the rules-book

[havana97]

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.

[Elana]

Learning from a book is one thing.
A second important thing a rule book has to provide is looking things up in game.

So it needs to be good organized with an index that actually helps finding things

And rules should not be buried in tons of prose but shown in a way you can easily remind yourself with during a game

If you can describe something with 3 words in a table..do so. Nobody wants to read six sentences saying the same during game.

(So be more like 3rd Edition than 5th in rulebook design)

[Jormengand]

This is a word-for-word copy of about 3/5 of an old OP: it's almost certainly a bot.

[LibraryOgre]

The Mod Wonder: Thanks, Jormengand; I suspected.