Organising text

[Tony Irwin]

I hate polls on discussion boards, but...

What game book can you recommend to me for its outstanding clarity and organisation?

I've got loads of instructional text crammed into word documents on my home PC but am having trouble organising it into satisfactory rule-sets. Its the old "To understand this you should really have read this first, but I need to refer to it now so that you can understand this..." kind of problem. The bigger (and more unique) the game becomes, the less satisfied I become with its presentation. Sure, its not a novel, its meant to need more than one reading, but if anyone can point me to good models out there (or offer some principles they feel apply) I'd be greatful.

I'd also be very grateful to hear from any self-published game authors who can describe the decisions they made for the tone, and organisation of ideas within their own text.

Many thanks,

[Daniel Solis]

I'd say Nobilis 2nd edition is the top dog of RPG layout. Every single aspect of the design has obviously considered very carefully, making a vast, sprawling world much easier to approach thanks to the book's high readability. However, Nobilis' style is uniquely austere and possibly too stuffy for any subject matter not dealing with high cosmic nobility. In that case, just take into consideration the things Nobilis did that makes it such a great read:

Capitalized acronyms need not be full size to be recognizable. Making them small caps maintains a visual distinction while avoiding having large amounts of copy look like a bunch of capital letters scattered in a sea of text.

In a similar vein, the section headings need not be in an astronomical point size nor do they absolutely need to be in a different font than the main body copy. If you use a font with a variety of styles, including small caps, old-style numbers, and so forth, you have more than enough fonts with which to play without resorting to the use of a 1001 Fonts! CD.

Charts don't need actual visible grids to distinguish themselves from body copy. A simple difference in font is difference enough. Something like serif font for the main copy and a condensed san serif font for charts is all you need. Nobilis shows that just having text in a chart or table line up on an invisible axis is enough to show that, "hey, this is a table/chart!"

Flipping through the book right now I'm noticing something else that I like quite a bit. Examples of rules are given as an immediate sidebar when the rules are presented. In many circumstances this is hard to do, I, for exmple, often whind up writing twice as much for an example as I do for the rule it's supposedly explaining. Nobilis does it very well, though, thanks to its unusually large shape and extra room for sidebars at every opportunity.

The only other thing I can point out immediately is that despite the rarity of artwork, the typography is interesting enough to not make reading the lengthy text an interminable bore.

[Jason Lee]

I was personally very impressed by the tone and clarity of the 7th Sea player's guide.  For some reason that's what sticks out about the game for me.  Lots of 'this is what you can do' and very little 'this is what you can't do'.  Negative statements also seem to take up a lot of unnecessay space.

(Keeping in mind I'm probably better and transforming into a flying cow than I am at writing.)

[Emily_Dresner]

I bought a book called "The Non-Designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams that I found to be extremely helpful in figuring out what is good design, what is not, and why.  Best of all, the book is only $15.  There are several other books she recommends, all of which are apparently very good.

Instead of mimicking your favorite design layout, what you might want to do is start a file in Word or whathaveyou listing your favorite RPGs and notes about their design.  Did you like the layout?  The font?  The headers?  The footers?  The picture placement?  Why?  Why not?  What looks cluttered to you?  Clean?

After a while, you'll start building up a general idea of what you like, what you don't, and what works for you.  From there, you can create your own style, instead of mimicking someone else's.

[Paul Czege]

I was personally very impressed by the tone and clarity of the 7th Sea player's guide.

I bet...John Wick is pretty much the top bar for this, and use of language. I recall Scott Knipe once showing me an email of John's comments on the game text of WYRD. I have an English degree (and I've worked as a reference book editor)...and I wanted my money back.

As far as organization and clarity is concerned, the "see page 37 for the section on pistol whipping" thing feels awful to read and even more awful to write. But for how common it is in RPG texts, I ultimately took the road less-traveled in writing My Life with Master. My early drafts were arranged structurally, like a reference book, and featured more "see references" than I cared for. But I changed that in the final rewrite, preferencing an organization I thought would deliver a much less disjointed reading experience. This is why, for instance, the section on Outsiders appears in between the section on determining a Master's Aspect and the section on determining a Master's Type. I figured folks would pretty much internalize the whole damn game, except the formulas, after reading it, and so I decided to deliver as nice a reading experience as I could.

