FFG Rulebooks

I keep hearing about how Fantasy Flight Games rulebooks suck. Maybe I have been lucky in my purchases, or maybe I happen to have an IQ higher than room temperature, but I haven't had a problem learning or playing games designed by Fantasy Flight. Rather than just mindlessly repeat bullshit statements from other sites, let's have a conversation about this. Name specific FFG games and describe specific problems that you have had with the rulebooks for those games.

My one complaint is that they are wordy because I get the feeling they are trying to anticipate and address any issue/question that may arise and avoid the stink caused by people expecting the game designer to chime in with an official ruling and deem the game broken until they do.

Android: Netrunner has an index, which is a thing desperately needed by most FFG rulebooks (the BSG rulebook, fer instance, would be way better with one) in my opinion, but it's woefully incomplete. If you put an icon on your cards ('memory', for example) you should include an entry in the index so I can quickly look up what that icon means.

I never got the complaint until I bought Wiz-War. With their other games, there were a bunch of rules, so I thought the long rulebooks were warranted. Wiz-War, however, is incredibly simple; there really should be about four pages of rules for that game. Instead the rulebook is huge and it's bizarrely difficult to find the rules you need to find.

I do love that they mostly include lots of visual examples, though. I don't need it most of the time, but every once in a while I'll read another non-FFG rulebook and come to a point where something seems ambiguous and REALLY wish there were a good explanatory example.

I've always liked FFG rulebooks, but that's largely because of when I got into this hobby (2005) and what the initial games were that I was buying/teaching (Fury of Dracula, Doom, Arkham Horror, Twilight Imperium). Their rulebooks are fine when that's all you know. And they're still fine for me now.

dragonstout wrote: I never got the complaint until I bought Wiz-War. With their other games, there were a bunch of rules, so I thought the long rulebooks were warranted. Wiz-War, however, is incredibly simple; there really should be about four pages of rules for that game. Instead the rulebook is huge and it's bizarrely difficult to find the rules you need to find.

Isn't Talisman's rulebook the same way? IIRC it's something like 20+ pages, periphrastic and weirdly structured. There's no excuse for that shit; it's not goddamn Die Macher, it's fucking Talisman. It's among the simplest board games any of us will ever play.

I don't really want to drop science about technical writing when I'm seven beers deep. But Shellhead's lazy barbs about low IQs and mindlessness have convinced me. Do me a favor, Shellhead. Wander into your game library. Retrieve the rules for virtually any Hasbro AH title. Or grab the instructions from your shabby old copy of Risk from the '80s. Or Clue. Or Monopoly. Or, fuck, any mainstream board game that's sold at Wal-Mart. Read those rules.

What do you notice? That's right: you. You notice clear, conversational instructions that are directed at you because they're expressed in second person indicative or imperative. And, in English, instructions written in the second grammatical person have some key features:

1) The instructions directly address you.

2. When the instructions directly address you, rather than "the player" or a gendered pronoun, you envision yourself performing those actions rather than an abstracted third party ("he" or "she") performing those actions. As the audience, you develop an associative relationship with the rules that's immediate and personal. This helps your brain process the instructions faster.

3. Because they're written in second person, when you repeat these instructions aloud everyone in earshot also envisions themselves performing those actions. Their relationship with the rules is just as immediate and personal as yours.

The state of FFG's technical writing is abysmal. Fucking abysmal. Word-bloat and bad organization aside, their biggest problem is that their rules are written in a gendered third person that carries none of the above didactic advantages. In some passages, I've witnessed their rules unravel into some freakish, I dunno, third person passive imperative that makes me want to jump off a bridge. And oddly enough, it hasn't always been this way; I can think of a few FFG titles where, between the 1st and 2nd editions, the instructions mutated from the second person into a gendered third person word salad.

Hasbro knows better. Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley knew better.

One of the things that FFG does very well is that their rulebooks give you a feel of the actual game. Recently I read the rules for Puerto Rico, and while I understood everything, they were a hell to read because they were all about the rules and not the game. Also many FFG rulebooks have a high level of redundancy. While normally this is not perfect in writing, I believe it makes me able to read the rules once and then more or less play the game. Of course it can also make finding a specific rule more difficult which is why an index is important.

I agree that for instance the Starcraft or Arkham Horror rules are somewhat messy and not all that easy to use. And for the past five years or so, almost every rules question on TOS (and there's always A LOT when it comes to FFG titles) can be answered quite easily by reading and understanding the fucking rules.

