G'day
Back in 1988 a friend of mine named Sean Case remarked that the contents of any roleplaying game can be divided into three categories: rules of representation, rues of resolution, and vague waffle about role-playing. I would protest that the waffle need not be vague, and I would add a fourth category, description of the setting (Sean considered this not to be part of the game at all: he called in 'background material'). So we end up with four elements in a roleplaying game:
I. Generalities about roleplaying games
II. Background material
III. Representation systems
IV. Resolution systems
I do not mean to say that rules books are always organised like that, nor even that they necessarily ought to be. But I think that most of us will agree that all that which belongs in a RPG fits into one (or more) of those four categories. And I wish to maintain that this categorisation helps one to organise the material in an RPG product for the greatest convenience of the users. The key to understanding how to arrange the material in an RPG is to realise that the four different sorts of material are used in different ways and at different times.
(I) Despite Sean's dismissive characterisation ("vague waffle"), I think that general discussion of roleplaying games is very important. It is almost essential if you hope to sell your product to a general audience rather than solely to the initiated. I also think that literary criticism, game design, and plain experience have taught us a lot of things about running and contributing to an enjoyable game that are not obvious, and that we ought to share with new customers. In Sean's defence let me add that I think that the quality of this sort of material in new games in the last ten years has been much better than it usually was before.
I would clearly hesitate to say that this material was unimportant. But it is that case that for all its importance it is the material that will be least read and least referred to. Novices to RP will read it once, perhaps twice, and from there on learn by doing. Experienced roleplayers will skim it once, pick up on anything that strikes them as new or interesting, and otherwise never glance at it again. It is discouraging to a writer to pour effort into an enterprise that will be so little-regarded. But I think that it has to be done.
The conclusion is clear. This is material that one class of users will want to read before they do anything else, and that the other class will skim once. Therefore this material ought to be completely segregated from all other material so that (1) novices reading this material are not confused by the mention of game mechanics, and (2) so that inclusions of this material do not break up, spread out, or otherwise disorganise rules sections. I think that the front of the book is the best place for generalities about role-playing games, though I have no real problem with putting material for character-players at the front and for GMs elsewhere. And I have seen games that had at the beginning of each chapter a section on how to use the subject of that chapter in a game, and that worked quite well too.
(II) I think that there is a lot to be said in favour of segregating background material into a different *product* from the game: rules in one book, ready to be used with a different setting, setting in another book ready to be used with a different set of rules. But I appreciate that a lot of others, unlike me, prefer a setting-based game: fair enough, but do they have to scatter setting information throughout the rules as 'examples'? Many RPGs suffer from this flaw, but the one that baugged me most recently was 'Legend of the Five Rings'. The GM had replaced the game's weird mechanics with C&S, but he still has to search though a stack of a dozen booklets (none of them arranged alphabetically, and lacking a collective index) to find the name of an NPC. I used sometimes to take a nap while he sorted out who my character was talking to.
Background material is used in two modes: familiarisation and reference. It should be organised around these activities for the convenience of the user.
Familiarisation comes first. A player or GM on first reading is looking for the big picture. He or she wants to know what the setting is like in general, well enough that he or she can imagine a character who might live or an adventure that might take place there. And what serves this need best is terse running text organised under such headings as 'Geography', 'Climate', 'Agriculture', 'Religion', 'Recent History', 'Government', 'Warfare' and so on. Since this reading is a necessary preliminary to running an adventure or generating a character, it is reasonable to assume that it will be done in spare time, and that the reader will have half an hour or an hour to devote to it at a stretch, and to organise it to be read like that. But it is not reasonable to suppose that a player will have time to read through the entire 'Lord of the Rings' and remember details. Nor is it appropriate to make the player integrate a cloud of impressions, nor analyse a host of implications. This material has to be explicit and concise.
Reference mode comes later. Character-players and GMs need to check details while generating characters, while designing adventures, and during play. Since they have their minds on other things, and since in the last case any unnecessary delay interrupts the course of play, the material has to be organised so that a user can find the right place quickly and take in the necessary details at a glance. This is no place for fancy writing, delicate hints that have to be integrated with other information, and so forth. A GM needs to be able to take in an item of background information at a glance and without danger of misunderstanding. This is the place for monoclausal declarative sentences, minimal adverbs, and strict, form-like layout.
I like to organise my background material into a few thousand words of familiarisation as running text, plus tables, lists, and an alphabetical glossary.
(III) The most important representation system in any role-playing game is (or ought to be) the character representation system. RPGs often also feature representation systems for monsters, melee weapons, missile weapons, suits of armour, and means of transport. The more systematic ones have a representation system for tasks. C&S has a representation system for mounts and one for fiefs. ForeSight has representation systems for toolkits, vehicles, robots, alien species, ecosystems, spaceships, miracles, magical spells.... The Fantasy Trip has a representation system for jobs. Judge Dredd the RPG has a representation system for motorcycles that is more detailed than its character representation system.
