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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5978065" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree with these calls for clarity.As to the "does not compute" view about drafting rules, I think that <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">Ron Edwards has explained it</a>, at least to an extent:A lot of game texts in this tradition reach for a fascinating ideal: that reading the book is actually the start of play, moving seamlessly into group play via character creation. Features of some texts like the NPC-to-PC explanatory style and GM-only sections are consistent with this ideal . . . This ideal poses . . . problems: one for the GM in particular . . . The GM problem, only partly solved by GM-only sections, is that it makes it very hard to write a coherent how-to explanation for scenario preparation and implementation. Putting this sort of information right out "in front of God and everybody" is counter-intuitive for some Simulationist-design authors, because it's getting behind the curtain at the metagame level. The experience of play, according to the basic goal, is supposed to minimize metagame, but preparation for play, from the GM's perspective, is necessarily metagame-heavy, and if reading the book is assumed to be actually beginning to play ... well, then a certain conflict of interest sets into the process.I want to emphasise that to explain isn't to justify. On the other hand, these conflicting desires for drafting styles pose a genuine problem for WotC, because for some people the rules text is part of playing the game (in some sort of "immersive", maybe illusionist fashion). Mearls is clearly aware of the issue, because it lies behind (or, at least, seems to me to lie behind) his suggestion that the metagame stuff about monsters (roles, for example) would be in an appendix rather than in the monster entry.If I understand it properly, part of CJ's point (on this and other threads) is that even if the rulebooks are written in an opaque, stylized, "immersive" prose, the designers have a conception of what they are doing which is clear and well-understood.Crazy Jerome, assuming I've got that right, do you have a view about how some of that understanding might be communicated to users of the rulebooks while remaining consistent with the desires of some to get the sort of rulebook experience that Mancatbear and Edwards are talking about? Do you think a "technical appendix" (or what Monte Cook used to call "designer notes") can do the job?</blockquote>

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