Book 'em Danno

Reach up to your nearest bookshelf and take something down. I'd say there's a pretty good chance it's a book. Now look at it very carefully. Can you see it? That's actually quite remarkable, as what you are looking at is an invisible object. Or so it sometimes seems...

Now, choose an ordinary book, a novel would work just fine (maybe that's what you just took down). And compare it with the first role-playing game that comes to hand. Again, there are going to be exceptions, but in general I'll bet that the role-playing game doesn't look very 'book'-like. It'll have two columns on a page, probably a fancy border, lots of artwork and maybe colour on some - or even, folly of follies, all - of its pages. The question I want to ask here is: why?

Why is it necessary to tart role-playing games up so? Do role-players really need it? Do they want it? Do they demand it?

In the case of Feng Shui, to pick an example of the folly of follies I was on about above, I wonder whether it was really necessary to make the first edition of the book full colour. To saturate every page in colour, and never mind the readability - is that really what the punter wants, at any price? I choose Feng Shui deliberately, because there's no doubt that it was a good game, that people did want. But wouldn't they have loved it just as much if it were black and white, and half the price? And if the company that made it hadn't gone bust? No doubt Atlas Games will furnish us with the answer to at least one of these questions...

I can't help feeling that with the role-playing industry contracting, lavishing ever more superficial, glossy treatment on its published material may be a self-destructive strategy. Ordinary books, with their ordinary strategy of easy-to-read black-and-white pages seem to have become invisible to its designers. Maybe, to a certain extent, it represents an attempt by established companies to erect barriers of entry to newcomers, a cost hurdle beyond the reach of the average small publisher. In which case it's hardly something to be applauded by gamers.

Moreover, even this doesn't seem to be true. Half a dozen years ago, an ex-employee of Hogshead told me that the layout for a prototype game I'd designed, which they were considering publishing, was 'pedestrian'. Last year, Hogshead published, to considerable acclaim, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, with layout twice as pedestrian as mine had been (though very nice for all that). As I said, ex-employee...

While many eyes are turned to the Web for the salvation of role-playing, it may be worth remembering that we still use wheels. Old technology can be very useful, especially when faced with something that generates as much sound and fury, light and heat, as the World Wide Web. Simple, cleanly laid out books are an established technology. They are also a technology which has been given a boost by Internet outlets such as Amazon, and which are feasible using electronic media such as HTML and PDF (there's nothing so inflates an Acrobat file as colour graphics!).

If we really want role-playing games to prosper, and even find a place for themselves in the mainstream, mightn't it not be a good idea to start employing a mainstream medium? To make role-playing games that look like books, not magazines or product brochures? To sell them in mainstream bookstores (real or virtual)? To lower the price and pay more than lip-service to that great cliché of the Web: 'content'.

Does that make me a luddite? I don't know. I do know that the most attractive and useful role-playing games I've seen in the last few months have been amateur efforts: cleanly presented and looking like ordinary, common or garden, black and white books.

Make them look like books, and write them for ordinary people, in ordinary language, rather than the post-Gygax gibberish which currently rules the roost. Cut to the core of what makes role-playing games fun, and concentrate on that, without excluding possibilities. Give purchasers all they need to play the game - and more to the point, to play the game straight away, without having to do a load of planning. But not to spoonfeed.

Sometimes it seems that the recipe for revitalizing role-playing is so painfully simple and obvious that it's only obsessive immersion in the gaudy accreta of the field that could be blinding producers to it...