Comic strip rules

[Tony Irwin]

The comic strip rule samples I've seen for WGP are very, very exciting. I'm looking forward to buying the finished game, I'm betting the book will have real "Hey, flick through this and tell me if you want to try it sometime" value. I remember my girl friend flicking through L5R first edition, commenting on the tiny cramped text in that enormous coffee-table hardback,  and asking me "Is this game for people who are really serious about roleplaying?" Not, she implied, for people like her who just do roleplaying because it's fun.

I've done some comic strip rule stuff for my own pet project but sadly I need to rescan it all as the resolution is too low and came back from Lulu quite grainy. Needless to say your WGP stuff is stunning. I'm just putting together a little book that I can share with the people I play with, hopefully one with real "Hey, flick through this" value as well. I've linked to two comic strip rules samples below, I've got three in the book altogether.

http://uk.geocities.com/tony_irwin50/sample.pdf

http://uk.geocities.com/tony_irwin50/sample2.pdf

What I don't have is strips like yours that cut between the real players using the rules, and the imaginary events that result. That's very cool, WGP is challenging me to up my game.

Also all those nice shoujo pictures I've spent so long filling the book with are stand alone pictures of characters. Again, WGP presents a challenge - instead of me having lots of nice shoujo art supplemented with some kooky little comic strip rules, can I combine those so that the comic strip rules are the nice art? Shoujo is a comic book genre, why on earth am I trying to make a rule book that doesn't look and work like a comic?

Maybe for the next game, it's a real challenge.

Tony

[Michael S. Miller]

The comic strip rule samples I've seen for WGP are very, very exciting. I'm looking forward to buying the finished game, I'm betting the book will have real "Hey, flick through this and tell me if you want to try it sometime" value.

I wish it were more. A lot more, actually. It's only going to be four pages (the two pages in the ArtPeek.pdf, plus the rest of that little story). I had hoped for more, but RL stuff stepped in at the 11th hour and quashed those plans.

WGP has lots of play examples. If I were able to draw, I'd love to illustrate them into comics. But, that won't be happening...

I like your little Shoujo pics. Makes me very interested in seeing the finished game. One thought. The text below the comic story essentially repeats what the comic teaches you. Might it be better to have the rules "text" in one place and the rule "illustration" in another, to facilitate an approach where you could read the illustration to LEARN the game, and reference the text when you PLAY the game? Just a thought.

As much as I'd love to take credit for the interspersing of game-world and real-world panels, the idea was actually Ron's. At GenCon, Andy K. gave this great little presentation on comic art in Japanese RPGs, and I mentioned to Ron how I was hoping to do some comics in WGP and that I thought I'd do a left-page = real-world, right-page = game-world split, with the two panels being just the same. Like they did in Mage, 2nd edition. Ron said "No, man. You  gotta mix 'em up!" So I did. I like it better this way.