In any case, any object in the game world must be represented using an appropriate representation system before any resolution procedures can be applied to it. In practice, this means that players generate their characters and their character's possessions, and record the resulting representations on their character sheets. Then they do not have to refer to the representation rules during play: the information needed by the resolution rules is neatly and conveniently stored on their character sheets. Complexity is mastered by pre-calculation.
There are four issues that I can see as being important for the organisation of representation systems.
The first is that they need a clear key. In D&D, for instance, all attributes are on the same scale: 3-18 for normal humans, with some prodigies going up higher. The uniformity of this scale makes it easy to tell what any attribute means. (FUDGE goes further: labelling all values with a word denoting their significance, and using the same scale for everything, it makes the significance of any representation abundantly clear.) An example of a representation lacking a clear scale is C&S social status. It is only by comparing several different tables in the character generation system that one can tell the significance of any given social status.
The second is that they ought to be consistently placed. Put all the representation systems together in chapter 2 if you like. Or write a chapter on character representation and put all the other representation systems in the 'possessions' chapter. Or put combat equipment at the beginning of the 'combat' chapter, vehicles at the beginning of 'travel' and so forth. Or put horses at the begining of overland travel and ships at the beginning of ocean travel. Or put them all at the ends rather than the beginnings. But be consistent. A GM about to start (say) a chase scene wants to turn to one spot in the rules and get everything represented, and then to another to start resolving the scene. And he or she wants to be able to do that with a minimum of time lost searching for rules.
The third is that the more intricate representation systems, especially character creation, ought to have its parts arranged in the order in which they will be used, so that a player, even one unfamiliar with the system, can work through it methodically. Some time ago I was helping one of my players generate his C&S character for my 'Swords of St John' campaign. And I was unfamiliar with the system myself, so I found it very difficult. The steps are arranged in a bad order. C&S asks you to assign points to your attributes first, then generate your social background, then choose vocation: but this is ludicrous. You can't know what attributes will be important to your character until you know what vocation he or she will follow, and you can't know what vocations will be available until you know social background. Further, some options you get in social background alter the number of points you get to spend on attributes! The order should be background, vocation, attributes.... Another problem arose with the calculation of body levels and fatigue levels. Despite having almost a whole page dedicated to calculating these two numbers, there was no reference at all to the fact that the character's skill in conditioning and endurance ought to be added in. There is no point in calculating these numbers before purchasing skills. A complicated set of rules ought to be like a computer program: it ought to explain clearly and in the correct order what the user has to do. If the user has to work out for himself or herself what order to do things in then the game designer might as well not have bothered to specify an order at all: all he or she has done is make things more difficult.
The fourth issue is that representation systems, and especially complicated ones, are not the place to put general comments, background material, and resolution procedures. To put those things there means in the first place that they confuse and delay character creation (or whatever), and in the second that they cannot be found by the people who are looking for them.
(IV) The resolution systems (or, preferrably, system) are the part of a game that get used most often in play. And so they demand the clearest writing and the most careful organisation. The ideal is that all the rules for each type of scene which the rules support should be contained on one two-page spread of the rulebook. This allows the GM to open up at the appropriate page and adjudicate the scene without excessive page-turning. Turning back or forward a page every now and again is undesirable but acceptable. But it is not acceptable to have to turn to or bookmark a table in another section and flip to and fro. Special resolution systems, or special elaborations of the resolution system, are usually concentrated on fights and chases: scenes that are supposed to be exciting. This is exactly the worst place to interrupt the flow of play by searching for scattered rules, exactly the worst place for the GM's narrative to be interrupted by curses and imprecations against the rules' inept editing and the astonishing lack of an index.
Now, getting a resolution system down to a two-page spread, or even two two-page spreads, is not easy. One thing that is very helpful is to have a consistent resolution procedure that is used for everything. Another is a well-designed character sheet that puts all the necessary information from various representation systems together, grouped for convenient use. These alone, or even with concise writing, are not enough. The trick to keeping resolution systems brief is to remove all the background material, all the representation systems, and all the vague waffle about roleplaying to their own separate sections.
In summary then:
Although the four elements of a role-playing game need not be totally segregated, nevertheless in each chapter or each section the generalisations about roleplaying, the background material, the representation systems, and the resolution systems are best kept distinct. The representations produced by the representation systems should be recorded on the character sheets to minimise references to the rulebook during play. The resolution systems should be laid out with a view to minimising page-turning during exciting passages of play. Every RPG rulebook needs an index.
