went through translating the books, according to him it was like pulling out teeths, mainly due to the fact that they strived (and looking back greatly succeeded) to retain the evocative feel of the books without dumbing it down, another thing that they had in mind was that their target audiance were late teens and folks in their twenties and thirties and this being tiny Israel with a tiny population of roleplayers, where everyone knows everyone, if they did dumbed the books down they would have been ridiculed.

My point is, talented translators don't need you to keep the language down for their benefits they are bright enough folks and can handle themselves.

My other point is that it's perfectly fine to have products aimed at younger kids. Back when I was ten, I wouldn't have been able to make heads or tail from the game if it wasn't for the starter box, and that's a great thing to have, but the more advance books were aimed to an older audiance and that worked great too.

I don't want to alienate the younger generation, heck my younger cousin is going to be ten when 5e will come out (and guess what I'm going to get him?) but I have no Intrest in reading books aimed for ten years old, and to be frank I grew out of it when I was twelve.

Warder

Blackwarder said:

I would like to know what you guys think about this, I would much prefer having a book written by adults for adults and then having a kiddie friendly version, preferably in starter set boxes that I could buy for my small cousins.

Click to expand...

Writing for adults and producing something children can read are not mutually exclusive ideas. When I read a PHB or DMG I don't want to feel that it was written for ten-year-olds but neither do I want a separate version for ten-year-olds. I'm not even sure that's possible.

Here's a thing: back when the world was flat, I worked on White Dwarf, among other things. We knew, from readership surveys, that the average age of our readers was 15-16 but we wrote for a mid-twenties reading age and our readers liked it, even those as young as 12. I have to admit, however, that the confusion occasionally evinced by correspondence from some of our very youngest readers still makes me smile.