Universalis Examples

[Nev the Deranged]

1) would rearranging the chapters to put them in a conceptual importance order rather than a chronological order help folks learn to play from the book?  If so, what order makes the most sense to you?

2) would there be enough value to this to be worth sacrificing the on going play example and instead go to more independent snippet examples?

3) or would having a beginning to end overview of what Universalis play looks like right in Chapter 1 mitigate most of the egregiousness of making reference to rules found in later chapters found in the current chapter order (since those concepts will at least have been mentioned already) making it possible to keep the current chapter order and hense keep the chronological example?

I actually kind of dug the squirrel-riders. But then one of my first Uni ideas, before I'd even read the book, was ninja-pirate squirrels...in space. So, yeah.

Anyway, 1) I would go conceptual. The chronological order wasn't necessarily BAD, it's really helpful to me to see things laid out the way they would actuall occur, but I think an order-of-play overview somewhere in there would accomplish the same thing and leave you free to explain things simple-to-complex in the actual rules.

2) Again, while I really liked the "extended AP writeup" flavor of the play example, I think the conceptual version with disparate examples (highlighting the "unlimited" part of "the game of unlimited stories") would be better. Although, it might not suck to have an appendix that included a full on AP writeup sort of thing.

3) The overview idea = good. I don't know if I'd put it first.... but then, maybe that is best. Even if you put in the overview (which I'd say you should no matter what), you could still go with the conceptual order... in fact, if you go with the conceptual order, I'd say that makes the overview even MORE important, since it clearly lays out the order of play.

Just my 2 coins. ^_^

Oh yeah, this may not be the place for this, but I was wondering if anybody had posted sets of Rules Gimmicks specifically designed to alter the game for specific purposes (since Uni is really a nomic-style development system at heart), IE has anyone (well, besides you) taken Uni and made it into their own game? If so, you might include some examples of that too, but definitely somewhere out of the way, maybe in another appendix.