The Culture: Learn To Read The Manual!

You want to unfuck Tabletop?

This is your cornerstone: Learn How To Read!

"But I already know. I'm reading this post."

Do you?

Analytical Reading

• Intended Purpose: Complex essays, technical reports, legal contracts.
• Strategy: Previewing; read to identify inference, make conclusions, and evaluate logic and the writer's craft. Reading and marginal notations, underlining.

Study Reading

• Intended Purpose: Textbooks, problem-solving material; information to be recalled for testing; literature.
• Strategy: Previewing; reading and outlining; note making; mapping.

General reading

• Intended Purpose: Any nontechnical material read for enjoyment or good understanding of content.
• Strategy: Read actively with an inquiring mind, recognizing main idea and important details.

Skimming

• Intended Purpose: Any printed material:
  1. When minimal comprehension is satisfactory for general information in newspapers, magazine articles, junk mail," correspondence.
  2. For a preliminary familiarity with format and of organization lengthy or difficult material in textbook chapters, novels, instructional manuals.
  3. To get the gist or main idea of essays, editorials, reports.
• Strategy: Read titles and subtitles. Then read introductory paragraphs, opening sentences of all other paragraphs, and concluding paragraphs or summary.

Scanning

• Intended Purpose: Any printed materials when looking for specific information or pertinent facts like names, dates, quantities, places. Also used for information from reference guides:
  • Table of contents
  • Index
  • Appendix
  • Dictionary
  • Telephone
  • directory
  • TV schedule
  • Want ads
• Strategy: Examine organization of information alphabetical, chronological, I conceptual. Look for key ideas or words that guide rapid location of information. When looking up dates or quantity, looking for names or particular places, think of capital letters.

What mode of reading are you doing when you crack open that rules manual for that product that says it's a game? Analytical. You can Scan and Skim to get the lay of the book--which should tell you at a glance if the technical manual in your hands is a competently-made and/or written one or not (likely not; technical writing is deficient in the hobby), but when it comes down to learning how to play the game you engage in Analytical Reading.

Your objective, when reading a technical manual, is to put together in your mind the entire process of how the widget you bought works from start to finish. You should be able to draw up an entire procedural outline as you go, and then make flowcharts out of those outlines. If you can't do that, chances are good that the manual's publisher or designer couldn't either and you've got a shit widget that doesn't work. (Look for such outlines or flowcharts in the manual; if they're present, use them- that's what they are there for.

When you do Analytical Reading, you are actively wrestling with the manual. This is work; it tires you. You are demanding that it define itself, explain itself, show its receipts (as we say), wtc. because you are interrogating an argument as a proxy for getting comprehension of a machine made up of complex technological processes (which is what a hobby game of this sort is) designed to achieve a specific result guaranteed given that the user executes the procedures properly.

The difficulty that people have with Tabletop Adventure Games is that they are neither tactial nor kinetic; if you screw up operating any form of vehicle or screw up riding an animal there is immediate and direct feedback that allows you to connect Cause to Effect, and the same is true for screwing up with weapons or unarmed combat or cooking or fishing, and so on.

Tabletop games lack both, so for those not used to thinking in the terms needed to grasp how something that isn't tactial or kinetic is in fact just like a real physical object or tool it is necessary and proper to show how the operations work when done as instructed- that's what flowcharts and examples are for. What is lacking is showing how faling to observe procedures produces dysfunctional results; this is the biggest change that has to happen going forward.

Meanwhile, you are using General Reading (with Scanning and Skimming) to read this post. This is the baseline level of reading, where comprehension isn't meant to be taxing. It can engage the reader emotionally or intellectually, but rarely does it go past any shallow level of comprehension. If you get it just from one read, that's intended. (If not then there may be issues on your end, the writer's end, or both.)

And that does not account for the lack of comprehension of publishers in the hobby that they are, indeed, selling technical manuals to machines that only exist in the realm of Forms.

This is not a hobby for the illiterate. It is not a hobby for the innumerate. It is not a hobby for the incompetent. The problems with the hobby exist because too many are one or more of these- especially on the product pushers' part. There are other hobbies that better fulfill the wants and needs of such people, so the humane and kind thing to do is to redirect those unwilling or unable to rectify these defects to those alternatives. For those that can and will rectify these defects, the Clubhouse awaits.