Quote from: boulet;283224I wonder if it would be feasible to market a game with a DVD acting like a demo exploring different aspects of the game.

Like that?

Dragon Strike

Well, on second thought, rather not like that.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;286219Like that?

Dragon Strike

Well, on second thought, rather not like that.

yeah it made my eyes and ears bleed after half a minute... So something without the suck, and real nuggets of gameplay advice !

Quote from: JohnnyWannabe;2832192. Self-fulfillment. As role-players quest for new ground, the rules-sets become more complex to cater to gamer demand. Many hardcore gamers, particularly those who populate internet fora, have a lot of demands. Their list of musts has grown considerably.

It's true. When I sent the latest version of GAMERS to a friend, I said, "this time I included rules for starvation and drugs and stuff - hardly anyone ever uses them, but everyone expects them to be there."

We expect all these detailed rules to be there, but writing them up takes a lot of words, so the important stuff gets lost amongst all the bullshit.

Also when you have a system attached to a particular setting, the system and setting stuff get mixed up in the text, which further makes things unclear. And then of course the game play advice is rarely in a chapter of its own, but gets mixed up with the system and setting. With certain indie games, game design philosophy is thrown in to muddle it all up - Burning Wheel is a classic example of this, everything in there he tells you why it's there and how awesome it is.

Reading Burning Wheel is like reading the rules for Monopoly mixed in with Marx's Das Kapital.

I wrote d4-d4 in a conversational style, as though (one reviewer put it) I were a GM explaining the rules to a player. But more recently I've tried to be more spare with the words. In GAMERS almost all skill descriptions are 25 words or less, as a individual rules - though examples are longer.

Of course this makes for boring writing. Simple and clear is simple and clear, but not entertaining to read. The rambling mix of system, setting, game play advice and game design philosophy is much more fun to read, but drives us crazy when we're trying to find a rule during a game session. Form vs function once more Or as HinterWelt put it,

Quote from: HinterWeltIf you approach a game book as though it were an art book you will have a different result than if you approach it as a technical manual.

Technical manuals are useful, but boring. Art books are entertaining but useless.

The writers suffers from the curse of knowledge.  It's tough to imagine not knowing and understanding the rules.  (Once it clicks, it seems so obvious.)

It's like every RPG needs an extended FAQ section where the same Question and Answer is repeated, but phrased in different ways.  While it seems redundant to the writer or designer, different people will latch on to different explanations.

I really like examples of game play.  It helped me to understand how to play DnD by reading the short example in 2nd Edition, where the adventuring party is going down the sewer tunnel after the WereRats.

And of course a reader / potential player has to want to learn.  Seeing other people having fun can help with that though.