See that's the kind of thing that had me reconsidering things, Kreuger.  

Sure, some games are pretty basic concepts or generic enough that most people can "get" what a character is likely to be and what the world is like just by going through chargen if it's good.  If it's really, really good, or just heavily randomized, you can get a lot through to the player that way without all the preamble.

But on the other hand, when I start thinking about something like this duck game, well, it seems like the players are going to need a little explanation up front.  "Anthropomorphic ducks in a post-Napoleonic France" seems like the kind of "too weird to live" setting I love, but also the kind of thing that may take a little bit of preamble after all to get the players into it.

Quote from: J Arcane;515324But on the other hand, when I start thinking about something like this duck game, well, it seems like the players are going to need a little explanation up front.  "Anthropomorphic ducks in a post-Napoleonic France" seems like the kind of "too weird to live" setting I love, but also the kind of thing that may take a little bit of preamble after all to get the players into it.

And I think that one you go there and require a preamble and homework before the players can dig in and create a character, you are creating a barrier that's going to limit your audience.

This goes back to S. John Ross' Five Elements of Commercially-Viable RPG Design and, particularly, the element of Cliché.  

"The value of cliché – the use of stock imagery and other familiar elements – is accessibility and mutual understanding. If the Game Master tells you the new campaign is to be set in the 'Duchy of Crows' and concerns an evil priest gathering the Hill Ogres to his cause, that may sound a bit threadbare, but it also provides a reliable common ground. Everyone can jump right in and focus on what the game is really about: the PCs and their adventures. If, by contrast, the GM tells you the new campaign takes place in the Shining Tertiary Plane of Tsalvanithra, a science-fantasy blend of Mayan mythology, Depression-era satire, 16th-century French politics and Japanese courtly manners, you're in for some research before you dare put a mark on the character sheet. The most popular games rely on stock images as a language for skipping to the good parts (and for sharing in a celebration of things gamers enjoy celebrating). Games that make a point of shunning cliché tend to be more niche.

S. John Ross would be the first to tell you that broad commercial appeal is not the same thing as quality or good design, which is why he was so reluctant to put those elements down on paper (I'm the guy who offered him money to write it up, which he declined), but the further you get from having readily understandable clichés that let the players get right to creating characters and playing, the larger the hurdle you are creating for players and GMs to get into the game.

Quote from: CRKrueger;515318For example, I buy Werewolf.  Umm, ok so what kind of werewolf, Lon Chaney, American Werewolf in London, what the fuck is this game even about anyway besides a cool cover with tears in the cardboard?

And Werewolf and Vampire both mitigated this problem by relating the types the players had to choose between to specific examples found in movies, books, and TV shows that the players could reasonably be expected to be familiar with.  The less familiar the clichés, the harder it is for the players to understand what they are supposed to do.  It's no mistake that D&D is more popular than Vampire, Vampire more popular than Werewolf, that they are more popular than Shadowrun, or that Shadowrun was more popular than Jorune or Tékumel.  It's actually all pretty predictable.  It's also why, despite the ridicule and criticism, Palladium games often did so well.  They were full of easily accessible clichés.

Quote from: J Arcane;515324But on the other hand, when I start thinking about something like this duck game, well, it seems like the players are going to need a little explanation up front.  "Anthropomorphic ducks in a post-Napoleonic France" seems like the kind of "too weird to live" setting I love, but also the kind of thing that may take a little bit of preamble after all to get the players into it.

I think you're 100% right.  Starting off with "Let's make your character, Choose what type of duck you are" would not be the way you wanted to go.  

Jumping in to Chargen first assumes you're already on board enough with the concept that the character you're about to generate isn't a blank white space.  Audience matters a lot though.  If you're playing with tabletop veterans, the High Concept might be enough to get them rolling and they'll start building stuff in their mind as they go, but if you're "too weird to live", there's definitely going to be questions.  For others though, they'll look at you like you just spoke the High Concept in Ainu.  

If I heard "Anthropomorphic ducks in a post-Napoleonic France", I'd say "Ok, but dude, work with me here, I need a little more."  

Quote from: John Morrow;515329And Werewolf and Vampire both mitigated this problem by relating the types the players had to choose between to specific examples found in movies, books, and TV shows that the players could reasonably be expected to be familiar with.  The less familiar the clichés, the harder it is for the players to understand what they are supposed to do.  It's no mistake that D&D is more popular than Vampire, Vampire more popular than Werewolf, that they are more popular than Shadowrun, or that Shadowrun was more popular than Jorune or Tékumel.  It's actually all pretty predictable.  It's also why, despite the ridicule and criticism, Palladium games often did so well.  They were full of easily accessible clichés.

