The first is from Cyberspace, the little-mentioned ICE cyberpunk Rolemaster variant from 1989. The second is from Judge Dredd: The Roleplaying Game, from 1985, by Games Workshop (and authored by Rick Priestley and Marc Gascoigne, no less).
Notice anything? Christ, that's a lot of text, isn't it? And, to the modern eye, isn't it presented in an almost aggressively unapproachable way? It's not just boring. It's also unintuitive - to get the hang of the rules you would have to devote careful study, almost as a separate project, making your own notes and staying up all night to revise before each session. They look like law textbooks with a few more interesting pictures.
I got these two games, along with quite a few others, secondhand over the course of a number of years from various physical shops, with the idea of reviewing them for the blog. (These two cost £3 and £5 respectively, since you're asking.) But each time I have sat down to begin this task, I have failed miserably. I just can't be bothered. Whatever initial enthusiasm I have drains out of me like air from a rapidly deflating bouncy castle, leaving me a flacid floppy mound of rubber - the party long gone and not even a doggy bag left.
What's wrong with me? At the age of 14 I would have lapped all this stuff up. The impenetrability wouldn't have bothered me one jot. Partly this is age, and lack of time, and better things to do, and fewer brain cells. But also I think it's because when I was 14 basically all RPG books looked pretty much like this (the text might have had nicer backgrounds in the mid-90s and the internal illos were usually in colour by then, but that's about all that would have changed). And I hadn't experienced "good" information design - I hadn't grown up in a world in which you had to do anything other than just sit down and digest a massive shitload of infodump text if you wanted to know how to play an RPG. I hadn't been molly-coddled, in other words. I was a better and more focused reader.
All of that is to ask: am I just old and stupid now? Or is it the case that getting used to information being presented in an accessible format has made me less able to actually just sit down and do some proper reading and retain the information I've read?
More discerning, more or less. Like, it's hard to say with certainty because you can't do it as a controlled study, but research comparing individuals in societies with strictly oral traditions suggests that those peoples tend to have better precision long-term memory than peoples in societies that implement writing, but... so what? At the end of the day, our society as it exists doesn't benefit from that, so we don't develop those skills as much, and it's fine. There's does, so they have it, and that's nice for them. In the same way, maybe we don't have the attention span for poorly laid out, overwritten books, but... so what?
ReplyDeleteBut maybe it would benefit from that. Dun dun DUN.
DeleteI think focus, or lack of it, is a big part of what's changed... for me at least... and it's not due to age.
ReplyDeleteI can read short articles on the internet all day long... but my attention span quickly drains if faced with more than a few pages of text. It's become a struggle to get through books when I'm tempted by much more immediate entertainments online.
The information in those old rulebooks is perfectly accessible for who we were then. Less distracted, fewer temptations, more patient.
It is due to your smartphone. Get rid of it.
DeleteDon't know if its related but when I was younger I wanted complicated games and now I want them simple. Now I have no time or willpower to digest the crunch no matter how perfect the graphic design might be.
ReplyDeleteI used to think that too, until I realized that what I came to dislike isn't so much complexity in itself, but excessive detail and administrative grind. A lot of supposedly complicated games are at heart pretty straightforward, what makes them a drag to play are the long procedures and pointless attention to little differences that, really, don't make a difference or at least aren't worth the effort of tightly regulating. It's often the combination of a core that is so simple I could have thought it up myself in 5 minutes and all the superfluous baggage layered on top to make it seem deep & awesome, that I find off-putting.
DeleteThat used to seem awesome but now it seems hubristic and twee. Give me simpler games even if it takes you 180 pages to lay them out.
DeleteI'm not sure I ever really liked them to be massively complicated. When they were it just seemed like all we did was argue about the rules.
DeleteI think what Ruprecht says is part of it. I am just fine reading books with hundreds of pages of single column text and little to no illustrations, but I have no patience for lengthy rulebooks no matter how pretty.
ReplyDeleteYes, I do read a lot of absurdly dense books for work.
DeleteOr maybe it's just that you already know more or less what these rules will contain, and can't be bothered with putting in effort to find out the exact details. You're a grognard, you've seen it all, you intimately know the genres they try to represent, and these vintage games won't give you anything new.
ReplyDeleteI think this is probably the main thing. It's like I now know there is no magic RPG bullet out there that is going to completely revolutionise what I do for the better.
DeleteYou might be more discerning but I’m definitely stupider.
