Presentation: A Matter of Tone
By The Warden
Designing a roleplaying game is difficult work involving numerous key decisions aside from mechanics, theme, scope, content, and more. There is a very important factor generally hidden between the lines yet keenly aware to many players and Gamemasters alike. It’s an issue brought up in an earlier editorial posted by Morrus on EN World last week. I highly suggest you take a moment to read before going any further. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
It’s an incredibly valid point and as an avid D&D player, I can firmly agree on how the presentation of the rules can make a massive difference to the outcome of the game at the table. While I do enjoy my group’s 4e game, it is very much played like a technical war game listing the power name followed by a dice roll, followed by the occasional discussion on the specific enforcement on the rules. If I hear another debate on whether or not a flying creature with hover will fall when prone or just remain suspended in midair, I think I’ll fall prone. This issue never comes up in Pathfinder or Savage Worlds game and the GM’s word is taken to heart; sometimes a flying creature might fall, others leave it hanging in the air. While everything remains to the interpretation of each group and its individual players, the tone of the rules leans itself towards a highly suggestive recommendation on how to interpret the game. It’s the equivalent of parents telling fairy tales as lessons of morality to their children or recounting them as historical events.
FLUFF VS. CRUNCH
Reading a rulebook stressing rules through strict definitions and limited applications versus guidelines presented through loose structure and possibilities is the designers’ way of expressing the mechanical balance of a game. In many ways, it’s why fans of one game may deride another because their game provides room for fluff and improvisation over the other. That does not mean the game fails, just that it’s a different style of gaming. It’s no different than how any GM presents their game; some encourage freeform expressions and extensive roleplaying with a hybrid game involving extensive house rules and others are strict adherents to the rules as written. We never kick up a fuss online about how much of a tight ass our GMs are. We simply play in their group and accept their style or move on to a different game. The presentation of the rules is no different.
Even then, there are more decisions a design team places on tone and presentation than just how the rules are demonstrated. It’s also about creating an easy-to-read book and treating the rulebook as a novel in its own right, encouraging the reader to delve into the book by making the learning experience easy to appreciate. Same as any novelist telling a story or, more appropriately, a teacher’s lesson before an entire class of students. The medium is the message. During my recent review of the Supernatural RPG, I found the book’s writing took great strides to help get me in the mood for the feel of the game and helped sell it as an emulation of the popular TV show. That’s a huge step, especially when you’re trying to build a game based on an existing property.
Modern games can actually benefit from slang, even in the explanation in their rules, though such flexibility in the game’s vernacular might be too distracting in certain hands. Now the entire principle becomes even more complex because there are two components to every game’s presentation: fluff and crunch (or flavor and mechanics, if you want to get stiff about it).
Writing fluff always leaves room for creative writing and its goal is to set the scene, establish tone, and invoke characteristics for its people and avoid overwhelming factual accounts of culture and history. Crunch does not always provide as much room for interpretation and there are many players who need to turn to the crunch as reference or education with clear, concise terminology. The guidelines for writing crunch are stricter than those for fluff because it’s hard to sell the steadfast concept of a rule by phrasing it as “An action is that thing where you get stuff done.”
Now for the crux of it all: mixing the two together. Fluff and crunch must serve their own purpose and simultaneously work together as a cohesive whole. This means the crunch must stand alongside the fluff, yet clearly dictate one or the other. Some books rely on layout decisions (a chance of font or font color) to designate crunch, but it must still follow the base factors discussed above.
THE HUMAN LEARNING CURVE
In all honesty, I’ve always been of the opinion that crunch can be just as varied as fluff when it comes to presentation, yet there’s a core value of the human learning curve we have to accept and that’s the manner in which we learned as a child. Particularly, school. Our lessons were provided in textbook formats with appendices featuring definitions in alphabetical order to facilitate memorization. Whether or not this realization was made in the early days of RPG publishing, I’m not sure, but it seems to me no coincidence why many of my non-gaming friends and family look at my stacks of RPGs as cooler-looking textbooks.
The rulebook approach to game presentation is the only current application I can think of (other than learning a game by playing with friends or strangers at a convention), but it is an interesting exercise to consider other means by which we learn. There’s visual learning (some people learn better visually, such as myself), which would require publishers to present their game as a short film or slideshow, but would be somewhat difficult to quickly reference rules during the game. “Let’s take a break and watch this presentation, shall we?” Audio learning is no different, except it’s biologically harder for the majority of people to learn from audio and is best used as an extension of a learning process rather than the sole means (learning a new language, for example, can only teach you how to pronounce words rather than spell them).
Perhaps there may be other devices out there I’m unable to think of and the future may yet provide us with a way of buying a needle of D&D 8th Edition and inject it directly into our frontal cortex for instant understanding, but it seems as if we’re stuck with using books to learn our games. (The latest upgrades in technology are simply electronic versions of books and while they may provide some of the solutions provided above – visual presentations, for example – they are still books to their core.)
Let’s go back a step, though. Two paragraphs ago, I mentioned learning to play at the table (“…other than learning a game by playing with friends or strangers at a convention…”). There is a common tool used by designers to help new players and GMs learn their games: examples. When I was reading the new Marvel RPG, they made extensive use of examples to teach many of the new or unusual concepts of the game and I personally found them incredibly helpful. In a way, many examples are provided as fluff while presenting crunch and since they are a revision of the original crunch, they’re not held to the same formalities as crunch. Without the examples, I might have had great trouble understanding how the Marvel RPG worked and why they would bother doing so.
ENCOURAGING PLAYERS, NOT TEACHING THEM
When it all comes down to it, as we’ve previously discussed in House Rules, the success of a game can be measured by how far players can stretch the material. Going back to the high school textbook comparison, students are taught math so they can learn to apply it in an infinite number of possibilities, not just recite formulas as high IQ bragging rights. RPG rules must do the same: it’s not enough for players to know how the rules work, but how they can use the rules to handle any given situation.
Presentation plays its part in this regard, bringing us full circle to the balance of fluff and crunch in a roleplaying game. Do you want your students (players) to recite the rules or learn from them? How far do you plan to allow your players’ wings to spread so they can fly (even if they fall prone) or is the purpose of your game to keep them firmly on the ground? Can the game work as a sandbox or is it a one-trick pony? Like everything else this column investigates, there is no clear-cut answer, which is why I present it with more fluff than crunch to encourage you to fly. Fly, my little gamers, fly!
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