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located in Toronto, on Dish With One Spoon land. sovereignty was never ceded.
https://linktr.ee/larkannex


yrgirlkv
@yrgirlkv

the thing that has always stood out about them is that they have to serve a dual purpose: they have to both set tone AND be good pedagogy. in fiction you don't have to teach people stuff; in RPGs, teaching people stuff is the whole point. this is always toughest for me in play examples, because play examples have to both clearly illustrate the point being made in prose AND sound at least slightly naturalistic. the former is more important but kudos to anybody who enjoys blending the two, because damned if it isn't the hardest part of writing a game for me.


larkannex
@larkannex

as a reader I don't really vibe with play examples at all. just not the way my brain works. but as a writer, I know that's not the case for everyone, and that discrepancy makes them extra-hard for me to write


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

Yeah. One thing I'm trying in my current project is getting overly chatty about the context of the example actions. For example:

Example: Lella is redlining through the busy streets of the North-West Hab Zone, eager to reclaim her lead before cops break up the illegal race. The Director has made it clear that the scattered stalls and civilian traffic will pose a serious danger if she doesn’t slow down to maneuver around them, but Lella doesn’t care.

In truth, the Director really enjoys this scene and decides this can count as a single hazardous factor - thus the roll will have a hazard of 1. Lella rolls 1, 2, 2 and 4. The pair of twos is enough for her to win the roll, but she also suffers one strain, as a single spec die fell within the hazard threshold.

So the first paragraph here isn't really necessary for anything - I could've just say "Lella enters a busy street, here's the number stuff" and that'd be all that's necessary. But it's also mostly cordoned off to its own bit - so if you're going through the mechanical explanation trying to figure this mechanic out, it isn't all that disruptive either.

So why bother? The idea here is to low-key pepper the entire book with glimpses into the intended mindsets and contextualize the mechanics. In the above case, we have:

  • Painting a scene to make it a little more vivid. There's no attempts to do any purple prose (still keep the example relatively clean and concise), but it gives the reader something to imagine the context of the game and then see how various bits of it are interpreted.
  • Pointing at what are important considerations for the scene. So the player's speed is important to determining if something counts as dangerous, defining a hazard as broadly as "yeah, there's some stalls on the promenade" is intended, etc.
  • Stating that Lella took a willing risk. So this hazard thing is generally bad and if the Director (GM) took steps to clarify the situation you're probably meant to avoid it - but since our example gal didn't, there's apparently room to deal with it if you want something bad enough.
  • An insight into player attitude: Lella drives recklessly and really wants that fucking win - and, huh, this player goal is apparently more important than the looming threat of arrest or a direct, stated, physical do-you-really-want-to-do-that danger. Nobody asked, but it's made clear that this isn't a ten foot pole dungeon kind of game.
  • An admittance that the Director interpreted the fictional situation based on a whim to take it easy on the player - showcasing that this degree of flexibility is possible and intended.
  • That bit about a pair of twos winning the roll? Helping reiterate the core mechanics from a few pages earlier (while not really mentioning what was she actually rolling against - that's an unnecessary mechanical detail that'd only obscure explaining the mechanic this example is actually about).
  • Suggestion that hazard and strain it causes are independent from the success or failure of the action. Now this doesn't really need explaining - it's just how the rules are - but it's nice to put that thought in the back in readers head just in case.

Now, all of the above is essentially small, gentle suggestions and implications. I have no expectation that all of this information will be fully uploaded into the reader's brain as if it was clearly stated in text - but if the entire book keeps throwing these repeated contextual suggestions at you, it'll eventually stick.

Play examples are the hardest part of writing for sure. I tried riffing off of things that happened in actual play sessions, but it's tough. Even figuring out the tone is so freaking hard! How overtly didactic do you want to be, is it basically short fiction, do it like a script, how many rules do you explicitly reference, etc. I feel pretty good about the examples I ended up with in my game, but writing them was such a pain in the ass.

in reply to @larkannex's post: