Response to Kobold’s “Writing Precise Rules”

By far my biggest takeaway from this week’s reading was the importance of not overcomplicating rules. This applies to the writing as well as the rules themselves. Encapsulated in this are several ideas:

• Use consistent language that makes at least some intuitive sense the first time being read. For example, there’s no need to make up a new name for “attack” if the word “attack” already works just fine. In other words, just because you’re unique doesn’t mean you’re useful.
• Break up long pieces of text. Unlike required readings for an English class, players aren’t really forced to read your rules. If they’re too long or confusing, they might be tempted to say “Let’s just get started and see if we can figure things out.” Or, worse, they may give up altogether.
• It’s ok if rules are complicated, so long as it’s possible to explain them well. This one seems the most tricky to get right, since a rule that makes sense to you as a game-designer may not make sense to your target player. Playtesting would probably be the most effective remedy here.
• Be concise, but not overly so. I partially disagreed with the author on this point (which seemed to be simply “be concise”, so I appended the “overly so” bit). Being concise can mean being efficient in your writing, but you might run into some difficulty if laconicism limits your vocabulary; maybe you could replace those 3 words with 1 fancy word that few players will know the meaning of, but who does this really help?
• Don’t overwhelm the readers by having 10 different ways to emphasize text. For example, one game component could always be bolded, another written in all caps, another with symbols nearby, another written in a different color, etc. Use of too many of these emphasizing techniques can make it hard to read blocks of text since our eyes naturally jump around to what seems important. Of course, you also don’t want your rule sheet to end up looking like a website from the 90s.

As long as your rules are straightforward and no longer than they need to be, chances are that you’re getting most of this right. Since all of this is pretty subjective, I’d say the best way to test if your rules are effective is by playtesting thoroughly with your target demographic. As long as they can learn the rules with relative ease, you should be good to go.