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"don't be dawizard"
Feb. 23rd, 2024 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhleeNever not funny.
This is telegraphic; Mike Selinker's talk on 10 rules for writing game rules [YouTube] that a friend pointed out is very well worth listening to. (First thirty minutes is the presentation; the rest of it is a very skippable Q&A.)
Even if you have no interest in game design, skip down to #11 for something HILARIOUS.
1. Use no intermediary terminology.
He gives an example from Afrika Korps (which I've heard of but never played) where the rules declare that "hexagons" will henceforth be called "squares."
2. Use real words.
3. Make no more work than necessary.
4. Add flavor (but not too much flavor).
5. Write text no smarter than your reader. He mentions the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale, which I usually flunk (I use a wordcounter web app that calculates that automatically and I regularly get "middle grade" or "YA" passages in "collegiate" whoops).
6. Discard rules that cannot be written.
I forget what the example here is but it's apparently some super notorious black Magic: The Gathering card.
7. Take a breath.
He cited a one-sentence paragraph rule that was like 170 words.
8. Go easy on the eyes.
9. Get your final version playtested.
10. Fix it in post.
11. Special bonus rule: don't be dawizard.
The story behind this was that someone was told that "mage" was going to be replaced by "wizard" in whatever version of D&D this was, so the well-meaning person ran a search-and-replace-all without double-checking, turning all instances of "mage" to wizard" and, as a corollary, "damage" to "dawizard"...
This is telegraphic; Mike Selinker's talk on 10 rules for writing game rules [YouTube] that a friend pointed out is very well worth listening to. (First thirty minutes is the presentation; the rest of it is a very skippable Q&A.)
Even if you have no interest in game design, skip down to #11 for something HILARIOUS.
1. Use no intermediary terminology.
He gives an example from Afrika Korps (which I've heard of but never played) where the rules declare that "hexagons" will henceforth be called "squares."
2. Use real words.
3. Make no more work than necessary.
4. Add flavor (but not too much flavor).
5. Write text no smarter than your reader. He mentions the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scale, which I usually flunk (I use a wordcounter web app that calculates that automatically and I regularly get "middle grade" or "YA" passages in "collegiate" whoops).
6. Discard rules that cannot be written.
I forget what the example here is but it's apparently some super notorious black Magic: The Gathering card.
7. Take a breath.
He cited a one-sentence paragraph rule that was like 170 words.
8. Go easy on the eyes.
9. Get your final version playtested.
10. Fix it in post.
11. Special bonus rule: don't be dawizard.
The tower can sustain 200 points of dawizard before collapsing. Dawizard sustained is cumulative, and the fortress cannot be repaired (although a wish restores 10 points of dawizard sustained).
--Encyclopedia Magica, vol. 1
The story behind this was that someone was told that "mage" was going to be replaced by "wizard" in whatever version of D&D this was, so the well-meaning person ran a search-and-replace-all without double-checking, turning all instances of "mage" to wizard" and, as a corollary, "damage" to "dawizard"...
