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

The setting of a tabletop RPG is no less of a user manual than the rulebook, but its emphasis is different. The purpose of a setting manual is to perform the same function that a Series Bible does in film and television production; it is there to brief the user on how to create content that conforms to the experiences that the audience expects.

This should not be controversial. As with rules writing, a review of the body of work published since 1974 will disabuse you of this notion.

The information that a user needs to know about the setting needs to be confined to the end of getting the user to create his own original content for use at his table. It is not there to be passively consumed, endlessly argued about, and treated with religious fervor. It exists solely to ensure a baseline level of quality so that the player reliably has the gameplay experience that he expects from the game.

The setting manual, as a work of technical writing, needs to identify what that baseline experience is to the user. Then it needs to explain how to go about meeting that baseline when running the game. This does not mean talking about technical specifications for a battleship, the politics of an empire, or the weather patterns of a mountain range, anymore than it needs to explain how to write narratives using mood, theme, and motif. It needs to talk about the core of the game, the gameplay loop therein, what players want out of this and how to give it to them.

In short, we're talking about ludology, particularly applied ludology- not history, not myth, not storytelling.

All games have a gameplay loop. All tabletop RPGs rely on user-generated content. The setting manual explains the gameplay loop to the user so that they can create playable content that satisfies the audiences that want this gameplay loop. (e.g. D&D and its derivatives focus on a loop based on the exploration of dungeons and the recovery of treasure, which is itself derivative of wargame gameplay loops, which is why higher-level play reverts to that loop.)

Compare this to a lot of well-selling setting products and you see the issue; they are meant to be passive consumed, as they are really coffee table books for status-signalling, and not to be used as manuals to guide users in making gameplay content for their own hobbyist enjoyment. The information presented, while interesting for passive readers and would-be novelists, has little or no relevance to actual play at the table because the owners have little or no guidance from those books on what a satisfying gameplay scenario in Setting X is for the target audience. This cannot be assumed.

As for publishing products that have information on specific places, individuals, etc. that's better served in the context of actual gameplay scenarios--adventure modules--and not volumnous tomes (such as the massive library published for the Forgotten Realms over several editions of D&D), and those need to be few and far between- one or two will do, and only to give completely new users a model to learn from.

Far more useful would be for a publisher to curate online sites that feature active gameplay archives that document actual play, be they blogs or video channels or podcasts, and to encourage those sites to annotate their gameplay reports for the benefit of those reading/watching/listening to their reports to learn how the game is to be played. (e.g. the #BROSR and its campaign report blogs)

This sort of knowledge is starting to gain ground across the hobby, as is the rediscovery of how Real D&D is to be played; for the latter--and, once again, how bad actors are deliberately memory-holing Jeffro as the man behind it--see his post today. Credit thieves must be named, shamed, and relently bullied until they capitulate.