Alright I have written 70 goddamn pages in this blog by now. It’s the end of another week that has gotten away from me, largely because I’ve been in a lot of goddamn meetings, my work is launching an entire new Resource Center on Monday, I’ve been preparing for a reading of the 38 (???) pages I’ve somehow written on my current play, and which I just heard. Good news, the pages are very bad! More time for games writing. Or, I suppose, I could improve the play pages. We’ll see which wins out.
As it’s far too late for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday, I think I’ll just chat a bit about hierarchy of information today. And of course let’s frame it in terms of experience. Now, for a play, particularly one that disregards unity of time and chronological order, you can present information however you please. I generally tell my students that they need to have an intention that they’re fulfilling, but you could present it randomly, just to be a piece of shit. But if you drop your audience into the middle of the action, if you deprive them of any frame of reference or context, they’re less likely to engage, or know how to meaningfully or fully engage. Lights up on two characters, both bleeding from the mouth, glaring at one another. Who do you side with? Who do you hope for and invest in? When one of them says that the police will be there momentarily, what can that possibly mean to you if you have nothing else to go on?
Now, again, you don’t need to tell every story chronologically. You just need to have an intention for the order in which you present the beats of the story. Confusion and action and tension can shake up an audience and get their adrenaline going, and require that they actively watch with skepticism and intellectual curiosity. The nonsensical first scene can serve a sensical purpose depending on what is shown next. Is it a flashback? Does a narrator intrude? Do the actions of one of the characters eventually compel the audience to side with or against them?
Of course, games are somewhat more straightforward. Generally, you’re not trying to make the audience of a rulebook jump through mental hoops. Rather, you want to shorten the time and space between when they don’t and do understand the game and how it’s played. You want them to do less questioning and more accepting. There’s a reason that most rulebooks follow a formula: Game Statistics (player count, duration, age range) > Synopsis > Objective > Components > SetUp > Course of Play (And sub-heirarchy of scope) > Ending the Game. It draws the magic circle one degree at a time, to bring the player from ignorance and real life, to knowledge of (and an acceptance to reside within) the world of the game. Generally speaking the above also follows a chronology. The Setup, of course, comes before the tallying of victory points. But the Synopsis and Objective are helpful to have at the beginning to provide a microcosm of the entire game that is to come, a glimpse of the big picture; particularly because knowing how things end may affect the first choices you make during the onset.
Ah, but what about when you have items that fall outside of or get lost in the spaces between the above categories? How do you order your apples and oranges? Obviously Combat, Healing, and Equipment go somewhere in between Character Creation and Character Death, but how do you prioritize them? My recommendation, to reduce scrolling back up and down and searching: arrange your sections according to how they refer to one another. If you have “Apples: Like oranges, but with an edible red skin and white consistent flesh” and “Oranges: A superior fruit”, list Oranges first, so that the reader has everything they need to read the section on Apples. Likewise, you probably don’t need to know what Healing is until you understand the Combat that necessitates it, and if all of your Equipment has to do with Combat and Healing, we don’t need that information until we know what both of those things are.
Welp, it’s Saturday now because Baby Sitter’s Club on Netflix ate up the rest of my Friday night and I was too busy having feelings to finish the post. But it’s time to wrap this up so I can start… preparing for the post for next week, which… starts in two days. Oy vey. Til next time!
As it’s far too late for a Mechanic Monday or a TTRPG Tuesday, I think I’ll just chat a bit about hierarchy of information today. And of course let’s frame it in terms of experience. Now, for a play, particularly one that disregards unity of time and chronological order, you can present information however you please. I generally tell my students that they need to have an intention that they’re fulfilling, but you could present it randomly, just to be a piece of shit. But if you drop your audience into the middle of the action, if you deprive them of any frame of reference or context, they’re less likely to engage, or know how to meaningfully or fully engage. Lights up on two characters, both bleeding from the mouth, glaring at one another. Who do you side with? Who do you hope for and invest in? When one of them says that the police will be there momentarily, what can that possibly mean to you if you have nothing else to go on?
Now, again, you don’t need to tell every story chronologically. You just need to have an intention for the order in which you present the beats of the story. Confusion and action and tension can shake up an audience and get their adrenaline going, and require that they actively watch with skepticism and intellectual curiosity. The nonsensical first scene can serve a sensical purpose depending on what is shown next. Is it a flashback? Does a narrator intrude? Do the actions of one of the characters eventually compel the audience to side with or against them?
Of course, games are somewhat more straightforward. Generally, you’re not trying to make the audience of a rulebook jump through mental hoops. Rather, you want to shorten the time and space between when they don’t and do understand the game and how it’s played. You want them to do less questioning and more accepting. There’s a reason that most rulebooks follow a formula: Game Statistics (player count, duration, age range) > Synopsis > Objective > Components > SetUp > Course of Play (And sub-heirarchy of scope) > Ending the Game. It draws the magic circle one degree at a time, to bring the player from ignorance and real life, to knowledge of (and an acceptance to reside within) the world of the game. Generally speaking the above also follows a chronology. The Setup, of course, comes before the tallying of victory points. But the Synopsis and Objective are helpful to have at the beginning to provide a microcosm of the entire game that is to come, a glimpse of the big picture; particularly because knowing how things end may affect the first choices you make during the onset.
Ah, but what about when you have items that fall outside of or get lost in the spaces between the above categories? How do you order your apples and oranges? Obviously Combat, Healing, and Equipment go somewhere in between Character Creation and Character Death, but how do you prioritize them? My recommendation, to reduce scrolling back up and down and searching: arrange your sections according to how they refer to one another. If you have “Apples: Like oranges, but with an edible red skin and white consistent flesh” and “Oranges: A superior fruit”, list Oranges first, so that the reader has everything they need to read the section on Apples. Likewise, you probably don’t need to know what Healing is until you understand the Combat that necessitates it, and if all of your Equipment has to do with Combat and Healing, we don’t need that information until we know what both of those things are.
Welp, it’s Saturday now because Baby Sitter’s Club on Netflix ate up the rest of my Friday night and I was too busy having feelings to finish the post. But it’s time to wrap this up so I can start… preparing for the post for next week, which… starts in two days. Oy vey. Til next time!
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