By Jess Levine
When I edit TTRPG rulebooks, one suggestion arises more than any other:
Consider making this a note.
No one definition distinguishes a “note” from a “rules text,” but exploring that distinction is a great way to ask when and why you might use a note. Often, the final distinction will be as simple as how a piece of text is labeled or decorated in the layout—but this can go a long way towards making your rulebook easy to use and learn from.
Definitions
A rule legislates what you explicitly can or cannot while playing a game. Rules might be ignored by some players, but in most cases, a rule is a baseline expectation of play shared between you, the designer, and your players. Rules text is the prose necessary to understand the rules of your game, and typically appears as a continuous stream of text on a similar background, broken up by headers and page breaks.
Everything else is a great opportunity for a note (or tip, which I use mostly interchangeably.) This can take different forms: the generic note, designer’s note, reminder, suggestion, and so on. Even play examples and optional rules might be considered in this category, though discussion thereof would require its own article. All of these share a tendency to appear in boxes, footnotes, asides, or even separate sections at the end of a chapter or book.
NOTE: What about fiction? This simple scheme does not necessarily capture the fictional prose of games that establish a specific setting. For simplicity’s sake, consider that to be a third type of text!
These definitions are fuzzy, but that’s ok! They are not intended to objectively divine whether any given paragraph is “rules text” or “a note,” but instead to help you ask the question:
Does this belong here?
Which brings us to our first tip on tips:
1. Use notes to streamline your rules text
When editing your own rules text, look out for phrases like:
- “Optionally…”
- “You could…”
- “Consider…”
- “Because…”
- “It may be best…”
While these could be a vital part of rules text, in most cases these are non-standard forms of play or uncommon edge cases that can and should be extracted to a note.
Remember: as the author of a rulebook, you are writing a reference text.
Players will reference your rulebook at the table. When you separate the standard from the optional, the common from the uncommon, and the commentary from the regulatory, players can quickly and easily find the information they need.
Your primary job is not to communicate to the reader the many possible ways of playing your game, or even necessarily how to get the most out of your game. Instead, inline rules text should communicate as concisely as possible what is necessary to start your game and keep that game going—for everything else, there are notes.
2. Capture table advice
Not everything that impacts the experience of your game can be mechanized. How players communicate, how they implement your mechanics, and even the perspective from which they think about the mechanics can affect player experience just as much as any rule. The game as played is often very different from the game as read. Notes help you to bridge the gap between the theoretical model of your game described by the book, and players’ experience of it at the table. Because these notes are about table experience, writing them typically necessitates a step that is key to writing most kinds of notes: playtesting.
In the first playtest of my own game I Have the High Ground, the other playtester satah drew attention to the fact that in their desired outcome, their (victorious) character would not consider themselves to have “won,” but that it felt like win to them as a player. This was an unusual distinction which players coming from less metanarrative games might not expect, or even realize they could aim for! There was no need to mechanize this fact—but it became apparent that it would be useful to remind players of this option. This and other notes from that playtest became the foundation of many of the tips in the I Have the High Ground book. In fact, the quality of such feedback led me to bring satah on as a design consultant on the game; never doubt the value of playtesters who can articulate moments of confusion or friction in your game, and clearly communicate their experience of it. If someone gives you such thorough feedback, consider asking them to be a repeat playtester, or potentially even a collaborator!
A tip from my own game I Have the High Ground based on notes offered by design consultant and playtester satah during the initial playtest.
Another great way to capture table advice is to facilitate your game, then write down the advice you find yourself giving spontaneously aloud—recording yourself facilitating can make this easier. When we play, we develop heuristic knowledge, and watching the advice that you give spontaneously can help you capture knowledge you might take for granted. Similarly, try observing or recording playtests by others, and listening for the same.
Beyond that, look for moments where players approach a mechanic differently than you expected them to. Sometimes you might need to change the mechanic, but other times, it’s enough to advise players to approach the mechanic differently, or to invoke it at different times or for different goals.
One sign that it may be enough to include a note—without changing the mechanic—is to see if experienced players are also struggling in the same place. If players who have experience from previous playtests or with similar games aren’t having trouble, but newer players are having difficulty, this can be a sign that new players aren’t using the mechanic effectively. As such, you might be able to solve the issue by determining how you and other experienced players approach it differently, then passing along that advice in a note.
