havana97
2018-04-28, 12:45 AM
It's not something that gets talked about a lot, usually people like to talk about contents of a system independently of how they learned about them. But at some point we have to actually learn about the system. You can have it explained to you during play, watch example play videos or whatever, but at some point you can trace that all back to the good old rule-book.
As someone who is starting to write the rule-book, and as someone who has trudged through a few from the homebrew forum, I've been wondering what makes a good book or bad one. Some of it is just document view; such as having nice headings and fonts, the art is good quality and the iconography is constant and meaningful.
But some of it is more particular to role-playing games. For instance a lot of board game rule-books open with set-up, you know the first thing you do when you play the game. If a role-playing game does that, it just isn't enough context to actually make a character. But then they could stick too much context and I find myself wondering why I need to know about the personal history of the second in command of the this medium sized fraction.
As someone who is starting to write the rule-book, and as someone who has trudged through a few from the homebrew forum, I've been wondering what makes a good book or bad one. Some of it is just document view; such as having nice headings and fonts, the art is good quality and the iconography is constant and meaningful.
But some of it is more particular to role-playing games. For instance a lot of board game rule-books open with set-up, you know the first thing you do when you play the game. If a role-playing game does that, it just isn't enough context to actually make a character. But then they could stick too much context and I find myself wondering why I need to know about the personal history of the second in command of the this medium sized fraction.