Where was John Wick when I needed him!

Paul

[Clay]

Tony,

The two examples I always try to keep in mind are Call of Cthulhu and the original Traveller Little Black Books.  Neither are known for their stunning graphics or artistic layout (that will change when the next edition of Cthulhu comes out though). They are both well organized though, and it's easy to learn to play.  In fact Call of Cthulhu gets all of its rules, including character generation and combat, done in a remarkably small space.

[iago]

I've been pretty happy with the organization of http://www.roguepublishing.com/cgi-bin/viewbook.cgi?value=q003">Rogue Publishing's The Collectors as much for how it presents a dense mystery plot in the provided adventure, as well as its treatment of the character creation rules.

[jdagna]

I did most of the development for my book the way you describe - lots of little Word files.  I also discovered that they can be very hard to piece together in any sort of a logical way.

I decided that the best strategy was to simply use what I'd written as a rough draft and rewrite the entire document to combine everything together.  Yes, I'm a perfectionist.  On the other hand, rewriting takes far less time, since you're only worried about words - you've already tackled rules and concepts.  Being able to worry just about the expression of the rules keeps you from mental overload.

I also discovered that I needed to address two issues: teaching and reference.  The text has to be able to teach the system (or setting or whatever), but it also has to be useful for reference.  If you've read many computer books, you've probably noticed that the best teaching texts are often the worst reference texts.  You'll want to strike a balance as you present the book.

In my chapter on computers, I ran into a very similar problem as you did with needing to introduce topics separately, but refer between them.  My solution was to start the chapter with a summary of terms and concepts, with just enough explanation to cover the necessary cross-referencing.  Then I launched into the full explanation of each topic confident that people had that outline down.

As far as overall layout and appearance - I think good advice has already been given.  There's no single right way to do things well.  Once you get past some basic black and white design mistakes, there's a whole range of grays that may look totally different and be equally pleasing overall.

[iago]

Another thing to look at would be textbooks.  Chapters could be organized into three parts.

- A preamble that mentions in brief what's going to be covered in the chapter, and gives a "surface" definition of terms.

- The meat of the chapter.

- A summary at the end that boils the chapter down into bullet points.  They don't have to cover things in detial -- you can always provide page references for someone to dig deeper.

This last part I'm talking about is almost never seen in RPG books, but really should be, precisely because it helps to bridge the gap between 'teaching text' and 'reference text'.

[Rob Donoghue]

First off, let me second the suggestion of Robin Cook's excellent The Non-Designer's Design Book.  I have yet to see another book that addresses the basics of layout as well as it does.  From a pure layout decision, you simply cannot go wrong with it.

There are really two issues at work here, one of prose, and one of layout.  Both are crucial to keeping a book readable.

First off: prose.  The writing style of a game book can have a lot of impact on how readable it's going to be.  If you look around, you'll see a lot of different approaches, but the two most prominent are a conversational tone and an academic tone.  Now, right off the bat, neither of these is necessarily better: if well written, either can help, but if done poorly, either one can bring a great deal of pain.  Prose generally has one goal: to make the subject readable, either by being fun (conversational) or concise (academic).

A conversationally toned game is often filled with parenthetical comments, in jokes to the reader and very loose language.  In the best conversational games, that tone is enough to make the reader smile occaisionally without interfering with the content.  In the worst, it comes off as smug or ingratiating and can be a real turn off.  It also can be an excuse for excess - many authors use a conversational tone as an exscuse to subject you to their l33t literary skills.

7th Sea's player's guide is a great example of strong conversational style.  John Wick's enthusiasm comes through with every paragraph, but there's always a sense that whatever you're reading is there to help you understand the game.

Most really egregious prose is in homebrews, but I have no candidates to suggest at the moment, though I'm sure someone can think of one.