Regards,
Agback
Back in 1988 a friend of mine named Sean Case remarked that the contents of any roleplaying game can be divided into three categories: rules of representation, rues of resolution, and vague waffle about role-playing. I would protest that the waffle need not be vague, and I would add a fourth category, description of the setting (Sean considered this not to be part of the game at all: he called in 'background material'). So we end up with four elements in a roleplaying game:
I. Generalities about roleplaying games
II. Background material
III. Representation systems
IV. Resolution systems
I do not mean to say that rules books are always organised like that, nor even that they necessarily ought to be. But I think that most of us will agree that all that which belongs in a RPG fits into one (or more) of those four categories. And I wish to maintain that this categorisation helps one to organise the material in an RPG product for the greatest convenience of the users. The key to understanding how to arrange the material in an RPG is to realise that the four different sorts of material are used in different ways and at different times.
(I) Despite Sean's dismissive characterisation ("vague waffle"), I think that general discussion of roleplaying games is very important. It is almost essential if you hope to sell your product to a general audience rather than solely to the initiated. I also think that literary criticism, game design, and plain experience have taught us a lot of things about running and contributing to an enjoyable game that are not obvious, and that we ought to share with new customers. In Sean's defence let me add that I think that the quality of this sort of material in new games in the last ten years has been much better than it usually was before.
I would clearly hesitate to say that this material was unimportant. But it is that case that for all its importance it is the material that will be least read and least referred to. Novices to RP will read it once, perhaps twice, and from there on learn by doing. Experienced roleplayers will skim it once, pick up on anything that strikes them as new or interesting, and otherwise never glance at it again. It is discouraging to a writer to pour effort into an enterprise that will be so little-regarded. But I think that it has to be done.
The conclusion is clear. This is material that one class of users will want to read before they do anything else, and that the other class will skim once. Therefore this material ought to be completely segregated from all other material so that (1) novices reading this material are not confused by the mention of game mechanics, and (2) so that inclusions of this material do not break up, spread out, or otherwise disorganise rules sections. I think that the front of the book is the best place for generalities about role-playing games, though I have no real problem with putting material for character-players at the front and for GMs elsewhere. And I have seen games that had at the beginning of each chapter a section on how to use the subject of that chapter in a game, and that worked quite well too.
(II) I think that there is a lot to be said in favour of segregating background material into a different *product* from the game: rules in one book, ready to be used with a different setting, setting in another book ready to be used with a different set of rules. But I appreciate that a lot of others, unlike me, prefer a setting-based game: fair enough, but do they have to scatter setting information throughout the rules as 'examples'? Many RPGs suffer from this flaw, but the one that baugged me most recently was 'Legend of the Five Rings'. The GM had replaced the game's weird mechanics with C&S, but he still has to search though a stack of a dozen booklets (none of them arranged alphabetically, and lacking a collective index) to find the name of an NPC. I used sometimes to take a nap while he sorted out who my character was talking to.
Background material is used in two modes: familiarisation and reference. It should be organised around these activities for the convenience of the user.
Familiarisation comes first. A player or GM on first reading is looking for the big picture. He or she wants to know what the setting is like in general, well enough that he or she can imagine a character who might live or an adventure that might take place there. And what serves this need best is terse running text organised under such headings as 'Geography', 'Climate', 'Agriculture', 'Religion', 'Recent History', 'Government', 'Warfare' and so on. Since this reading is a necessary preliminary to running an adventure or generating a character, it is reasonable to assume that it will be done in spare time, and that the reader will have half an hour or an hour to devote to it at a stretch, and to organise it to be read like that. But it is not reasonable to suppose that a player will have time to read through the entire 'Lord of the Rings' and remember details. Nor is it appropriate to make the player integrate a cloud of impressions, nor analyse a host of implications. This material has to be explicit and concise.
Reference mode comes later. Character-players and GMs need to check details while generating characters, while designing adventures, and during play. Since they have their minds on other things, and since in the last case any unnecessary delay interrupts the course of play, the material has to be organised so that a user can find the right place quickly and take in the necessary details at a glance. This is no place for fancy writing, delicate hints that have to be integrated with other information, and so forth. A GM needs to be able to take in an item of background information at a glance and without danger of misunderstanding. This is the place for monoclausal declarative sentences, minimal adverbs, and strict, form-like layout.
I like to organise my background material into a few thousand words of familiarisation as running text, plus tables, lists, and an alphabetical glossary.
(III) The most important representation system in any role-playing game is (or ought to be) the character representation system. RPGs often also feature representation systems for monsters, melee weapons, missile weapons, suits of armour, and means of transport. The more systematic ones have a representation system for tasks. C&S has a representation system for mounts and one for fiefs. ForeSight has representation systems for toolkits, vehicles, robots, alien species, ecosystems, spaceships, miracles, magical spells.... The Fantasy Trip has a representation system for jobs. Judge Dredd the RPG has a representation system for motorcycles that is more detailed than its character representation system.
