technoextreme
Explorer
Honestly Gygax couldn't write very well. Most of the stuff I've read of his tended to contradict itself every other sentence which makes reading his stuff headache inducing.mplexity of Gygax's language that explains its popularity (in some quarters). It's his voice. The man behind the words shines through. His rule books are written like good essays, which don't to remove the author's personality, idiosyncrasies, the "I" from the text. They aren't just instruction manuals, they're this interesting character reading you an instruction manual, using language which would had been comically ill-suited for task if it didn't wind up resonating with so many people.
Lively writing with a point of view doesn't require a surfeit of complexity. It's just that Gary's did.
If they write them like older editions yeah because no one in their right mind writes like that. I was reading some old D&D book that was talking about a Dog Handler and it took me a long time to even figure out that I was reading actual rules and not fluff text. Pathfinder has a similar problem where the rules are so poorly worded that if you had any ability to edit you could condense down three paragraphs into one. You really couldn't make the rules any more confusing and obscure.I also refuse to believe that a young teenager is bamboozled by paragraphs. I was able to handle the horror of the paragraph when I was young, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't a child prodigy or anything.
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