On The Need For Competent Technical Writing In Tabletop RPGs: Rulesets

On the matter of objectivity in tabletop RPGs, I say that it begins with design and documentation. The designer should have, somewhere, a flowchart that shows where a user inputs his decisions and from which the results of those inputs emerges. That flowchart needs to mark every step fron Input to Output where an operation needs to occur to advance the flow from start to finish.

Documentation of this design is where the importance of technical writing, with its focus on clarity of communication, comes into play. The rulebook of a tabletop RPG is a user manual, and as such it must be written with the user firmly in mind. What words you use, and how you go about using them, matter here; you do not write for an adult as you do a child in Elementary School, and you do not write for an expert in a specialized field as you do for a layman.

It is far more important for the rules manual to possess clean, clear, and clinical communication than to worry about narrative concerns such as theme, mood, or motif. Those narrative concerns have no place in communicating to a user how to use the rules of the game. Such matters are properly addressed elsewhere, assuming that such matters are relevant at all.

If one should err in their technical writing, it should be on the side of nescience (due to innocent unfamiliarity) and ignorance (due to incompetence via bad prior experience) instead of knowledge. Be default, assume that the user has no familiarity with the medium or the hobby; use ordinary language whenever possible, reserve game-specific jargon terms for what is required, and define those terms when they first appear. Refer to a Glossary after that point.

Testing should account for both communication as well as operation, as a failure of the formerly reliably results in a failure of the latter. I recommend actually showing the flowchart of operations in the manual, as I find that some people comprehend how things work faster when they can see it depicted in visual terms, and Examples of Play also do this for many people for the same reason.

You'd think this would not be controversial. Spend some hours reading rulebooks from across the decades and you will be disabused of this notion.

(Disclaimer: I am not talking about setting here. Setting deserves a post of its own, and I will give it that attention tomorrow.)