WorldBook a little dry in the beginning.

  • WorldBook a little dry in the beginning.

    After beginning my read of the worldbook in PDF form, I have a comment that I would like to hear other playtester's opinions on. My observation is this:
    The climate and celestial body information provided at the very start of this book, while great information and good to know for the kind of people who can name every part of the StarShip Enterprise and draw it's blueprint from memory, is really not that smashing a way to start the book for the majority audience. In fact, I felt it detracted from my enjoyment of the book to be made to slog through all that right at the beginning. I would relegate it to the end, maybe even in an appendix. And start the book off with some attention grabbing fiction, and some meaty info like the over-arching culture of dardunah, the religions and the country by country chapters. the real, need-to-know-to-play stuff. Knowing the names of the seasons, moons, days of the week and calendar months is just flashy show-off role playing
    "Daggra" means "Enemy" in Tibetan.
    "Chora" means "Thief" in Sanskrit.

  • RE: WorldBook a little dry in the beginning.

    Whereas I would not necessarily have chosen the somewhat "insulting to detail-oriented (Startrek) fans" method :D of pointing out the dryness of the start of the first chapter of the World Guide, I do agree that there may need to be some reorganization of the order of presentation so as to bring you into the pleasurable fiction prior to the "headier" fiction pertaining to more specific aspects of the world.

    One thing, I think, that lead me to place that first, however, was the fact that the more "flowing" fiction of the 10,000-year History of the Jánah (following immediately after the Writings of Atáj), contains many passing references to details offered in the initial writing in question, as does most of the rest of the book's fiction, including the Countries and Cultures information of the second chapter. My worry, of course, is that without this somewhat dry, educational primer-like introduction, there would be less understanding of the following fictional work.

    It may be possible to slightly re-arrange the info in the first chapter to allow the History to come first, perhaps after the introductory paragraphs by Atáj, followed by the more detailed descriptions of the basic features of Dárdünah as a whole, but there is still the issue of "cart before the horse" confusion while even reading the lengthy history itself.

    What it almost sounds like you are looking for at the beginning of this book is something akin to the "Dárdünah at a Glance" section of Chapter 1 of the Basic Compendium, which has (hopefully) already given the general audience a basic fictional wrapper for the world of Dárdünah, without having to descend into the gritty details required of the World Guide as a whole.

    Based on these thoughts, and the current layout of the World Guide, how would you suggest these existing elements be re-arranged to offer this information in a less-dry way? My immediate thought, as mentioned before, would be merely to switch the places of "A Treatise of the History of the Jánah", with "The Order in the Heavens". Do you think this would be enough to satisfy, without depriving the reader of potentially meaningful information (such as the names of the suns and moons of the world, as well as a knowledge of its specific atmospheric and geologic alien-ness) while reading the rest of the offerings in the World Guide?

    Scottie ^^

  • RE: WorldBook a little dry in the beginning.

    I would recommend bits of fiction to begin each section, like they do with many RPGs nowadays. It gives the flavor of the world and puts the reader in the right mindset to read the section that follows. And nothing beats that to create a vision of the world in the players' minds. That's why I think Monty's idea of a comic book is a good one.

    As to who should write this fiction, well, that's another matter entirely. ;) If Kris and I were not busy writing a novel currently, I'd suggest us. Who knows, maybe if we decide to take a short break we could come up with short bits of fiction for each section of the books (they would not have to be that long, only a few paragraphs, really; just enough to whet the reader's appetites).

  • RE: WorldBook a little dry in the beginning.

    That sounds like a pretty good idea,..adding little bits of fiction at the beginning of each of the sections. If you do get time,..let me know,..and I'll get with you about that.

    For a current fix, I had Ghorüm come over to my house and we sat down to pinpoint the specific parts he thought were the "dryest". Once we did, I worked on several bits with him sitting right there and fixed many of them to his satisfaction! Some of it was merely changing the way some things were said,..for instance,..there was a section talking about the rainfall in repeating sentences referring to each area and the exact numerical range of inches that fell upon them. This seemed like just too much specific detail for a "cinematic-oriented" game's needs,..so I merely changed the wording and stucture to make the descriptions of precipitation more fictionally meaningful by getting rid of the specific "inches" numerics in favor of more creative descriptions concerning the how many days a week/month/year rain may fall, or in the cases of rainforests and such, how many hours a day it rains, with commentary on the fury of its monsoon seasons, overflowing rivers,..etc...

    These types of changes seemed to help a great deal in Ghorüm's mind,..so I'm fairly satisfied with that, for now.. BUT,..if you guys have some time to write a few paragraphs,..let me know!!

    Scottie ^^