New Legend and Lore: Getting the Most out of the Rules

[I'm A Banana]

Any rule that takes more than a few paragraphs to explain needs to be simplified.

A few paragraphs of rules-ese in a page of evocative examples of how to use those rules is OK by me.

 

[Agamon]

I've never been able to sit and read listings of spells, powers, feats, or anything like that. Too rote. It might be because I'm not one that cares what kewl stuff my PC can potentially do. If I can get a handle on how the fundamental rules work, I'll worry about the individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis when they become relevant.

Then again, I've never really liked reading published adventures either. Too dull. If I can get the underlying idea, that's enough, I tend to not run those by the letter anyway.

Adventure ideas or settings on the other hand are often enjoyable reads for me that stimulate the imagination.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Rules should be written with precision first. Conversational tone, evocative phraseology and examples can be added after. The only time that precision has lesser importance is when it is a specifically intended design conceit of the rules to be imprecise - to require DM adjudication and invention even when it may not have been necessary. This doesn't mean the fluff isn't important. He's right when he deplores rules that read like boring, dry technical manuals.

When game rulesets are issued revised versions they don't add more fluff, adopt a more conversational tone or try to evoke greater inspiration - they simply insert greater precision; clearer understanding of how/why things work. While I personally favor 1E as a ruleset over any other for a variety of reasons it most definitely suffered from a lack of mechanical clarity (sometimes catastrophically so). I have long attributed this to the manner in which it was created - a collation of disparate rules (which were expansions and additions to earlier rules) rather than a system built from the ground up. Had it been organized (or REorganized) from the ground up with an aim at greater precision and clarity THEN had its conversational tone and inspirational passages applied to that framework we might still be playing AD&D. Much more evolved, no doubt, but still firmly clinging to AD&D's roots.

 

[AeroDm]

It's been said already, but I think it bares repeating.

I want my rules material to by crisp and clear, so I know exactly what it means. If it's dry and dull, that's okay.

I want my settings, adventure, and monster descriptions to be cool and evocative.

I enjoy conversational sidebars that tell us what the designers where thinking (and how to make house rules if we disagree).

Oh, and every intro book should include the play-script style "example of play." I never tire of reading those.

I agree with all of these sentiments, but I imagine there are limits. For instance, clear and crisp rules are great, but what if it is 300 pages straight? There needs to be something to break up the monotony or people's eyes will glaze over. In most books, they try and just use that little intro paragraph to each section to provide concentrated fluff (you know the one, "The dwarves toil heartily within the great stone caverns they've carved over generations while the elves mirthfully mirth about their mirth trees..."). I loathe those paragraphs.

I'm also surprised at how many people enjoy the sample of play excerpts. I see them as useful and often necessary, but rarely fun to read. What specifically is it about them that people enjoy? Just seeing the mechanics in action? Getting a sense of how other people game? Should they be used to introduce colorful ideas?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm also surprised at how many people enjoy the sample of play excerpts. I see them as useful and often necessary, but rarely fun to read. What specifically is it about them that people enjoy? Just seeing the mechanics in action? Getting a sense of how other people game? Should they be used to introduce colorful ideas?

Don't much like the opening flavor paragraphs, either, but mainly because once they start doing them, they apparently feel compelled to include a bunch of them. Only some will be worth keeping.

I like the play excerpts for a couple of reasons:

1. I really think that the play excerpts ought to be written early, the game designed around them, and then revise the excerpts to fit the game as it evolves. I know that most of them are written late, but a late excerpt is better for the design than no excerpt.

2. When the excerpt is written late, it often does a better job of telling you how the game plays than the rules and evocative text do!

Take AD&D 1E, for example. There are parts of the game that get you thinking your are playing in a Tolkein, Moorcock, Anderson, Leiber, Howard, Vance, etc. novel. Then you read the example of play. This tells you that after a couple of encounters and a few turns of exploring, the party is likely to lose about 20% of the party. (That poor gnome. )

I think the example of play information is more accurate for a beginning group applying the rules as written, best they can.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For instance, clear and crisp rules are great, but what if it is 300 pages straight?

IMO, if it takes 300 pages to explain your rules (heck, if it takes 50!), your rules suck.

Well, let me soften that blow: if you can't explain the rules clearly and crisply without adopting a dry formal tone, your rules are too complex for me to fully enjoy. If you need to adopt the exacting language of legalese to specify exactly what you mean by a rule, you've passed the "thinking too hard about pretending to be an elf" threshold and entered raw ruleswonk territory.

Not that that's not fun, just that it should be the kind of fun you can opt into, rather than the kind of fun you HAVE to go through to pretend to be a magical wizard for 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Also, keep in mind that providing variety is a little different. Monster Manuals are 300 pages, but you only need a few of them each night. Powers or spells are somewhat in the same boat: they are variations for options, not necessary bits. Your Combat chapter, though, is the heart of it: it shouldn't take dry talk about Lines of Sight and Areas of Effect and Opportunity Attacks to get me to smash some orcs in the face.

 

[AeroDm]

IMO, if it takes 300 pages to explain your rules (heck, if it takes 50!), your rules suck.