In any case, any object in the game world must be represented using an appropriate representation system before any resolution procedures can be applied to it. In practice, this means that players generate their characters and their character's possessions, and record the resulting representations on their character sheets. Then they do not have to refer to the representation rules during play: the information needed by the resolution rules is neatly and conveniently stored on their character sheets. Complexity is mastered by pre-calculation.
There are four issues that I can see as being important for the organisation of representation systems.
The first is that they need a clear key. In D&D, for instance, all attributes are on the same scale: 3-18 for normal humans, with some prodigies going up higher. The uniformity of this scale makes it easy to tell what any attribute means. (FUDGE goes further: labelling all values with a word denoting their significance, and using the same scale for everything, it makes the significance of any representation abundantly clear.) An example of a representation lacking a clear scale is C&S social status. It is only by comparing several different tables in the character generation system that one can tell the significance of any given social status.
The second is that they ought to be consistently placed. Put all the representation systems together in chapter 2 if you like. Or write a chapter on character representation and put all the other representation systems in the 'possessions' chapter. Or put combat equipment at the beginning of the 'combat' chapter, vehicles at the beginning of 'travel' and so forth. Or put horses at the begining of overland travel and ships at the beginning of ocean travel. Or put them all at the ends rather than the beginnings. But be consistent. A GM about to start (say) a chase scene wants to turn to one spot in the rules and get everything represented, and then to another to start resolving the scene. And he or she wants to be able to do that with a minimum of time lost searching for rules.
The third is that the more intricate representation systems, especially character creation, ought to have its parts arranged in the order in which they will be used, so that a player, even one unfamiliar with the system, can work through it methodically. Some time ago I was helping one of my players generate his C&S character for my 'Swords of St John' campaign. And I was unfamiliar with the system myself, so I found it very difficult. The steps are arranged in a bad order. C&S asks you to assign points to your attributes first, then generate your social background, then choose vocation: but this is ludicrous. You can't know what attributes will be important to your character until you know what vocation he or she will follow, and you can't know what vocations will be available until you know social background. Further, some options you get in social background alter the number of points you get to spend on attributes! The order should be background, vocation, attributes.... Another problem arose with the calculation of body levels and fatigue levels. Despite having almost a whole page dedicated to calculating these two numbers, there was no reference at all to the fact that the character's skill in conditioning and endurance ought to be added in. There is no point in calculating these numbers before purchasing skills. A complicated set of rules ought to be like a computer program: it ought to explain clearly and in the correct order what the user has to do. If the user has to work out for himself or herself what order to do things in then the game designer might as well not have bothered to specify an order at all: all he or she has done is make things more difficult.
The fourth issue is that representation systems, and especially complicated ones, are not the place to put general comments, background material, and resolution procedures. To put those things there means in the first place that they confuse and delay character creation (or whatever), and in the second that they cannot be found by the people who are looking for them.
(IV) The resolution systems (or, preferrably, system) are the part of a game that get used most often in play. And so they demand the clearest writing and the most careful organisation. The ideal is that all the rules for each type of scene which the rules support should be contained on one two-page spread of the rulebook. This allows the GM to open up at the appropriate page and adjudicate the scene without excessive page-turning. Turning back or forward a page every now and again is undesirable but acceptable. But it is not acceptable to have to turn to or bookmark a table in another section and flip to and fro. Special resolution systems, or special elaborations of the resolution system, are usually concentrated on fights and chases: scenes that are supposed to be exciting. This is exactly the worst place to interrupt the flow of play by searching for scattered rules, exactly the worst place for the GM's narrative to be interrupted by curses and imprecations against the rules' inept editing and the astonishing lack of an index.
Now, getting a resolution system down to a two-page spread, or even two two-page spreads, is not easy. One thing that is very helpful is to have a consistent resolution procedure that is used for everything. Another is a well-designed character sheet that puts all the necessary information from various representation systems together, grouped for convenient use. These alone, or even with concise writing, are not enough. The trick to keeping resolution systems brief is to remove all the background material, all the representation systems, and all the vague waffle about roleplaying to their own separate sections.
In summary then:
Although the four elements of a role-playing game need not be totally segregated, nevertheless in each chapter or each section the generalisations about roleplaying, the background material, the representation systems, and the resolution systems are best kept distinct. The representations produced by the representation systems should be recorded on the character sheets to minimise references to the rulebook during play. The resolution systems should be laid out with a view to minimising page-turning during exciting passages of play. Every RPG rulebook needs an index.
Regards,
Agback
