Hi-

I've been playtesting Ten-Cent Heroes for a few weeks now and have run into an issue with walk-up gamers. While running the demos I'll have someone come up and want to join in; no problem, make a character, here is copy of the rules & a character sheet. The problem comes when the play-to-be doesn't really read the chargen section and just starts filling out the character sheet any way they want. The fact that its happened more than once led me to believe that my directions may not be as clear as I thought; no problem, its an ashcan. So, what I did was make a comic book-style pamphlet with bullets that explain facts about each trait (how they are ranked, what the rank range is, that kind of stuff). That seemed to help.

I've been thinking about adding the bullets to the rule book for quick reference and maybe thinning out the text a bit. Its not a thick book, and I don't think you have to be a miner to dig out the gist of the mechanics, but hey, I already know the rules (most of them).

Has anybody else had clarity issues during playtesting (that may be as simple as players not ready the book), and what did you do to your rules (if anything) that helped solve the problem?

Thanks

Ken

Oh yes, I've had all sorts of clarity issues :)

My biggest problem is stating something fairly clearly in a paragraph and then at the end making a throwaway comment that is supposed to compliment the rest but actually muddies the waters so far that people end up not knowing what I was saying. Or I make a 'cool' throwaway line that actually suggests a new rule and then don't follow up on it.

Back to the original question, I like bullets, they are clear, and they really do beat individual paragraphs that start 'first', 'second' , 'next' and so forth. However you have to use them sparingly, you can stand 4 or 5 on a page, but multiple pages of bullet points are death.

Your other good option here is to use text boxes with bullet points in them.

I've read plenty of books where the writing is atmospheric and really gets a player into the feeling of the game, but you've got to dig through two or three paragraphs of background information and colourful description to get something simple like "Elves get +1 to dexterity".

Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a paragraph about the gracefulness and elegance of an elf and how this translates into all of their actions. I think that removing a paragraph like this would turn the game into a vanilla clone like so many others that are around. But a lot of players who want to get into the game quickly won't want that kind of detail when they are generating their first character.

The solution I'm working with is to keep the flavour text (or fluff, or whatever term you use for it). But make an obvious and simple text box in the corner of the page that gives a concise explanation. You could even take this concept further by having a "cheat sheet" of rules at the back of each chapter (or even compile them at the end of the book). For example, you could have a combat overview sheet which gives you most of the details you need at a glance, similar for character generation, magic, etc. These sheets give you the basics to get started, but de;lving deeper into the pages of the book reveals the true richness of your world and system.

Just some ideas...

V

But a lot of players who want to get into the game quickly won't want that kind of detail when they are generating their first character.

What I do in Orp is always separate rules from the rest of the text.  It's kind of like this:

http://zuggers.org/orp.pdf wrote: 2.1 Parts of a Character

A character in terms of the game rules is really just
a structured piece of information (we'd call it a data
structure in computer programming lingo, but any-
way). In Orp, a character is defined as follows:

Rule 1: Characters. A character is described by
    six major parts: traits, resources, skills, knowl-
    edge, health, and experience. Each is specially
    defined below.

Most of the crunchy parts of an Orp character are
zero-average, which means that a zero is a perfectly
respectable value for a given value.

I'm not sure how "deeply" the problem goes from your description: Are there mechanical "not following the rules"-type errors, or is it more that they fill out the sheet technically correct, but inconsistent with the theme or narrative of the game?

If it's problems of the first type, you might try designing a "sidecar" sheet, or an overlay for the actual character sheet that gives a one-by-one rundown superimposed with the actual paper you're working on. I did something a bit like this for a Mage CS a long time ago: http://rpg.pixelsaredead.com/mage-asc-charsheet-helper.pdf (PDF link). (Granted, this example is more of a mind-jog for an experienced player-- you'd probably want more information and a different layout, but that's the "overlay" concept I'm talking about.) You could also do something like many tax forms-- each fill-in field has a small number ("Box 1", "Box 2") that corresponds to a numbered list of paragraphs telling how to fill each one in.

FLEB wrote:
I'm not sure how "deeply" the problem goes from your description: Are there mechanical "not following the rules"-type errors, or is it more that they fill out the sheet technically correct, but inconsistent with the theme or narrative of the game?