Well, let me soften that blow: if you can't explain the rules clearly and crisply without adopting a dry formal tone, your rules are too complex for me to fully enjoy. If you need to adopt the exacting language of legalese to specify exactly what you mean by a rule, you've passed the "thinking too hard about pretending to be an elf" threshold and entered raw ruleswonk territory.

Not that that's not fun, just that it should be the kind of fun you can opt into, rather than the kind of fun you HAVE to go through to pretend to be a magical wizard for 4 hours on a Sunday afternoon.

Also, keep in mind that providing variety is a little different. Monster Manuals are 300 pages, but you only need a few of them each night. Powers or spells are somewhat in the same boat: they are variations for options, not necessary bits. Your Combat chapter, though, is the heart of it: it shouldn't take dry talk about Lines of Sight and Areas of Effect and Opportunity Attacks to get me to smash some orcs in the face.

Oh, I'm with you. I think shorter is not only better, but probably also superior design. But so far this entire thread has said PHBs should be dry and crisp and PHBs tend to reign in at 300 or so pages. I guess we could except out spells sections, feats, etc as just exposition of rules and not rules per se, but I'm imagining people want their feats and spells to be crisply clear as well.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Oh, I'm with you. I think shorter is not only better, but probably also superior design. But so far this entire thread has said PHBs should be dry and crisp and PHBs tend to reign in at 300 or so pages. I guess we could except out spells sections, feats, etc as just exposition of rules and not rules per se, but I'm imagining people want their feats and spells to be crisply clear as well.

I'd like the mechanics for feats and spells to be crisp and clear. If there can also be some evocative, useful stuff included in that section, that's great. But then I'm not wedded to having 300 pages.

I do think that since 2E, a certain amount of the page count in core rules has been unnecessary redundancy. (For clarity, some limited redundancy may be useful.) Certainly, given the powers that we have in 4E, I would prefer for the common (or almost common) things to have been explained once, clearly--and then simply referenced by some simple means in the (shorter) list of powers. If the occasional power needed to have exceptions to that and thus its own mechanics--fine.

Saying something once, that needs to be said, clearly and precisely--not many people mind that. Repeating it until to your eyes glaze over and you recognize the meaning from the shape of the text--that's dull.

 

[pemerton]

Have a look at the 4e PHB rules on powers. We have six pages to define and explain the concept of powers, but dozens and dozens of pages listing powers. For me, that's six pages of rules and gazillions of pages of data to be processed using the rules. Did anyone actually have a fun time devouring all those powers?

I wouldn't say I had a fun time devouring all those powers. But from time to time I do pick up the PHB, or a power book, and look through the lists of powers to get ideas about what I might do in the game.

Similarly with Monster Manuals. I see these lists of rules elements as the source of inspiration for adventure design. Although they are just mechanics, I find it fairly easy, when reading them, to imagine them as mechanics-in-play.

I'm also surprised at how many people enjoy the sample of play excerpts. I see them as useful and often necessary, but rarely fun to read.

I don't mind reading them, but often they are a lot less helpful than they could be.

Two examples:

In the Rules Compendium (4essentials), there is an example of a skill challenge. The skill challenge ends with the players failing. In resolving that failure, the GM does so in a metagame fashion - that is, the GM determines the consequence for failure not by extrapolating from what went wrong, in the fiction, with the last attempted skill check, but rather by deciding on a consequence that is suggested by the earlier play of the encounter, and which makes sense as a way of bringing to an end the PCs' attempts to unravel the challenge.

Now I have nothing against this way of GMing. In fact, in my view, without it you can't make skill challenges work. But nowhere do the rulebooks talk about how you might do it! Nor is there any commentary on the example of play that explains what the GM did. It is all left as an exercise for the reader. In my view, that is a crappy way to explain the rules of your game.

Second example: in Burning Wheel, players and the GM have to script their combat rounds in advance, with only a limited capacity to change manoeuvres once the scripts are declared. Now, Burning Wheel melee also has parry/dodge rules, but if you don't script your parry/dodge at the same time as your enemy scripts his/her attack, then you lose! So being lucky and clever in your scripting is an important thing.

But in all the examples of play in the book, the opponents "just happen" to script their attacks and parries/dodges simultaneously. So (i) we get no example of how to resolve an attack where there is no scripted defence, and (ii) we get no example of the fizzling of a defence when there is no scripted attack, and (iii) we get no discussion of what (if anything) experienced players can look to to help with their scripting.

In short: I've got nothing against examples of play, but they should (among other things) give well-explained examples of how to handle the tricky or important things, not just gloss over or ignore those things.

 

[Jhaelen]

In short: I've got nothing against examples of play, but they should (among other things) give well-explained examples of how to handle the tricky or important things, not just gloss over or ignore those things.

This bears repeating. I've too often seen examples that illustrate only the straightforward cases to be convinced that gameplay examples are generally worth the space they occupy.

Ideally, you'd have a set of progressively complicated examples to illustrate how things work but that requires even more space _and_ it's more likely that it will not be read in its entirety because it looks too friggin' long.

And finally there's the issue that those examples better be correct! I've seen way too many examples that contain errors to be convinced they are actually useful for anything. Take D&D 3e's plentiful sample characters: was there even a single one that was completely free of errors? I doubt it.