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FFG Rulebooks
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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