One of the worthy finalists in the Advice category for this year's Bloggies was Sam Sorensen's “Ten Intangible Tips for Development Editing Your RPG Manuscript.” I like the way Sam writes these “ten tips” articles; he adopts an authoritative voice, like he's the author of a style guide (which I suppose is exactly what he's going for, after all, on a small scale). Maybe it's professional bias speaking—although my day job entails mostly writing now, I spent most of my career as an editor—but there's little the TTRPG scene needs more than good, authoritative editing advice. There's a lot of beautiful writing out there, a lot of tremendous creativity; there isn't a lot of rigor or polish.
Accordingly, my favorite tip from Sam's post is #10: “Write to Be Read, Do Not Write to Not Be Read.” You know that (apocryphal) Michelangelo quotation, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”? Writing is like that. The first draft—all of the writing, in a sense—is just getting the marble from Carrara. Your big, bloated, excessive first draft is your raw material, assembled and ready to be worked. The real artistry is chipping away everything that doesn't need to be there. Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.” (Saint-Ex really did say that one.)
Which is a good segue into one area where I'm kind of in disagreement with Sam, or at least where I'm not sure where I stand. On a continuum between Sam's way (do all the legwork for your reader, so that once they've assimilated the information, they can take it straight to the table without having to do any additional prep) and, say, Luke Gearing's way (where important factions, events, and NPCs are roughly sketched, or even exist in name only, and the reader must develop them at length—maybe with tools the text provides, maybe not—before play begins), I definitely tend more toward Sam's philosophy, but I'm not all the way there, and I also recognize that this is a matter of philosophy. Some people want pick-up-and-playability; others want to make commercial material their own, or leave room for replayability (attractive for one-shots like Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine). “How much detail is too much?” is ultimately not really answerable, at least as long as we avoid the extremes of the continuum. Different strokes for different folks. But what about the extremes?
The extreme Luke end of the continuum is obviously a problem—it sometimes gets to be not so much an RPG manuscript as a mood board the reader can use to homebrew something. But the extreme Sam end of the spectrum has its perils too. He argues, if I can oversimplify things, in favor of great specificity both in the sense of rejecting the generic and in the sense of providing meaty details. Below, I quibble with both.
HOW MUCH DETAIL IS TOO MUCH?
The first place Sam loses me a bit is #8: “Clear, Specific, Evocative.” He gives a series of examples of dungeon dressing, which begin vague and generic:
In one corner are caged animals. Sometimes, they make a loud noise.
He makes the description clearer:
In one corner stand a collection of cages, each holding a wolf. Twice a day at a certain hour, they howl.
He makes it more specific:
In the northeast corner stand 8 square iron cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a scrawny, mangy wolf. At 8:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. each day, they howl.
And finally, he makes it more evocative. Or tries:
In the northeast corner stand 8 chain-link cages, 5’ on a side, each holding a fat, grinning hyena. At 10:10 a.m. and 10:10 p.m each day, they yowl with synchronous laughter, their cackles harmonizing into a B minor Mixolydian scale.
I'm with him to a point. The scrawny, mangy wolves and fat, grinning hyenas I can picture; that's certainly more evocative than simply “a wolf” or “animals.” An individual five-foot cage, whether iron or chain link, I can picture too. But eight cages in the northeast corner? How are they arranged? Are they all jammed together, taking up a 15-by-15 area? If so, how does anybody get to the wolves to feed them? Are they stacked one on top of the other? If they're all on the floor, but spaced out enough for a kennelman to move among them, they're probably spread out across like 600 square feet. Is that really in the northeast corner (just how big is this room)?
To me, an excess of detail has now made things less clear. And what's with them howling at exactly 8:00? Again, it strikes me as being too specific, to the point of being glaringly unnatural—it's accidentally moved back into the realm of demanding extra prep; the GM might need to come up for an explanation of why these guys howl or yowl with clockwork precision. (I'd do away with the precision and opt for something more like “Twice a day, sometime after dawn and again after dusk, one wolf begins to howl, and the others all rush to join in.”)
The final change, introducing “a B minor Mixolydian scale,” has gone way too far for me. I don't know anything about music theory! (I played the drums; you know the jokes.) This surely means something to one of the players in one of my groups, who went to a music conservatory, and probably means something to one of the players in my other group, who has forty different hobbies (music among them) and is confoundingly talented at all of them, but it means nothing to most of my players, and even if a couple of my players get it, it doesn't really mean anything coming from me, a guy who is just parroting words he does not understand.
You have to know your audience when you're writing, but when you're writing TTRPGs, you also have to consider your reader's audience. One of the advantages to not sewing everything up tight, to leaving a little extra cloth for other folks to let out or take in as they see fit, is that you can write for a broad audience, and let them tailor your material to their own little micro-audience.
HOW MUCH ORIGINALITY IS TOO MUCH?
“Clear, Specific, Evocative” ends with Sam asserting that “an iron cage holding a howling wolf is bog-standard dungeon decor; a chain-link cage holding a chubby, giggly, singing hyena situates the reader someplace far more unique and unusual.” In #9, carrying this thread forward, he enjoins us to “Push Past the Obvious.” And again, I say yes…but let's not push too far. Bog-standard material should never be front and center, but it makes fantastic set dressing. You don't want everything about your setting, your dungeon, your scenario to be unique and unusual—this not only requires a lot more written material, it puts a much bigger cognitive load on your reader and their players. Bog-standard elements are useful shortcuts. In Sam's terms, they're legwork that's already done, legwork your reader and their players have already committed to memory.
We all know what an elf is. We all know what an orc is. We all get the vibe established by some iron cages containing mangy wolves. Not having to do the mental labor of understanding those elements from first principles (if every ancestry, every creature, every magic spell were unusual or original) frees up resources for wrapping our heads around the limited amount of extremely creative, cool, polished-to-a-mirror-sheen stuff that the work is really about. Push harder to make things shine, to make things polished—again, polish, not originality, is what is most consistently, conspicuously lacking from the indie TTRPG universe—but don't make everything weird without purpose. Make things exactly as weird as you need them to be to for maximum effect without disorienting or overwhelming readers and players. (And, again, know your audience; they might have a near-infinite appetite for weirdness, after all.)
