Tuesday, September 26, 2017

I Can Has Questions

Why do the current crop of RPG rulebook writers insist on hiding the essential information needed to get up to speed as quickly as possible behind pages and pages of waffle?

Used to be the character build process was the first thing in the rulebook and was laid out quickly and in a straightforward manner. But now you have to wade through almost the entire blasted book to find out the most important stuff - i.e. how to build a character for use in the game.

Not that I'm against having a rich character-build process or game world you understand, but it is much easier to understand the bits the author is trying to convey at the start by reference to an actual, you know, character. Writers: don't describe the blasted skill test mechanics to me until you've described how I build the skills.

Case in point: I want to run some players through Planet Mercenary RPG this Saturday and since no-one has any idea of what that entails I need to get up to speed quickly. I flip to the character build section (a good 1/3 of the way into the book) and my immediate question was "How many skill build points do I have?" It took me about 15 minutes to locate the section in which that info was yielded up. Shortly after, I was looking at the Starship build process (part of the initial group character build process). How many resource points do the players get? Another 15 minute search for something that should have been front and center, not buried in a small paragraph at the end. Seriously, are the editors autistic or something?

This isn't a problem restricted to Planet Mercenary RPG either. D&D 5e pulls the same nonsense. Dresden Files RPG did it in spades, requiring reading almost the entire rulebook to get a character built.

Savage Worlds on the other hand presents all the relevant info concisely and up front. GURPS also does the job right, if somewhat less concisely. So it isn't impossible or hard to do. Call of Cthulhu has a two-page spread that explains the whole process diagramatically. It really doesn't get any easier than that.

So game designers and editors: If you want people to play your games, why make it hard to glean how to do so from the rulebooks? If you are going to make people go hunting in YouTube for instructions on how to play, why bother writing a rulebook at all?

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