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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5238995" data-attributes="member: 42582">For flavour text, I prefer the first over the third.Agreed.I was almost going to start a thread today on the quality of writing in RPGs. The following is from a recent article on the WotC site:You have a price on your head, because you have earned the enmity of powerful enemies that will stop at nothing to capture you dead or alive. You have no safe places to hide and few whom you can trust without fear of betrayal. Friends are a luxury you can hardly afford, because your mere presence endangers their lives. You do not stay in one place for long and you have learned to sleep lightly, with a weapon close at hand. One day you will face your hunters and make a final stand. Until then, you must run. That's really not very good writing. And a lot of other D&D material, and material for other RPGs, is not very well written. Too many adjectives, too many cliches, altogether not very tight. I don't want to have to wade through paragraphs of that to get what I need to know about the monster or the ingame situation that's relevant to me as a GM.I find this is a problem even with the books like Underdark and Plane Above. These books are full of ideas for interesting situations that I want to use in my game, but to get that stuff out of them is sometimes hard work.I don't hold it against game designers that their writing is often not the best - it's a job that draws on a range of different skill sets and writing is just one of them. But given that, I prefer an approach that plays to strengths rather than weaknesses. Short, tightly written lore - like that found, on the whole, in the 4e MM - is what I want.EDIT:The same author also wrote this, about Oublivae:She is called the Angel of the Everlasting Void, the Demon Monarch of the Barrens, and the Queen of Desolation. She stalks the empty wastelands, lurks amongst abandoned buildings and toppled ruins, and haunts the trackless seas and the starry void between planes and worlds.It's not quite poetry, but it's a lot better than the other passage. The rate at which this stuff is being written, as much as the ability of the writers, is probably a factor contributing to variable quality. In any event, tight writing rather than rambling paragraphs are what I want to see!</blockquote>

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