There is no substitute for observing or listening to playtests, but it’s also unrealistic to expect that you do so for all of them. It can be helpful to provide playtesters with a standardized form. This form should include at least two types of questions:
1. General survey questions about what went well and what didn’t, to identify potential problems.
2. Detailed questions about issues already on your radar, to determine how players are thinking about and experiencing the problem. In cases where other players are not struggling, this allows you to contrast their experiences and figure out what to communicate to bridge this gap. You can also ask such players follow-up questions, and continue to add and remove questions about specific issues between playtests!
Sometimes, however, an issue that might be more general than one specific mechanic—like in the above note from I Have the High Ground. That’s why you might…
3.Speak to expected player backgrounds
Everyone comes to your game with different tabletop gaming experiences, but some kinds of experience are more common than others. Consider if you are targeting a specific type of player, and what systems (or genres) those players are likely to be familiar with. Are you trying to do something different than those systems? Is your vision of the stories that your game tells different from the stories often told in its genre-space? Notes are a useful place to speak to your expected audience—or a specific subsection if it—about how your game differs from what they might expect.
At many tables, you are likely to find a specific, $100 million dollar dragon in the room by the name of D&D. Dungeons and Dragons dominates the tabletop gaming space. You can make a fantastic game while targeting only those familiar with indie or alternative systems, but if you want to welcome D&D players who are reaching beyond d20 fantasy for the first time, it’s a good idea to speak directly to that perspective shift. If your system has elements not common in d20 fantasy—anything from partial success and failing-forward, to clocks, to shared NPCs, and much more—it’s valuable not just to explain how these mechanics work, but why they create a better story and more fun experience, in order to help unfamiliar players make the best use of them. Put yourself in the shoes of a player who has never used such mechanics before—or even better, invite them to playtests and observe them—and write notes about what feels different, and why players might benefit from the new mechanics in ways a player might not piece together from the “what” of the rules alone.
In this note from FIST: Ultra Edition, designer B. Everett Dutton speaks to what players coming from fantasy games with a “dungeon master” might expect in-game narration to sound like, then suggests a different approach that might better fit the genre and theme of FIST.
4. Equip players to think like a designer
Everything in your game is there for a reason. If players know that reason, they’re better able to use that element effectively. A beautifully unique aspect of tabletop gaming is that in the end, the rules of your game as played are co-designed by the players themselves. Your game is not executed by a machine, or even the human-powered, highly standardized rules engine of most board games. Tabletop roleplaying games rely on players to choose what applies when, and for what reason. This is especially true for games with a GM, though not only such games; it’s important to remember that every player at the table invokes and arbitrates rules in a unique way.
By including “designer’s notes” about your intent or design process, players can implement your mechanics using the same guiding logic. Think about what mechanics in your game are most crucial to its themes or goals, or most unique compared to games your players might be familiar with. Include details about how you came to that idea and/or what purpose it serves in your system.
In Dream Askew / Dream Apart, designers Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum provide a note about the purpose of tokens. Alder and Rosenbaum go beyond what happens when you gain or spend a token, answering why their engine uses tokens as it does. This helps players new to diceless, GM-less narrative games move beyond viewing tokens as resources used to “win,” and helps all players understand what the goals are when using tokens, and as such what to do in order to best support satisfying narrative moments.
5. Give your rulebook personality
Finally, notes are a great place to establish a strong authorial voice. In the “reference” portion of the rules, it pays to be concise and standardized. Especially skilled authors might be able to add a unique voice to their rules text without introducing confusion, but every author can make use of notes to speak to their audience in their own voice, or to establish the voice of a unique narrator for your game’s rulebook. This voice can communicate the tone of your game and simply make the experience of reading the rulebook more enjoyable! Don’t be afraid to be a little bold!
In the end, the line between a note and rules text will always be fuzzy—as fuzzy as the line between rules and advice themselves. However, making an effort to extract the optional and the commentary from the expected and the procedural can make your game easier to use and easier to understand. Observing how you facilitate and what advice you and others give at the table during playtesting can serve as a strong basis for what commentary to include in your notes. Narrowing in on the difficulties of particular audiences or particular friction points when soliciting playtesting feedback can also help you to write tips that apply to large swaths of players or specific aspects of your game without having to change or abandon a mechanic. Notes let you equip your players to solve problems themselves and get the most out of your game by understanding your intent and empowering them as the game’s final designers. So go forth and remember: no one plays without good advice!
Sandy Pug U 