Too much prose in RPGs?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Because they are. I’ve seen insiders discussing the customers who read but don’t play bandy around the figure of 50 per cent. And those are buyers who aren’t actively gaming at all, not gamers who have bought a book and haven’t gotten around to using it yet.

Look at Paizo. The foundation of their business is subscriptions to adventure paths. Chapters are released monthly, and each takes around 10-15 sessions to run. That’s if the subscriber is even running an active game - which most aren’t. So what fraction of AP chapters sold is ever used in a game at the table? I’d be surprised if it was even 25 per cent for the early chapters, and much less than that for later chapters.

In that light, and assuming Paizo and WotC have even the crudest outlines of customer behviour, is it surprising these books are designed to be read rather than used as play aids at the table?

It is. And it’s a distinct skillset from writing creative content. But it’s not a skillset that’s so difficult to learn that it can’t be incorporated into publisher processes and style guides. The basics of effective instructional design is using bulleted lists, sidebars, clean layout, and rendering all processes as numbered lists. And even descriptive prose can be written in a concise manner.

But this doesn’t happen. At least with the big publishers, who are wedded to their walls of text model. Most of it is the commercial incentives cited above - catering to readers rather than gamers. But part of it is just lazy traditionalism - designers and publishers presenting content the way it has always been done because that’s the way it has always been done.

It’s worth noting that the most effective, innovative presentation today comes from indie publishing, including the OSR. A lot of gamers love the style of publishers like Necrotic Gnome. And yet WotC continues to churn out books that don’t look any different in layout and design from what they published 20 years ago.


I’m the same way. The assumption that I’m going to read and memorize even a 32 page adventure that will take me multiple sessions to play is unfounded. I’m not 20 years old anymore - I can hardly remember what I had for lunch yesterday.

Which is why I’ve come to prefer PDFs rather than print adventures - I can copy and paste the content into a format that’s effective for me at the table.

Well... I think the actual skill in technical writing/documentation/manuals (and thus presumably games presented in a similar format) is actually KNOWING WHAT TO PRESENT. The single most common flaw with this kind of writing is that the writer is almost invariably an expert on the subject they are writing about (or invented the game/whatever) and they will almost surely not be able to inhabit the mind of a person coming in cold and trying to grasp the material! Thus the technical approach usually fails because it assumes the reader has a whole lot of context which they usually don't have.

Honestly I never had an issue with the way WotC presents stuff in a big way. I mean, 4e rules material was pretty focused. The 'lore' was sidebared, NPCs/monsters are stat blocks, etc. The problem with their ADVENTURES was always the horrible 'delve format' where basically each encounter would be described and then IN ANOTHER PART OF THE BOOKLET they would provide the stat blocks and such. UGH! what a craptastic format that was. I haven't looked at any 5e adventures TBH, but hopefully they've got rid of that junk.

The 5e rulebooks though, they're not too bad in terms of prose, the problem is the rules themselves, which are just not there. Also the format is somehow really hard to reference, things are not properly ORGANIZED, but the text is clear enough and there isn't an excess of extraneous material. Their class write ups for instance are not bad at all.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Right, so, when I'm about to run an encounter presented in a published adventure; I want to know what it accomplishes, plot-wise, who's involved, and what things could potentially happen, and where each one might lead next. NPCs should be from 1-6 simple statements, depending on how important they are or how many ways they could be interacted with.

That's why I like Kelsey Dionne's format. It not only describes rooms and inhabitants, it very succinctly conveys what the NPCs goals are, how the situation might evolve/develop, and where the PCs might go next. All are quick to find, without any walls of text.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's why I like Kelsey Dionne's format. It not only describes rooms and inhabitants, it very succinctly conveys what the NPCs goals are, how the situation might evolve/develop, and where the PCs might go next. All are quick to find, without any walls of text.

Right, I didn't comment on that mostly because I haven't read any of them, and have little to add. It does sound pretty good, and if I was running that kind of thing I'd probably be pretty happy with it . I think a lot of the earlier TSR-era modules are not TOO far off, though maybe a bit verbose in odd places as you said (or someone did). G1 for example is QUITE brief. The whole thing is what, 32 pages?

 

[Bilharzia]

No, I read RPGs for the creative ideas, not the actual writing.

So do I, but that's not what we are talking about is it? If our preferences aligned with how the books are produced we would not be talking about anything. I recall at least Paizo has said they know their adventure paths are bought to be read rather than played, and that informs the way they produce them. Of course prose fiction is far superior to RPG adventure prose (at least for me) but the consumers of this stuff enjoy it because of the imaginary meta-fiction they can run in their heads while reading it.

The upside is that it leaves space for the tiny indie publishers, writers, artists to create useable supplements, adventures, rules that people playing the game actually use, rather than the weighty prose tomes of the larger publishers. There certainly is a demand for this style, Necrotic Gnome and others have demonstrated it.

 

[Bilharzia]

This is where we part ways!

You are confusing personal preferences with market preferences.

 

[Bill Zebub]

You are confusing personal preferences with market preferences.

Again, I question whether it really is the market preference, or whether that's an assumption.

Above you, wrote:

the consumers of this stuff enjoy it because of the imaginary meta-fiction they can run in their heads while reading it

And that is exactly what I do when reading Neverland-like materials. In fact, I think it's easier to do that with the low-prose materials because the information density is higher.

Which makes me wonder if the real driver isn't the market, or freelance rates, but simply that it's easier to fill 128 pages with creative ideas padded with long winded prose, than it is to generate enough more creative ideas to fill those same 128 pages with dense information.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Which makes me wonder if the real driver isn't the market, or freelance rates, but simply that it's easier to fill 128 pages with creative ideas padded with long winded prose, than it is to generate enough more creative ideas to fill those same 128 pages with dense information.

I think you're onto something there.

One of the problems I see lately is that a lot of the prose is not just long-winded, but at its core, pointless. There's not much creative thinking going on in the industry, particularly in systems. Endless splatbooks for 5e are churned out, but new systems are extremely scarce.

 

[J.Quondam]

Which makes me wonder if the real driver isn't the market, or freelance rates, but simply that it's easier to fill 128 pages with creative ideas padded with long winded prose, than it is to generate enough more creative ideas to fill those same 128 pages with dense information.

And they can probably charge significantly more for a 128 page book than, say, a 96 page book, simply on the perceived "value add," even when that extra text isn't necessarily worth much.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

I think you're onto something there.

One of the problems I see lately is that a lot of the prose is not just long-winded, but at its core, pointless. There's not much creative thinking going on in the industry, particularly in systems. Endless splatbooks for 5e are churned out, but new systems are extremely scarce.

There are 19,796 ttrpgs on itch.io, most of which were added after 2018 (I know, because I was there when the indie ttrpg scene on itch exploded).

Top physical games

Find physical games like Lancer Core Book: First Edition PDF, Border Riding, The Long Rim: a Lancer Setting, HyperMall: Unlimited Violence, Honey Heist on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace

itch.io

Only 183 are 3rd-party releases for 5e. Most of the other 19,613 releases use their own systems, or pretty new systems like Forged in the Dark, Belonging Without Belonging, Tunnel Goons, Knave or others.

New systems are not scarce.

 

[Jd Smith1]

New systems are not scarce.

itch.io? A vast pool of junk, for the most part. Ranks up there with Amazon's perma-free indie novels. But you are right, I did not clarify. So:

New systems that use new, innovative mechanics and are marketed in mainstream venues are scarce. As in good, innovative systems.