The only thing that occurs to me off the top of my head not mentioned or criticized much by most people is something I’ve been noticing for the past year or so, and seems to be irritating me more and more as I come across it, either in things I already own or in new products, is actually in the game book production itself:

Frustrated-writer fanfiction “fluff” with dubious if any useful connection to the game itself, especially spread throughout the book, littering every chapter rather than at least corralling all the “bull(s)” in one fluff/setting/genre section.I think this is something akin to a dysfunction, Delusional Authorship Disorder or DAD, which afflicts perhaps thousands of people associated with RPGs.

You want to express and display your astounding creative writing chops, make it relevant and helpful and concise to the game, and stick it somewhere I don’t HAVE to come across it every time I have to reference something – page 16 in the middle of the character generation rules is NOT the place to plaster three damn pages of shitty, wall-of-text novella excerpts about your badass dwarven pistoleer and try to pass it off as “mood”.

This is usually done with even shittier unreadable fonts, for ineffable reasons I have never been able to even guess at, which I won’t try to make out since the author isn’t thoughtful enough to use readable text, which leaves me with a number of entirely worthless pages that I might as well tear out of the book and wipe with for all the use they are in the book.

To be honest, to a degree, the same with art, especially the background images and artsy drops of ink and wavy page tears and woodgrains behind the text that very efficiently obfuscate and obscure what I am trying to read – WHY do you do this to me? Give us a few good large pictures/pages, and maybe some good b&w images or icons on other pages, unobtrusive and complementary to the text and pretend we want a mostly “clean” page background to read.

All of the above also… no, especially… goes for adventures/scenarios/campaigns/modules – please, tell me the background of the situation/quest/adventure  briefly (read this again, briefly) and how it might be relevant and important to the PC’s or the GM, but spare me your voluminous and lengthy prologue of the evil wizard’s childhood abuse and gradual turn toward the fell arts… what in the HELL does that conceivably have to do with this adventure?!

Do you really think, can you honestly look over an adventure that has two actual full pages of nothing but prologue, melodrama and completely needless history, before even getting to the actual summary of the situation for the adventure, and think this is actually something people are raving for? I will share a secret: it’s not.

You writing a scenario should = you writing a scenario, not = you writing a novel, you writing an entire world history or cosmology or you writing a long diatribe of personal anecdotes of your life, backpatting and musturbatory self-accreditation; do what you’re supposed to do and give us what we’re expecting: WRITE THE DAMN ADVENTURE! If you can’t relate to me everything I need to know for the adventure in three “normal” sized paragraphs before the plot hook and start, then you have failed and lost sight of exactly what it is you’re doing – go back, revise and rewrite until it is something I can read in its entirety in three minutes or less – more than that and once again you have fallen off the wagon – perhaps writing adventures isn’t for you?

Within the scenario, if there are relevant pieces in your little short story that might help me GM the scenario and play the character, or that the PCs might be able to find out and use to their advantage, here is an unorthodox approach: extract them from your five gallons of bubbling word stew, and present them for the GM in a concise, useful and practical summary.

That’s great you can write multiple pages of verbose, flowery descriptions of people, things, actions and thoughts, but don’t seriously think that needs to be included in the “read this to your players” text -  there is no way in hell. Give the GM useful features and characterizations and a brief, simple summary, to allow him to present the scene to his players however he wishes, and make it clear enough that he can quickly read what you’ve written and reword it, without having to peruse your text and actually have to make tenuous inferences of what you’re even trying to say.

Tags:

This entry was posted by J P on Saturday, July 25th, 2009 at 2:47 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.