I don't have problems with their rulebook, and FFG rulebooks were the first I read back then when I don't even have single board games.

i think they have improved but i agree with Dragonstout et al,

The issue is that they take a very simple game and some how create a 20 page rulebook for it that takes two read throughs to grasp.

I thought AGOT 2nd edition had a pretty solid set of rules. But Fury of Dracula was a dog of a rule book. I didn't like the way the combat rules were written up specifically. Its more that its very hard to look things up and its written in such away that it takes too reads. THe big issue is their rules over views and summaries are usually terrible if existent.

The general problem with FFG's books, in my experience, is that the better first-time reads than references. I feel like the general quality is pretty good, and I do agree that they generally do do a good job of giving you a sense of the game and not just the rules.

I'll dissent on second person, which I find artificial and intrusive in most cases, and I have no problem with third person imperative for a rules set, which is, after all, a set of imperatives.

Sort of off-topic, but in response to the broad-based critique of FFG's technical writing, I'd say that I've found their Edge of the Empire RPG core rulebook to be very well done and generally free from confusion and error (admittedly helped by the fact that it went through a public beta first, no doubt).

The problem with second person is that most modern games have players taking actions on other player's turns, and it can be difficult to disassociate the two players from one another. I'll agree that as a general rule (particularly when describing the basic running gear of a game turn) second person is nice because it helps provide a narrative of the turn and brings the reader into the action. When there are interrupts by other players third person is often a better choice, and provides an aural clue that you're talking about someone else.

Fury of Dracula's rules don't have a solid connection to the narrative of play, and at times you have one hell of a hard time figuring out where the rule you want to reference is. You can remember it's there, but you can't find the damn thing. I always confuse the Headlines rule in Fury with the Headlines rule in Arkham, but in Arkham I can find the special rule on the cards. In Fury I have a devil of a time finding it. All in all I think their books have gotten better, but there's still room to grow. After I wrote an article on writing rules years back one of their designers contacted me for a review, but the communication abruptly stopped, perhaps because I indicated that hours of work marking up a big rule book might require me to get some level of remuneration for the effort.

S.

black inferno wrote:
What do you notice? That's right: you. You notice clear, conversational instructions that are directed at you because they're expressed in second person indicative or imperative.

Preach it, brother! I've been a tech writer for almost 20 years, and every online help system, user guide, and instruction manual I've ever written has been in the second-person.

To be fair, it's not like FFG has the corner of the market on shitty rulebooks. Plaid Hat's Mice & Mystics has probably the worst rule book I've ever encountered. Even the storybook is pretty bad. It reads like some crappy fan-fiction.

Why do companies go balls-out on graphic design and physical components, but then not hire a decent writer and editor?

Joebot wrote: Why do companies go balls-out on graphic design and physical components, but then not hire a decent writer and editor?

Softball question of the week.

Because the vast majority of purchasers are more impressed by bling bling than content, especially at purchase-decision time, and often at Internet chat time. Graphic Design sells games, the primary goal of every publisher on earth.

S.

I'm with dragonstout that Wiz-War is the most overwrought book they've done. That is a much easier game than the rules would have you believe. In my case this might be hampered a little by using a ton of what FFG calls "variant rules".

I haven't played Arkham Horror for a while, but even when I was playing it all the time I had to have a flowchart glued to my hand at all times. I'm not sure if that's the fault of the rulebook or the game itself being so busy. I also admit that it could just mean I'm a dummy. Fury of Dracula, like Sag said, has a weird layout. Although in that case, I'd much rather there was a player aid with all of the encounter token effects printed on it so that everyone could see them all the time. That's less a rulebook issue.

Death Angel, if I remember, had a weirdly obtuse rulebook. All of the rules were in there, but a couple of key elements were thrown in odd places.

But overall I have never had too much trouble with FFG. I think the problem is more that they can be exhaustive in their detail, which is a big problem in games like Wiz-War.

Sagrilarus wrote:

Joebot wrote: Why do companies go balls-out on graphic design and physical components, but then not hire a decent writer and editor?

Softball question of the week.

Because the vast majority of purchasers are more impressed by bling bling than content, especially at purchase-decision time, and often at Internet chat time. Graphic Design sells games, the primary goal of every publisher on earth.

S.

And if your story is any indication, they clearly expect to find someone to write and edit rules for free.