Its worth noting that the tone of the prose can also tune to the material.  the prose in C.J. Carella's Buffy the Vampire Slayer rpg is so jokey, familiar and self referential that it would probably be a turn off in almost any other game, but it suits the tone of the source material, so it proves a good match.

Academic prose concentrates less on entertainign the reader than on delivering informationas quickly and effficiently as possible.  The upside of this approach is that it can be quick to absorb, and free of certain distractions.  The downside is that it can be cosmically boring.  Far too many RPGs out there read liek textbooks, without the benefit of having contents as interesting as genuine history and science.

Ron Edward's Sorcerer books, especially Sorcerer's Soul are excellent example sof how to do this right.  His tone is analytical, and there's very little sense of wasted space: he's explaining all you need and you're expected to keep up.  That said, this isn't going to appeal to very reader: but then, what does?

I.C.E.'s Rolemaster products are probably some of the worst examples of this style, though I imagine there are other contenders out there.  Written (literally) in the style of computer manuals, rules details are laid out in meticulous detail, with the minimum text possible.

In the end, good prose is easy to point to, but hard to illustrate.  A skilled writer will generally produce good text, and a poor writer can do so with more work, but pinning down how exactly to do so is a bigger question than one post can answer.

Layout, on the other hand, is a little more complicated, but the questions it raises can be more directly answered.   prose is simple: You know who yoru target is (gamers) and you (hopefully) know what you want to say.  In contrast, layout begins with questions, specifically - how do you want this read?

A clean layout for the printed page is usually hard to read on the screen and vice versa.  If you need to take the physical printing process into account, issues of pagination and size require consideration.  You need to figure out all of these things before you begin.

Once you've figured them out, the goal is simple: readability.  A decent layout doesn't interfere with the reader's access to the text, and a good layout makes accessing the text easier.  To really get into what this means, the Cook book is really the way to go.

So that said, here are a few datapoints.  None of these are hard and fast rules, but they're general guidelines, some of which may be obvious already:
Columns - The eye can get lost in long lines of text.  A lot of people are more comfortable reading short lines, which is why almost any book over a certain size (like, say, most RPGs) is presented in 2 columns.  It's generally the easiest way to read the printed page.  They also make certain layout tasks much easier: Quarterpage illustrations can be inserted into the text without worrying about runaround, for example.

However, columns are inconvenient on the screen.  They interfere with the natural downward flow, since we generally cannot simply flick our eyes up to the text of the next column.  If you're planning to produce screen-readable work, limit yourself to one column.  You may even want to take steps to make that column narrower than the full screen, but that's up to you.

There are a couple other options.  3 columns is perfectly reasonable, but it introduces 2 problems.  Flowing text around graphics can get complicated, and the narrowness of the columns can produce wrapping problems.

Another option, made popular by Gurps, is 1 wide column, for the body of the text to go, and a narrow colum near the side of the page, for sidebar text.  This is a great method, and a good compromise, but unless you have the right software, it is also an absolute pain to create and maintain.

One last thing.  A funky graphical line seperating columns looks cool for about 2 minutes, then it turns into an annoyance and a waste of ink.  Avoid them, except perhaps inplaes where you want a particular emphasis.  If you feel you must put a lien between columns, keep it simple, but generally, you're better off just spacing the columns intelligently.

Headings - However you decorate them, must be kept reigned in.  the depth of your headings can make or break th eorganizational flow of a document.
Depth is a measure of how many levels of headings you have in a document.  Think of them as levels of an outline.  There is often a temptation to go as deep as you need to express your ideas in detail - don't.  When you start going beyond 3 or 4 different headings, you end up having to have hadings that look very similar, and the reader loses the sense of the flow.  Some books try to address this with a technical numbering schema, so Section 1, has section 1.1, which contains section 1.1.1.  This is tempting because it seems so logical, but it's got a history of going pretty badly, so avoid it.