True, and Albion Swords were told numerous times by potential investors that they could make a whole lot more money by creating swords using the method of cheap Indian knockoffs.  Unfortunately their problem happened to be the entire point of the business was making quality handcrafted swords for people who know who Oakeshott is.  

First Principles - Are you out first and foremost to make money and every aspect of game design flows from that goal, or are you out to make a specific game, and the tools of business simply let you achieve your original goal with as much profit as can reasonably come from it.  This is Quackpunk 1811 we're talking about, the "Milius or Lucas" ship has sailed brother.

Quote from: CRKrueger;515333True, and Albion Swords were told numerous times by potential investors that they could make a whole lot more money by creating swords using the method of cheap Indian knockoffs.  Unfortunately their problem happened to be the entire point of the business was making quality handcrafted swords.  

First Principles - Are you out first and foremost to make money and every aspect of game design flows from that goal, or are you out to make a specific game, and the tools of business simply let you achieve your original goal with as much profit as can reasonably come from it.  This is Quackpunk 1811 we're talking about, the "Milius or Lucas" ship has sailed brother.

Ironically, my initial motivation for wanting to  actually bring Quackpunk past a simple forum joke is I've gotten more positive response from the idea than I have anything else I've written in some time.  Getting people interested in DoW was like pulling teeth; the Warcraft name bears a certain stigma among a lot of gamers bitter about it's perceived theft of audience.

But then inspiration struck and now I actually think I can pull it off, and I'm hoping the interest will be there when the time comes.

RPG designers have to consider their audience. This consists of GMs and Players, the latter being more numerous than the former, and without whom the former would have no game to run.

Chargen at the start lends accessibility to a broader demographic, usually introduces key rules concepts early-on, sets the stage far better than fan-fic preamble, and helps the GM understand what kind of characters will be inhabiting the world that will be created and using the rules he/she will arbitrate.

Chargen at the start might sound hackneyed and oh-so Old Skool, but sometimes Old Skool is best. It works for a reason...

Quote from: CRKrueger;515333First Principles - Are you out first and foremost to make money and every aspect of game design flows from that goal, or are you out to make a specific game, and the tools of business simply let you achieve your original goal with as much profit as can reasonably come from it.  This is Quackpunk 1811 we're talking about, the "Milius or Lucas" ship has sailed brother.

Role-playing is an inherently social activity.  You have to convince a group of people to get together and share the game.  As such, if you create a game that only 12 people on your continent are going to want to pay, the odds of you getting enough of them into a room together to actually play a game is rather slim.  If you know you can fill a game with players who want to play a game with anthropomorophic ducks in post-Napolenoic France and don't have any delusions about getting rich, then by all means go for it.  But it seems like an awful lot of trouble, to me, to write up a formal rulebook with a fancy introduction if you are basically writing a vanity homebrew game for a limited audience that you'll probably be playing with you, so you can just talk to them.

Of course I think the right way to introduce a niche setting isn't with a story or essay but with a movie.  Get a tool that will let you create a Shockwave or mpg movie and create an intro that players can sit down and watch on their computer and TV.  Include narration, some art, maps, some background music, and so on.  It's not that hard to do that fairly cheaply with what's available now.  The idea is to make learning about the setting fun rather than a chore.

Quote from: CRKrueger;515318I don't think you can really group D&D editions with other games.  D&D has a whole host of built in assumptions.

While D&D's "generic fantasy" is probably pervasive enough today for this to be more or less true, character creation in OD&D starts on page 6. And in 1974 there was nothing particularly self-evident behind the hodge-podge grab-bag of tropes which constituted D&D's fantasy-land.

Quote from: J Arcane;515324But on the other hand, when I start thinking about something like this duck game, well, it seems like the players are going to need a little explanation up front.  "Anthropomorphic ducks in a post-Napoleonic France" seems like the kind of "too weird to live" setting I love, but also the kind of thing that may take a little bit of preamble after all to get the players into it.

IME, I can usually expect players to listen to about a 5 minute primer on a setting and/or read about 5 pages of material in a 12-point font.

If primers get longer than that, people don't actually bother to read them before they show up. If my opening preamble takes longer than that, people start tuning out.

I suspect this is also true for most players when it comes to rulebooks: You've got maybe a half dozen pages before they tune out.

Right now I'm running a 3.5 campaign that's lasted nearly 5 years and 75 sessions. All six of them now own PHBs. How many of them have actually read the PHB cover-to-cover? Zero.

Of the thirty players in my OD&D open table, how many have read the rulebooks? One. (And that's because he was going to DM a session of it.)

These are people who are enthused about gaming and most of them are very committed to gaming. But they aren't going to read rulebooks.

