How You Say It

(…is as important as what you say)

In the Beginning, there was D&D.

And it was kind of a mess. The original “white box” and “wood grain” boxed D&D sets of the early 70s were innovative, imaginative, and exciting (and perhaps even charming), but the material was not well presented. They read like a collection of house rules for people who were already well-versed in miniature wargaming. Because that’s what they were.

But let’s skip ahead a few years to AD&D. It’s clear that AD&D’s designer Gary Gygax saw that D&D could use some polish and organization. Whether intended or not, the way he wrote the AD&D rulebooks set the industry standard for the presentation of RPG rules. What some of us now refer to as Gygaxian style was simply thought of as “the way.” Even as a teenager, when I wrote up stuff for my adventures or settings, I wrote in that way. And that style included using the passive voice a lot, the occasional stream-of-consciousness digressions, an advanced vocabulary (I was a 14-year-old who used terms like “weal or woe” because of Gary), and a very authoritative tone. I think that last aspect was the most important, because to a lot of us, it was meaningful to read someone treating the activity we loved as seriously as a scholar would with any other subject matter. Reading Gary’s AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide was like reading a treatise on some vital topic of complexity and depth. Some of it, in fact, was inaccessible to a lot of us (I was 11 years old when I first read it), but that just added to the mystique.

In the end, the “style” of AD&D was right for the time. We felt that it was both validating and compelling. We felt like we’d stumbled onto something intellectually robust and challenging, not just a silly game where you pretended to be an elf or was some kind of weird “Satanic” cult material that would drive us insane. That’s important because that’s what non-gamers were saying about D&D. For us, the style was compelling and validating.

That was a long time ago, though. Times have changed. We’ve changed. The world has changed.

Now, as designers, we want to expand the audience. We want to be compelling, but we don’t want to be exclusionary. What’s more, we now recognize that there are a lot of ways to play these games. That means varying our presentations.

There are as many ways to present a game as there are games. But let me share some things I personally try to keep in mind about the actual writing of the rules.

1.    Almost certainly, the ruleset you’re writing needs to be both an instruction manual and a reference work at the same time. This means that to learn your game, someone needs to fully read your text. And yet, probably quite frequently, the players will refer to your text for reminders of how something works or to clarify a disagreement. But writing to someone who has no knowledge of your game and explaining it all, and writing to someone very familiar with your game who just needs to check a key piece of information quickly are typically two very different tasks. Consider how a textbook and a dictionary or encyclopedia are quite different, for example. One is a reference, and one is more explanatory. There are lots of different solutions to this problem, but as an example, in 3rd Edition D&D, we wrote most new rules or rules components with an example, and the example was presented after the rule was presented clearly and simply. The idea was that an example is a pretty good teaching tool, but readers who only needed to quickly reference something wouldn’t bother reading that far because their question would already be answered.

2.    Know your audience. Understanding who the game is for is pretty crucial. One might want to refer back to the discussion on the different motivations for players and think about which one(s) a new game is aimed at, and how best to appeal to that group. Further, you can write your rules or setting differently if you think the audience is experienced with RPGs than if they are not. Essentially, the more experienced you expect the audience to be, the more you can skip the basics of what roleplaying is, how to take on the role of a character, what a GM does, and so forth.

3.    Clarity is key. If you’re explaining particularly complex rules with a lot of interconnected subsystems and derivative stats, write in a very clear and gently guiding voice. You need to write simply—probably at a lower reading level than you might want to at first—without talking down to the reader (a difficult balancing act). Conversely, the simpler your rules, the more freedom you have in how you write about them. The actual mechanics of the game I’m working on right now, Stealing Stories for the Devil, are simple enough that I can play around with the voice I use to explain the rules and the setting. Stealing Stories is a very player/character-focused game and grants a great deal of narrative control to both the players and the characters in order to make it work. But because it’s not terribly complex and yet somewhat demanding of mood (it’s about cool reality heists), I have tried to adopt a voice that treats the reader like they are knowledgeable and skilled, yet the stakes are high. Because the characters and the players both have levels of control over the narrative, the text can get a little meta at times, and intentionally uses the second person with little distinction between player and character (“You roll the dice to see if you disable the alarm.”). These are all very deliberate choices.

4.    Writing style and word choice can convey mood, setting details, and character design options all by themselves. In Planescape, the setting material was written in a voice similar to what we imagined someone in the setting would sound like. The people there spoke in a particular cant and so the books were written in that cant. In Invisible Sun, I used third person, first person, and second person points of view in different sections of the rules. Spells, for example, are written in the first person because the person casting the spell is casting it from their point of view. Magical items, however, are written in the third person, because they were created by someone so that someone else could use them. Creatures and NPCs were written in second person so that the GM got the immediacy and the point of view of the person or creature they were portraying. (It’s a fantastic way to not make something feel like “the other.”)

5.    Your presentation guides player focus and attention. The thing you give the most attention to in your rulebook is probably the thing that readers will assume is the most important part of the game. Similarly, if you present the reader character creation before setting material, you’re conveying something—obviously the importance of characters, but less obviously that characters are outsiders to the setting in some way. (If I make my character with no knowledge of the setting, I am likely to make a character that isn’t tied to the setting.)

6.    By extension, organization will make you a gamer’s best friend. This means more than just putting similar material together and presenting it in the right order. You need to think about how the material will be used, and make it as easy as possible for the end-user to use it in that way. GMs, in particular, need a designer’s special consideration because they have to manage a lot of information. The more you give them, the more help they’ll need keeping it all straight. For example, back in 2006, when I wrote a giant setting sourcebook called Ptolus, we highlighted important terms throughout the text and then in the margin gave a page reference where the reader could find more information. It became so clear to me that this was the right way to present fairly complex material in large books that it became the standard for my company, MCG, in our Cypher System and Invisible Sun books.

(And, of course, presentation involves graphic design, art, and so much more. I’m certainly no expert in graphic design or art, although I have my opinions.) 

Players and GMs only have what you give them, so everything you give them potentially conveys something. In my opinion, designers should never stop innovating presentation. I don’t think we’ve got it “mastered” yet, and I certainly don’t think the inventors of the medium had it mastered 50 years ago.

Shameless Plug: If you want a concrete example of how I’ve chosen to present my own newest game, Stealing Stories for the Devil, you can download a (free) primer that includes most of the game’s rules, character creation, and very brief summary of the setting. Keep in mind that the design of the game is in progress and not yet final, but I think the primer is certainly a decent indicator of where I’m going with the design and presentation.