Gunning Fog index of 13.51. I guess it's 'trepidation' and 'arbiter' that do it.
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.
What makes this hard to read is, in my view, not the vocabulary - a dictionary will help with that - but the syntax.
The syntax is Object-Subject-Verb-Adverb. Which is already a bit stilted in English.
Then look at the phrases. Object noun phrase "This latter part of the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS project". Adverbial phrase "with no small amount of trepidation".
And the other problem is that the content is bascially vacuous. I mean, Gygax is not the first author to say "I was anxious when I started working on this book", but it's hardly gripping stuff, and doesn't really become more gripping just by upping the lexcical and syntactic complexity.
I more relaxed and personal authorial voice would be welcome.
Sure, although it also starts to depend a bit on the author. For instance, I don't particularly care for the tone of the author of the core HARP rulebook.
Heroes of the Feywild
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It's a great book, and I absolutely devoured it. The clarity of language is still there, as is the clarity of rules.
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RPG books absolutely need to be accessible. I know that some folks would prefer to only read books that are challenging, but I don't think that's the right approach for a game book that's intended to appeal to adults but also to mature children and teenagers.
I don't need my game books to be challenging. I need them to give me a good idea of how to play the game.
Personally, Heroes of the Feywild didn't do a lot for me - the rules are fine, but the prose is neither here nor there. If I want to read a fairy story I'll pick up Tolkien, or read one to my kids. My favourite 4e book for story elements is the original MM: most of the fiction is clear and to the point, there's not too much of it (not like the drivel I quoted upthread about Living Spells) and the mechanics are crisp (though in retrospect there are the known issues with some of the solos, and with upper level damage). By "crisp" mechanics I mean that I can read a stat block and (i) get a feel for how a monster might play, and (ii) therefore work out how a monster can play a useful story role.
What I
don't want in a gamebook is lots of fiction which may or may not be evocative (personally I've never read gamebook fiction that does much for me), but isn't related to the game - doesn't reflect or express how the game will play.
The rulebooks I've read recently, besides 4e ones, are Moldvay Basic, Runequest and lots of Burning Wheel. What is striking about the BW rulebooks is that the tone of the book - which is very distinctive - reinforces the way the game plays.
A simple example of this (from memory): when explaining, in the Adventure Burner (which is something like BW's GM's guide), how Let it Ride works, Luke Crane gives as an example as a change in circumstances that will permit a retest "your finery gets covered in blood/mud/s**t". Why this struck me isn't just that it's a bit provocative, in a juvenile sort of way: it also tells you that, in this game,
it matters if you're wearing finery, and
it matters if your finery gets soiled. That is, players are expected to ask for advantage dice when they talk to kings in their finery, and the GM is expected to make them recheck - perhaps with a penalty - when the PCs return to the court covered in mud, blood and/or excrement.
One of the problems for me with Heroes of the Feywild is that it has all this stuff about pixies painting the dew on the grass, and the rainbow in the sky, and so on, but doesn't make it part of the game. The Manual of the Planes has similar issues when it talks about the brightness of the Feywild and the oppression of the Shadowfell. Contrast with this the cards in the Shadowfell box set, or the sample skill challenges in Plane Below and Demonomicon, which (although not always as good as they might be) show me how the oppressive character of the Feywild or of the Abyss actually takes on life in the play of the game and the resolution of action.
TL;DR - I don't want evocative fiction, I want rules that make it clear what the game is about (
actually about, in play, not what the designer wishes it was about) and makes me want to care about that.
