Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 1699965" data-attributes="member: 18017">It's interesting to consider the apparent dichotomy as an example of the general writing rule show, don't tell. Game rules are the ultimate extreme of showing, like putting a set of schematics for a rocket engine into a book about spaceflight. Here's three points on that continuum:#1 is fluff that's all tell, no show: "The people of the human kingdoms suffer from extreme taxation."#2 is fluff that favors showing: "Trying to pay off his crushing post-war debts to Elfhame, the king of Jutsanland created new cutlery and garment tariffs and appointed a horde of tax collectors to collect them. Regrettably, these collectors were paid a percentage of the tariffs, leading to widespread abuse." (If this were actually good fluff, I'd have done it in the same number of words!)#3 is crunch that's all show, no tell: the Jutsanland Taxman PrC and a landscape-layout page of the tariffs on various goods. These are all different ways of telling the same story. Sometimes it's cool to leave it up to the reader to discover the story by reading between the lines of #3; sometimes there are important bits that can only be told about, like the history of the war between Elfhame and Jutsanland in #2; and sometimes no one cares about taxation and it's better to get it over with quickly, like  Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace.</blockquote>