Styles - If you plan on writing and layout out something larger than a few pages, for the love of god, figure out how your word processing program handles styles.  Most layout programs require them, but things like MS-Word ocnsider them add-ons, and you'll have to jump through some hoops to get them working.

For those unfamiliar with styles, the basic idea is that you decide that a particular heading has a specific style (such and such a font, such and such a size, and so on).  You type in the header, set is as that style, and it autoformats.  No big deal so far. The advantage come slater, when you decide your heading should change in some way, like into a different font.  You go into the style definitions, change the style, and it updates all your heading automatically.  This is a life saver.  Live it.  Love it.

Fonts and backgrounds - There are entire books out there about fonts (and stealing sheep), but what you need to knwo comes down to this: Fonts are either:
    serif-  meaning they have little crossbars at the end of the letters, like Times new Roman
    Sans-Serif - they don't have those little crossbars, like Arial
    Decorative - pretty much everything else.

Rule number one: Decorative fonts are not for use as yoru main text, unless you hate your reader, or are trying for a specific effect.  handwriting fonts, cool bleeding fonts an so on are all greta in their place, but they are simply not that easy to read, and anythign that make the text harder to read is the enemy.

Generally, try to keep your use of fonts to a minimum.  Use one font, either Serif or Sans Serif, for your body text.  Feel free to use a different font for your headers, but use it consistently. Some will say you shoudl never mix Serif & Sans-Serif, but in paractice having on as body and the other as headers can look pretty good. Experiment until you find something you like.

And here's a random point: Go easy on the text over graphics or greyboxes.  they're hard for soempeopel to read, and if you overdo it (like some companies do by putting a funky font on a funky background) you get something that looks really cool and is almost entirely unreadable.

There are a great many fonts of varyign quality available onthe Internet, so feel free to experiment.  However, please remember that every font out there was made by someone, and because fonts are so easy to pirate, many of the free fonts you can find are illicit copies.  Poke around a bit. Ingeneral, if you see a font you like, but the legitimate copy is nto available, odds are pretty good someone has created a knock-off.

Format - There are a few consideratiosn based on the final file format you're looking to produce, so you have a few options.
* Text is the most universal.  Downside is that you can't really format it.
* HTML is nearly as universal, and if you use style sheets (which you should) you can generally make the document eye-pleasing and robustly cross platform. Good HTML rocks for web-readability, but it can be hard ot make it print friendly.
* RTF (Rich text Format) - theoretically, this is a universal word processor format, and most word processors can use it.  However, it produces pretty large files, and it has th eproblems you would expect of basically being the least common denominator format.  Onthe plus side, Windows Wordpad can handle it, which makes it a lot more universal than Linux/Unix enthusiasts woudl like to admit. ;)
* DOC (MS-Word) - Love it or hate it, Word really is the dominant Word processing program out there, and it's fairly good at what it does.  It has some compatibility problems, but the real problem is that anythign released inthsi fashion invites flames from those who take Microsoft issues very, very seriously.
* LATEX - it's quite possible you've never heard of this one.  It's a layout tool originally designed for handling mathematics that has blossomed into a fairly robust document generation system.  It's available for most OS's, its free, and it can export to other formats, including PDF.  The downside is, the learning curve is seriously steep.
* PDF - Pdf is sort of the king of universal formats at the moment. While not truly universal, the reader is available for free for most systems.  the advantage of PDF is that it creates eye pleasing documents that maintain their format from system to system.  The drawback is that unless you have Latex or OSX, you generally need either an adobe product (Acrobat) or need to be willign to pay for conversion.

If you can produce material in PDF, that's probably your best bet.  If you can't, well done HTML has a lot going for it.  Unless, of course, you're just planning to print the stuff out yourse,f in which case, go with whatever word processor format you use.

Contents and index (And cross references) - Pretty much every modern word processor has tools to allow the creation of a table of contents and an index.  Please please please use them.  Similarly, the "See Page XX" typo has become somewhat legendary.  Check your cross references.

