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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8803332" data-attributes="member: 18">I don't think that's really true.They don't have to write like me (or to be fair, most people on ENworld... including pretty much everyone in this thread).Yeah, sure if you or I wrote such a thing, people's eyes would glaze over, but if someone like Robin D. Laws did? I don't think so.Part of the big problem here is that basically no-one senior on 5E is good at writing text that doesn't make people's eyes glaze over. Crawford and Perkins are very good at writing their precise "natural language" powers and spells (where natural means about as "natural" as Mountain Dew (TM)), but can they write interesting, involving text outside of flavour text (which they do sadly little of)? I'd say that's a big no.And I think this is another flaw 5E has that is totally solvable. I think there are plenty of writers out there who aren't meandering, circuitous buffoons like me, nor Text Robots like Crawford, writers who can boil stuff down to a sentence or three, and make it fun and interesting to read.Earlier you were talking about player types, and how you felt that section in 4E wasn't hugely helpful. I don't entirely disagree. But I've read material that covered the same ground but was drastically more useful (the 4E one was honestly a bit weird). And this doesn't need to be take a lot of space. For example, sorry to go on about Robin D. Laws, but he wrote probably the most succinct and helpful DMing book out there:[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.sjgames.com/robinslaws/[/URL]Is it perfect? No but it's a damn sight better than anything WotC or for that matter, White Wolf or Paizo have ever published regarding game mastering. And look - it's only 32 pages! You could easily contain all of that within the DMG. And I know some people love to say "prescriptive", which, frankly is being used as a meaningless buzzword, and quite politically rather than helpfully, but by no means is his book "prescriptive" (unless the 5E DMG is drastically more "prescriptive"). It's just a great example of what an actually-good book on DMing can look like, and how extremely small it can be!EDIT - Note I'm meaning prescriptive re: DMGs here, not 4E. 4E was, like 3E and 5E, pretty prescriptive. I don't buy that it was meaningfully more prescriptive than 3.XE, just prescriptive about different things, but 5E is certainly somewhat less so, albeit still drastically more prescriptive RAW/RAI than most modern RPGs. So I'm not critiquing your usage re: 4E.I'm not advocating for shrinking the DMG, note, I'm just saying, containing everything you need to get a good start on DMing can probably be done by a skilled writer on the subject in 32 pages. And given it's from 2003, I'm sure it could be improved upon.For contrast we might look at Gary Gygax's 1987 "Role-playing Mastery", which is 176 pages of absolutely "prescriptive" (in the literal sense) text on basically, how to be a "jerk DM" that nobody would ever enjoy playing with. Credit where credit's due, Gygax later basically disavowed this book, saying he's never actually run the game like that, and indeed, people who played with him backed that up, but it's still a travesty. Still what that points to is you can spend 176 pages and offer nothing useful, or 32 and offer a ton. It is important to hire the right people.</blockquote>

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