In order to get players to care about any of this stuff, they've got to get some skin in the game. Character creation is one way of doing that (assuming that you structure character creation correctly and make it accessible).

Quote from: Justin Alexander;515338IME, I can usually expect players to listen to about a 5 minute primer on a setting and/or read about 5 pages of material in a 12-point font.

That sounds about right to me.  I think you could probably get 15-30 minutes out of them if you created a movie with some graphics and music that was fun to watch.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;515338In order to get players to care about any of this stuff, they've got to get some skin in the game. Character creation is one way of doing that (assuming that you structure character creation correctly and make it accessible).

Yes, and I think this is one of the mistakes that games with point-buy character creation systems that try to use pre-generated characters or highly defined templates for characters to let players start quickly make.  When you roll up those 6 sets of numbers in D&D and pick a race and class, you've created a character that's distinctly yours.  When you are handed a pregen or highly personalized template with things like tag lines already defined, you are playing a character given to you.  It's one of the reasons why I think point-buy games really need a sort of random character generation for beginners.

GURPS did!

And then they got rid of it.  I had a sad.

Quote from: John Morrow;515337Role-playing is an inherently social activity.  You have to convince a group of people to get together and share the game.  As such, if you create a game that only 12 people on your continent are going to want to pay, the odds of you getting enough of them into a room together to actually play a game is rather slim.  If you know you can fill a game with players who want to play a game with anthropomorophic ducks in post-Napolenoic France and don't have any delusions about getting rich, then by all means go for it.  But it seems like an awful lot of trouble, to me, to write up a formal rulebook with a fancy introduction if you are basically writing a vanity homebrew game for a limited audience that you'll probably be playing with you, so you can just talk to them.

Of course I think the right way to introduce a niche setting isn't with a story or essay but with a movie.  Get a tool that will let you create a Shockwave or mpg movie and create an intro that players can sit down and watch on their computer and TV.  Include narration, some art, maps, some background music, and so on.  It's not that hard to do that fairly cheaply with what's available now.  The idea is to make learning about the setting fun rather than a chore.

These days definitely going for a cross-media blitz is the way to go.  As an example, just look at Far West.  It worked for them, and christ, they really didn't have much of a cross-media blitz, just an announcement that there would be one.

Quote from: J Arcane;515297This has generally been my logic.  I can't help but think of it in programming terms.  A game's rules are essentially just the engine, the system of algorithms, that you use to resolve the interaction of variables.  So, you start by defining those variables.  

This gets scrambled up a bit in a game like D&D or my Drums of War, where enemies use a different set of simpler variables, but I don't mind leaving them to the DM section of the book because only the DM needs to know them.  I don't actually like players knowing anything about monster stats anyway, which is why DoW's bestiary is as much a monster creation system as it is a traditional list of beasties.

That has generally been my view as well.  As an entry point into the system, character generation impacts just about everything the players will do, and most of what the GM will be doing as well.  While the GM also has the campaign to worry about (including monsters, world-building and so on), this concern will largely be in relation to the characters.

I am a big fan of the tri-libram format, so the GM book will have the things that will ostensibly be hidden from the players, and the Player's Book should have everything related to character generation and advancement appropriate to what the players need to know or should know.  Some things pertaining to NPCs may have elements of regular PC rules, but aren't available to players; certain kits or prestige classes (assassins, anti-paladins), spells that are wildly inappropriate for characters or difficult to adjudicate (augury, wish, etc), or races that always cause problems (drow, whatever craziness shows up in the splatbook du jour).

In that regard, I think the Player's Handbook for AD&D 1st is laid out really well.  The first half of the book applies to all classes, and the last half is useful for something like seven classes out of ten(?).  The Ranger and Paladin don't even need the spell section until much later, so that is really only about half the classes listed need the whole book right off the bat.  Pretty well organized, in my opinion.

Chargen didn't start "always" being at the beginning until the format of 3e became the standard format of organizing rules for almost all d20 games, and from there for all the industry.

People tend to think that intro-attributes-race-class-skills-feats-additional info-equipment-combat-magic-world stuff is how its always been, but its really only that way since D&D 3e.

Earlier posts in this very thread pointed out how in the 90s and earlier, it was all over the place.  

So I chalk the universality of this formula up to the success of D&D 3.0

RPGPundit

I think you need to know the rules of the game before/as you make your character, so you can make informed choices about how to spend your resources so your character can actually do what you want them to. It doesn't necessarily have to be a full chapter; just enough to tell people "what does this choice you are making mean?".

Sure, players only need it the first time, but they do need it that first time.

This was one of the things D&D4 did really well - explicitly telling people what each race / class was good for, in game terms. It could have done it better, true, but what was there was good.