Decorations and borders - If people are going to print your work out, remember that ink costs money.  Excessively ornate borders and decorations can end up being a waste.  Now, this is not to say you shoudl leave your margins bare.  Try to find a lightweight image or design to use in your border, and save the fancy one for The first page in a chapter.

Whitespace - Whitespace is that part of the page that has nothing on it.  It surrounds and supports text, giving it structure. If a page has little or no whitespace, it the text will feel cramped, and it will be hard to read. From a layou tperspective, it's hard to have too much whitespace, but in published products, a lot of whitespace can lead to loud complaints about "low word density" and the like.  Once again, the 7th Sea Player's Guide is a great illustration of this principal, for good and ill.

Charts and illustrations - These exist to make things easier to understand, not to complicate things.  Look at any illustration you include with this eye.

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Nobilis has been held up as one of the best examples of layout out there, and I'll agree it's a contender.  It's austere, almost to an extreme.  The layout is so clean as to almost entirely evade notice, which is an excellent thing because the writing is generally phenomenal.  It does, however, fall down a little in the rules sections: the formatting is far better suited for text, and rules material doesn't stand out, which makes reading someof the rules sectiosn a little confusing.  It's a minimal complaint. Overall, Nobilis really, really does it right.

However, to really see a layout that emphasizes the text, look to two recent additions to the superhero genere: GoO's Silver Age Sentinels and Green Ronin's Mutants and Masterminds.  SAS is probably the stronger of the two:  It uses color, offsets, border tabs and a ton of other layout tricks to emphasize the organization of the book.  Iago once' described the SAS book as a piece of gaming technology, and I do nto think he was far off.  M&M doesn't have quite the kick SAS does, but the layout still benfits from an excellent use of color and art, all of which helps make it more readable, and helps emphasize the comic book feel.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer also deserves mention for its overal production and clean layout.  However, it helps ilustrate a point.  While Buffy, SAS and M&M may be someonf the best example sout there, they're also full of color and art far beyond the means of most gamers.  7th Sea and Nobilis are probably far better examples of what you can do at home, at least starting out.
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Sweet mother of god.  Sorry about the length of that. It just kept coming.

-Rob D.

[Alan]

I like to break structure into layers.  

At the top layer, I put contents, index, glossary, and useful charts either at the front or back of the rules and the rest in the middle.

At the second layer, actual play rules come first, then detailed setting content.

At the last layer, actual play material is ordered in the sequence players will need it in play.  So, character generation and GM prep come first, actual play rules and resolution next, consequences, and reward system are laid out.

Organization of setting material would be by importance to the game.

[Contents, Glossary [Actual Play[rules][gm advice]] [Setting] Reference]

[Tony Irwin]

This has been an amazing thread, I've found it very useful. Serious thanks to everyone who contributed. I won't do a quote by quote run down of all the good stuff I'm especially appreciative for: everyone gave me stuff I'm going to follow up on.

::cease gush::

Thanks again

Tony

[Luke]

i feel i must, as a matter of honor, break ranks here.

I don't think Nobilis is all that well laid out. I won't go so far as to say it is poorly laid out, but the frequent sidebar text and lists of stuff never seemed that easy to navigate.

Nor do I think it is stunningly well written. The tone isn't to my taste (I know: people who live in glass houses...) and when I did try to sit down and do a flip-through read, I had trouble finding my bearings.

I'm not Nobilis bashing, just trying to point out that the super pretty doesn't necessarily mean easy to use and/or read.

Personally, I thought Matt Snyder's 9 Worlds pdf was very finely presented. Nice graphics, clean text, good white space.

As far as text organization goes, I had exactly the same problem you're suffering under. How to explain the egg without mentioning the chicken.

The best medicine I found was a rewrite. Then to get it read by someone not terribly familiar with the work, then rewrite it again. Then get it read. Then rewrite it again. You'd be surprise how much a little tinkering and feedback can help clarity. I, for one, never do my best work on my first or second drafts.

Remember, start very simple. Build up to bigger concepts. And if it is too complicated to explain without references, then something's amiss.

my ¢.02
-L