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<blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 9275324" data-attributes="member: 6696971">I think framing this as care rather than utility, functionality, and economy (both in terms of cognitive economy and table handling time) is the evaluation disparity that is going on here.&nbsp; For instance, Harper's Blades in the Dark text is overflowing with evocative language.&nbsp; It drips with it.&nbsp; Now I've run the game so much that I don't really need to look up anything, including Duskvol's 12 districts and the idiosyncratic aspects of the large list of Factions.&nbsp; Take a look at the following entry for Ulf Ironborn:[ATTACH=full]348456[/ATTACH]I can look at just a few of the demarcated sections of that entry and glean a tremendous amount of information to represent Ulf and members of his Crew (as both game engine machinery and fictional characters with motivations and distinguishing characteristics) in play.&nbsp; A few sentences and corresponding NPC tags and I'm there (a trivial few moments of scanning and parsing).&nbsp; If/when, I need more, I can go right back and grab more (&quot;who are they allied with,&quot; for instance) with another trivial moment spent.The utility, functionality, and economy (UFE for short) is immense.&nbsp; Now there is an alternative way to present Faction information that is terrible for UFE.&nbsp; That alternative way is an extremely large collection of words and sentences and paragraphs without any eye-assisting, attention-grabbing demarcation of which the format successfully serves as &quot;GM life hack.&quot;&nbsp; So basically, every time the information is required in play, an individual has to parse that entire field of text and do the winnowing down to the essentials they are seeking on their own.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Manbearcat, post: 9275324, member: 6696971"] I think framing this as [I]care[/I] rather than [I]utility, functionality, and economy (both in terms of cognitive economy and table handling time)[/I] is the evaluation disparity that is going on here. For instance, Harper's Blades in the Dark text is overflowing with evocative language. It drips with it. Now I've run the game so much that I don't really need to look up anything, including Duskvol's 12 districts and the idiosyncratic aspects of the large list of Factions. Take a look at the following entry for Ulf Ironborn: [ATTACH type="full"]348456[/ATTACH] I can look at just a few of the demarcated sections of that entry and glean a tremendous amount of information to represent Ulf and members of his Crew (as both game engine machinery and fictional characters with motivations and distinguishing characteristics) in play. A few sentences and corresponding NPC tags and I'm there (a trivial few moments of scanning and parsing). If/when, I need more, I can go right back and grab more ("who are they allied with," for instance) with another trivial moment spent. The utility, functionality, and economy (UFE for short) is immense. Now there is an alternative way to present Faction information that is terrible for UFE. That alternative way is an extremely large collection of words and sentences and paragraphs without any eye-assisting, attention-grabbing demarcation of which the format successfully serves as "GM life hack." So basically, every time the information is required in play, an individual has to parse that entire field of text and do the winnowing down to the essentials they are seeking on their own. [/QUOTE]

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