The Business: The Time For Tolerating Technical Incompetence Is Over

If you read yesterday's post, or the one the Sunday before, you ought to notice a few patterns emerging.

Let me make this explicit: a lot of tabletop products are dogshit.

This is not new. For decades one of the most common criticisms of rulebooks for various games is their incompetence at the core function that justifies their existence: as technical manuals.

The rules are unclear. The presentation makes reading the rules far more difficult than it needs to be. The design of the rules shows a lack of testing. The manual routinely fails to explain why the rules are as they are.

It doesn't help that a bunch of art school rejects and theater kids flooded into the hobby in the last generation or so, all of them under mistaken impressions fostered by the Cargo Cult that continue to hobble the hobby to this day.

This needs to stop, and it's long past time to start pushing good and hard for designers and publishers to meet a clear, objective standard for technical writing in their work.

This week's series will hit these four elements: Rules, Presentation, Design, Writing. The conclusion, coming on Saturday, will put them together. Fixing the hobby starts with insisting upon, and enforcing conformity to, an objective standard of measurement; this, in turn, starts with technical competence. This is not fiction writing. This is not up for debate; your game has to communicate clearly, cleanly, and concisely what the game is and how to use it. You cannot have a single cohesive hobby without technical competency.

A lot of well-known games, well-known publishers, and well-known designers have not (and do not) measure up. They will be named as we go. Get ready.