Some thoughts about sequencing game texts
I think a lot about the sequencing of RPG books. What information do we provide and in what order in order to best teach people the game, how much redundancy do we include, do we put rules before character creation or vice versa, etc. etc. I also think a lot about how many conversations on Twitter begin with the claim "Fifth edition is poorly designed because it doesn't have rules for X" when it does, in fact, have rules for X, and how often I've been told (upon pointing this out) that nobody reads the Dungeon Master's Guide, or that these rules are one of the first things people discard when playing a campaign, or some other reason why the rules that exist in the book don't actually count.
The three book model of Player's Handbook (ostensibly the "core" rules that you need to play the game), Dungeon Master's Guide (often thought of as containing "additional" or "optional" rules when it fact it usually contains the bulk of the stuff that actually helps you run the game), and Monster Manual can be traced directly back to the little brown books of OD&D. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect that it's one of those "it's always been done like this" things that doesn't get thought about much when people write a new edition. We need three books, and we broadly know what goes in those three books, so we'll write those three books.
OD&D's three books are titled "Men & Magic", "Monsters & Treasure", and "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures". The three books together come to around 150 pages - much smaller than even one of the three core books of modern games. The first book details "what characters can be played, potentials, limitations, and various magic spells" and shows us how to actually make a character, but it's not until Vol. III that we actually get anything like the rules of play. We're told this in the introduction:
Finally, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures (Vol. III) tells how to set up and actually play the campaign. It is presented last in order to allow the reader to gain the perspective necessary - the understanding of the two preceding booklets. Read through the entire work in the order presented before you attempt to play.
Modern trad1 games don't follow this formula, and this is where I think a lot of the problems with players2 not knowing which rules actually exist in the game they're playing comes from. By splitting the rules text into "core rules" in the first book and (sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly) "optional additional rules" in the third book, we've ended up with a situation where people often don't read the full rules before playing and then become frustrated when the ruleset seems "incomplete". 3
My attitude towards all this is that people writing games texts should think more critically about how their text is going to be used, and to write with that in mind. People like to talk about "intentionality of design" - I'd like to see some intentionality in the sequencing of texts. Ironsworn: Starforged is a good recent example of this, where it comes in two formats - a traditional RPG text that attempts to teach you the game, and a spiral-bound reference book to make looking things up during play easier. (The only good thing I have to say about my least favourite edition of D&D, Rules Cyclopedia, is that it at least functions as a good reference text).
Obviously we don't all have the resources to produce two different books for our shoestring budget indie games (six figure Kickstarter games do have the budget for this, but that's another conversation), but here's a suggestion for a way to sequence a rules text with onboarding new players and teaching the game in mind.
- Chapter 1: The very basics of the game. What kinds of characters can people make? What kinds of things are they going to do in play? Is there a main way of interacting with the rules (e.g. "roll a d20, add modifiers, compare to a target number", or "roll 3d6 under your most relevant ability score"). Nothing complex here - we're painting with a broad brush, giving context for what's going to follow.
- Chapter 2: A good example of play that introduces some other rules naturally (by showing them in use, with little to no additional commentary) and shows some edge cases that need adjudication (again with minimal explanation).
- Chapter 3: A sample adventure with pre-generated characters that teaches you how to play/run it. Rules are explained as they come up, the first few sections of it are fairly linear and serve only to tutorialise, and also to get people playing immediately.
- Chapter 4: The rest of the rules inc. spells, monsters, whatever.
- Chapter 5: Full character creation plus an explanation of how to upgrade/advance/whatever your pre-generated characters from the starter adventure, if you want to.
- Chapter 6: A good index.
My own recent game A Dungeon Game doesn't follow this sequencing and is missing some sections. There's no example of play or introductory adventure yet, and it's lacking an index, but these are things I plan to address.
Basically what I'm advocating for here is treating the first third-to-half of your book as a quickstart. Convincing people that they should probably spend some time learning the game before running it is going to be a losing battle, so instead let's embrace the fact that we know people are going to want to just dive straight in and facilitate that as best as possible through good sequencing of text.
Whenever I use this term there's always inevitably someone who pops up to tell me why they don't like it or don't think it's useful. I use it here to refer to games that share some of the DNA of D&D and that tend to operate in this "three core book" model.↩
"Players" meaning both "player who controls a single Player Character" and "GM".↩
As a sidenote here, there's often an attitude when talking about modern RPGs that players shouldn't have to read all the rules before playing - that a game should facilitate making a character, sitting down and playing, and learning as you go along. Groups will complain that learning new games is difficult, presumably because this is the manner in which they're trying to learn (i.e. nobody has read the game beforehand and spent time trying to learn it well enough to teach the others). I find this especially interesting when we compare it to the play culture of modern board games, where it's generally accepted that a) at least one player is going to familiarise themselves with the game enough to be able to teach it before everyone sites down to play, and b) that the first few rounds of a game will often be "practice" rounds where everyone plays with the intention of learning, before scrapping everything and starting again "for real". This mindset informs some of what I'm going to get to later when I talk about quickstarts/sample adventures.↩