For me, ttrpg books are work books. If they are unwieldy and likely to knock a glass over or can’t be handled while also sitting at a computer, I am annoyed by them.
Which means graphic novel format is about the max.
How To Make RPG Books More Readable?
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I’m moving so heavily to PDF/digital that I am fairly biased towards layout that works well on tablet devices. That usually means something like 6x9, single column, and fairly crisp, clean layout.
However, if a particular book is like coffee-table-level beautiful, I’ll pick it up in print. That’s a rarity these days, though. I like walking around with a massive bookshelf of RPG’s on my iPad, and I’m trying to unclutter my life a bit.
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I don’t have a lot to say on this matter, but I would love to hear what folks in this thread (many of which I have such immense respect for) think about this post from Luka Rejec:
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This was interesting. I think I also need to get my hands on the games mentioned in that post. I’ve struggled a lot with similar issues, of trying to break through the aesthetics of game mechanics to the social interaction of roleplaying. In the post, the writer says they don’t want to jettison D&D entirely, and I get that. However, I did end up jettisoning traditional mechanics entirely in my own Chernobyl, Mon Amour because they felt so counterproductive in terms of the experience I was after.
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I like that the post winds up acknowledging that you do need a level of compromise, because the thing about “natural language” is that it’s also ambiguous, and too much of it can make rules unreadably muddy. We can have mechanics like drawing cards and rolling dice because those words have been given universal meanings by popular games.
Imagine trying to figure out what “draw a card” means if nobody’s taught you how card games work. Do you sketch it? What about having a hand of cards?
I think what I’d add to this post is that in order to make rules that people broadly understand, you have to rely on widely-understood jargon, and should only lean into niche jargon when it’s absolutely necessary in order to identify a specific rules construct in your game.
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This is an interesting point, and directly relevant to readability! I’ve been reading a lot of 70’s rpgs lately and you really notice that established terminology doesn’t exist yet. This means that they have to spend a lot of words explaining things that now have standard expressions. One is about dice, the 1d6, 3d4+2 etc convention. If you don’t have shorthand, that becomes tedious very fast: “Take three of the pyramid-shaped dice with numbers ranging from one to four and roll them, adding the results together and then adding an additional modifier of 2…”
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Yep! Also, using a piece of jargon unique to your game allows you to utilize it as a macro. You see this a lot in CCGs, where a keyword takes the place of rules text. E.g., instead of saying “this creature can immediately attack when played, instead of having to wait a turn”, you give it the Haste keyword.
Not only does this save space, but it now makes it easier for rules to interact with that element. You can say things like “if this creature has haste” or “give this creature haste” or “search your deck for a creature with haste”.
On the flipside, jargon does decrease readability in other aspects, so it’s a trade-off. One example I like here is how Blades in the Dark defines something, e.g., a Fortune Roll, and then references that terminology elsewhere, i.e., “if X, you might make a Fortune Roll”.
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Yeah, explaining how that game works is the core activity of a rule book. But an instructional book on tennis, even a pretty basic one, does you the solid of presuming you understand what sports are and why humans might find them fun.
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Perhaps Cthulhu after dark meets Shadows of the Demon Lord?
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I suspect that this is done so that it is harder to copy. As mechanics are not copyrightable, mixing them in with copywritable material makes reimplementing them more of a chore. Then again, maybe that’s just me being paranoid.