ReplyDeleteI think long complicatetly written rules were just a fad of the 80s and 90s. I mean I started a lot later with RPG's than most of the people here. But I remember that I was annoyed with the seconed RPG rulebook I read, for being unnecesarry long and complicated. It wasn't unusual that I forgot half of the stuff from the begin of a paragraph when I reached it's end, but you could condense it's contents to less text than this comment.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet I read Wikipedia articles for fun. So it's not that I can't work with long poorly edited texts.
Was it just the 80s and 90s though? Seems like most modern mainstream RPGs are like that too - but just much better laid out.
DeleteThe older I get, the more I realise that there is more I would like to do than is possible. So, choices.
ReplyDeleteRegarding, dense 80s RPG books, I would still enjoy reading those provided I could do this in more or less one go without too much distraction which is hardly possible with grown-up responsibilities.
Now, if I were a single expat...
If you were a single expat you'd have bigger fish to fry.
DeleteBit of both for me, I think. On the one hand, I do find that I've let my focused reading skill atrophy some in the years since I was a teenager (time, pressure, smartphones), but on the other hand I think I'm more discerning as well. Or perhaps it's that I have less patience for putting up with sifting through a largely mediocre work to find the gems in it. As a kid more things were new, which makes it easy to sponge up all kinds of material, and I also had had more time on my hands and the sense that I would always have lots of time in the future. Now I'm busier (or at least, I feel busier - it's obligations and work taking up my time rather than classes and extracurriculars) and I have a sense of my time being finite.
ReplyDeleteWhen you basically spend all weekend and most evenings playing or thinking about playing Warhammer or D&D you can take in a surprisingly large amount of impossibly dense infodump.
DeleteOh yeah: I used to know D&D 3e and Pathfinder inside and out. Should've learned to play guitar or something instead of cramming enough rules text into my head so I could apply templates to monster stat blocks on the fly. And I'm sure I'll go to my grave still remembering loads of dumb bullshit about the histories of various space marine chapters.
DeleteI can't find anything unapproachable or unintuitive about those spreads, but I also still prefer my books full of text instead of full of space-wasting layout elements. Yeah, modern layout might make stuff more accessible, but almost inevitably it also makes for a lot less content than books used to have. So in my opinion, that someone would need more time to peruse one of those older books has much more to do with that it's much more content than that it's less accessible.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be worth looking through a couple of those old rulebooks and finding out how much of the text is droll explanations of edge-case rules and how much is "more content" like spell lists and bestiaries.
DeleteThe Cyberspace one is mostly the third option: info on the setting.
DeleteI might do a blog post on this shortly.
For me deep dives into dense rulebooks have always been pared with trying to figure out CR, forum arguments about alignment and coming up with ways to deal with non-existent rules lawyers. Not one to one, but abandoned all those things at around the same time when I figured out that they were not conducive to my enjoyment of the hobby.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it often just seems more trouble than it's worth.
DeleteThere is a significant gap between Stupid & Discerning. It might be better for you and your readers to explore the territory around 'Stupid' for a while before lurching out into the unknown and assuming you have landed in a better place.
ReplyDeleteFrom the point of view of the 1990' and 00's, a lot of people would kill for those clean, watermarking-free pages--free also of twee fonts, ubiquitous sidebars, and intrusive border graphics.
ReplyDeleteI like my inspirational material (encyclopedias, history books, etc) to be thick like a good shake.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes time to read soon-to-play game material, water. I have no time to work at slurping through a straw.
I think density has its place at the periphery of our games, but not at the center.
To me it depends on the subject of said book. I can read a Brandon Sanderson novel all day long but I just can't retain information(IE. Important stuff)when its presented the same way. If I need this and that rule, I don't wanna read a textbook paragraph to find it.
ReplyDeleteAt the very least, space out the paragraph instead of making it a block text.
Intelligent people are comfortable reading content in paragraph form, as for a novel or encyclopedia, and retaining the information they need or making notes. Intelligent people should set the standard not merchants who recognise a market full of dimwits with plenty of cash.
ReplyDeleteOF COURSE NO ONE, intelligent or otherwise, will read content in simple form (paragraphs) if the content is dull, stupid, counterfeit, tedious, repetitive, derivative, mimical or unoriginal. But inventive FORMATTING in the OSR is used to DISGUISE content exhibiting those qualities.
The Dim should not be consulted in learning good form. Merchants indulge Dim patrons for their own sustenance. And so we end up with Cheat Note OSR, material presented in summary form for fear that these writers would be derided if they wrote at length. Yes the more they expand their writing from sketch notes the clearer it is they can't write or think or imagine. But that suits the low bar.
I disagree. The standard for someone who is trying to make money should be the 40th percentile. Make it as simple as possible but no simpler and all that.
DeleteAnd what's wrong with making something easy to consume anyway?