The Purpose Of An RPG Book

I don’t remember where, but recently I read an article or overheard a conversation in which the author/speaker said something like, “the purpose of this roleplaying game supplement is so-and-so.” That got me to thinking, and seeing as how this is the Internet Age I’m going to do my thinking here on the virtual page, in public, for y’all to read. ;)

What I’m thinking about is this question: What’s the purpose of an RPG book?

For purposes of my analysis, I need to divide RPG books into two rough categories: “rulebooks” and “setting books.” By “rulebooks” I mean books that are entirely or significantly devoted to presenting, explaining, or expanding the rules for playing a particular RPG. The core rulebook of a game line certainly qualifies, as do many types of supplements specifically geared toward adding to those rules in some way (players’ and GMs’ guides, books of equipment or spells, and so on). “Setting books” are books that primarily describe some aspect of the game’s setting or background. They may include a few new rules, spells, archetypes, or what have you, but they’re not primarily focused on rules, and rules-related material occupies relatively little of their page space. The typical example is a literal setting book, one that describes the world (or a world) where the RPG takes place (such as the various Forgotten Realms supplements for D&D), or a book describing some part of a larger setting (e.g., a city book). But this category also typically includes books describing specific character types unique to a setting (“splatbooks”), organizations or NPCs belonging to a setting, and so forth.

Now of course, RPGs are a large and diverse topic, so not every book fits neatly into one of those two categories. Some sort of bridge the two, while others may seem to stand outside the framework I’ve described. But for purposes of this blog I think those two categories hold up pretty well.

So then — what’s the purpose of an RPG book?

The Uber-Purpose

To my way of thinking, all RPG books, regardless of category, have one overarching purpose: to help you entertain yourself.

Note that I did not say “to entertain you.” The two are different. A novel’s purpose is to entertain you. That’s also a movie’s purpose, a TV show’s purpose, and a comic book’s purpose.

RPGs are different. RPGs aren’t about entertaining you — they’re about allowing you to entertain yourself. An RPG book should provide the tools needed, but you have to do the actual entertaining. As a group, typically “led” by a GM, roleplayers use the elements provided via RPG books to create entertainment for themselves. Depending on the group’s style of play that can range from in-depth tactical combats to elaborate narrative roleplaying, but in either case the purpose is the same: for the group to provide its own entertainment.

This being the case, anything that makes an RPG book harder for you to use to entertain yourself is something designers/creators should probably avoid. Obviously this includes problems like poor writing, badly-designed rules, and inconsistency between different sections of the rules, but I think it goes beyond that. If the book’s hard to use — font too small or odd for easy reading at the table, artwork getting in the way of the text, and so on — then the amount of entertainment derived may be less than it otherwise would be.

To put it another way, an RPG book has to “communicate” well with you so you can entertain yourself with minimum effort and maximum enjoyability. Anything that prevents it from communicating properly is a problem.

The difficulty, of course, is that not all gaming groups use the same “tools” from an RPG book. For example, some groups may find the art in an RPG book to be essential to explaining the game to them and inspiring them to play it, whereas to others it may be a total waste of space. As usual, designers/creators have to try to satisfy as many “factions” of the overall gaming market as they can without driving up their product’s cost beyond reason or driving themselves crazy. ;)

The Lesser Purposes

But that’s not the end of the analysis. “Helping you entertain yourself” is an uber-purpose, an overarching goal for any RPG book. But I think there are other, lesser, purposes that depend on the type of RPG book involved.

I doubt it will come as a surprise to anyone who’s familiar with my body of RPG work when I say that I think one of the main purposes of a rulebook is to serve a reference guide and “technical manual” for the game. I’ve never heard anyone complain that the official rulebooks for, say, baseball or golf or chess are “dry” or “spartan” or what have you. They’re sports rulebooks, so people don’t expect them to be engrossing literature. And yet many gamers seem to regard RPG rulebooks as being different somehow — perhaps because they promise so much fun and excitement, or are inspired by media that are fun and exciting. I think this is a mistaken perception that leads to a lot of unjustified dissatisfaction.

RPGs need rules — clear, well-written, easily referenced rules — just as much as baseball, chess, or golf. And in my opinion the rulebooks setting forth those rules need to be just as precise and clearly written as those for major sports. Complaining that this makes them “dry” or “dull” misses the point. They’re supposed to be “dry.” If they’re not, then I think the writer doesn’t properly grasp the primary purpose of what he’s doing. He’s trying to entertain, rather than help you entertain yourself.

Thus, to me, anything that interferes with the reader’s ability to use a rulebook as a reference guide/technical manual is a negative to at least some extent. Depending on the game, these forms of “interference” may include:

—an insufficiently detailed table of contents

—lack of an index, or one that’s not sufficiently detailed

—lack of a glossary in terminology-heavy games

—lack of organization in the rules, or poor organization

—lack of cross-referencing within the text (and/or to related RPG books)

—poor or confusing writing

—wasting a lot of page space on “inspirational” fiction pieces

And of course a lot of the factors I mentioned above apply here as well. For me one of the worst offenders in this regard is when art gets in the way — such as when the text is placed over artwork so that the text ends up being harder to read. If I can’t read the text easily, the rulebook fails on some level. I first recall noticing this problem in White Wolf “World Of Darkness” rulebooks nearly 20 years ago, and by and large it only seems to have spread and gotten worse since then.

But of course, not all RPG books are rulebooks — some, in my two-category scheme described above, are setting books. Here’s where I think that an RPG book can have, as a legitimate secondary purpose, to entertain you. The trick is that it has to do it without detracting from the book’s ability to (a) help you entertain yourself, and (b) present any rules and rules-related hard information in an easily-used reference guide/technical manual way.

While this is by no means an easy needle to thread, fortunately for those of us who enjoy reading RPGs at least a few designers/creators have done it. Here are a few examples I can think of:

—Delta Green, from Pagan Publishing. While it’s vastly entertaining to read, it also presents its game information in easily-read, easily-referenced ways.

—a whole bunch of the Shadowrun 2nd Edition supplements from the mid-Nineties. Particularly in its gear/gadgets books, the Shadowrun 2E line uses in-character commentary in the form of computer bulletin board postings to provide setting flavor to rules text. Since the “BBS” posts are usually discrete, rather than being mixed into the “serious” text, a reader needing game information can easily ignore them. And the flavor they provide is cool and fun; they’re definitely entertaining to read all by themselves. If there’s any flaw here, it’s that it isn’t always clear whether the BBS commentary is accurate, and if it is what the rules effects are.

—the first edition Deadlands supplements (full disclosure time: I wrote several of these, so I may be biased ;) ). Here again, what makes this work is to separate the “entertaining in itself” text from the “help you entertain yourself” text. In this case the separation is even more stark than in the Shadowrun books: they present player-only “flavor text” describing the setting in the early chapters, with the actual rules and GM-only text in later parts of the book. (As I recall the core rulebook for Castle Falkenstein has a very similar approach, even going so far as to differentiate the rules sections by printing them on a different type of paper.)

There are plenty of other examples out there, I’m sure, but I think that’s enough to make my point. I’d never say that RPG books can’t be entertaining. They certainly can be, in some cases. But I don’t think that being entertaining should be their first and foremost purpose — that should be to clearly, precisely present the reader with the rules and information he needs to help him and his group entertain themselves. Anything that detracts from that purpose should be avoided, removed, or saved for a more appropriate supplement.