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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1480313" data-attributes="member: 10201">What headaches? I'd owned the book for years before i ran into anyone else who'd read it. It had never even occurred to me that it was a "difficult read". It took no effort whatsoever for me to read it--it was like a hot knife through butter, to misappropriate a cliche. And at the time i read it, i'd hardly had any college courses of the sort that required reading academic papers.Compare this to, say, the D&D3E PH. First, i found it immensely hard to get into. Second, i found it even more difficult to not put down--i just couldn't get very far before it simultaneously bored my and fatigued me. Third, it was downright difficult to read. I must've re-read the entire combat chapter 3 times, and re-read some sections even more than that, and i'm not sure i *ever* would've figured the whole thing out if not for the D20SRD (a model of clarity by comparison). And this is despite being thoroughly steeped in the jargon of RPGs, and D&D in particular, and having no problems with the words, just the grammar and organization.It depends what you're trying to do. If you want to make it easy for people who haven't read your game to get into it, you can borrow the terminology of an RPG they're familiar with, invent your own terminology, or pull out the dictionary and use terminology that "everyone" is familiar with (gamer or no). If the terminology from existing RPGs is insufficient (or has attached preconceptions you're trying to fight) or you don't know from which other game people will becoming, the first solution might not work very well. And i would've phrased it as "Aria is easier for bibliophiles to read, because it uses their language instead of gamers' jargon." I really don't consider the way it's written to be particularly specific to one style of higher education, and anyone who's a heavy reader (of non-fiction, at least) can probably parse it just fine.In any case, i'd say the style of writing in Aria has much more in common with scientific journals than liberal arts journals [of those i've read]. But i wasn't talknig about jargon of any sort (academic, gamer, or otherwise)--if you can pull a general-language dictionary off the shelf, and find the meaning being used in your context, it's not jargon. As for RPG books in general: they use jargon in place of common English words all the time. The worst is when they take a word that *has* a common English meaning, and use it for something noticably different (the WoD games, especially the early ones, are much worse than most others at this).Now, Aria did go overboard, much like some of Gygax's later efforts, in changing some of the established RPG lexicon that actually *was* transparent. "Character" is perfectly transparent, and sufficiently accurate--even if "persona" is more accurate, the former is familiar to RPers. But, for the most part, i found the terminology transparent in Aria, moreso than a lot of RPGs--it was a genuine surprise to me to hear complaints. Only word that tripped me up was "Aspect". Since it was capitalized, i kept trying to figure out the Special Game-Mechanical Meaning(TM), and it took me a couple chapters before i realized that the game-mechanical meaning of Aspect was "an aspect"--i'm still not sure why they chose to game-ize that term, since Aspects have no game-mechanical impact (that i can recall--it's been a couple years since i've run Aria).</blockquote>

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