Kontextmaschine

23rd June 2023

Post reblogged from David J Prokopetz with 4,873 notes

prokopetz:
I totally understand the sentiment behind applying the “I want shorter games made by people who are paid more to work less” meme to tabletop RPGs, but speaking as an editor and project manager, convincing tabletop RPG authors to write less is often precisely the problem. Like, no, Steve, a special ability whose mechanical effect is “you get to reroll a die” doesn’t need 275 words of flavour text. Put the worldbuilding bible down, Steve – don’t make me get the garden hose.
Like, I get that nobody wants a tabletop RPG that reads like stereo instructions, but on the other hand, RPG manuals are a kind of technical reference, and people need to easily be able to look up what shit does. There exists a happy medium between the RPG-as-stereo-instructions and a sea of italics were half the time the name of an ability and its associated rules toy end up on different spreads because the associated lore forced a mid-sentence page break.
(At one point I tried to compromise with an author like “well, what if we keep the long version, but also include a bullet-pointed quick reference sheet?”, and they were like “but I want people to have to read the microfiction”. I had to let that one sit for a full 24 hours before I trusted myself to compose a sufficiently diplomatic response.)

Given writers’ love of writing about writing, this was maybe an advantage of the Shadowrun books’ flavor-text-as-forum-posts format, if a writer was tempted to write too much and received pushback it could be replaced with dramatizing an in-universe poster starting to go overboard and getting brickbats

Tagged: shadowrun