All good points. Thanks.

Coincidentally, my own gaming blog's less than a week old.  Maybe people other than my players will care.  Maybe they won't.  It is what it is.

Would I get warm all over if I turned into a gaming celebrity through my dulcet prose?  Well, sure.  I'd also get warm if Bill Gates showed up at my place with a $10 million check, but I'd better not hold my breath waiting for either.

Considering the vast majority of gamers already have complete games they're playing, I'd say the weakness of your blog isn't so much your writing style as your premise.  You state upfront that you've been a chronic procrastinator, and that you blew enough deadlines and flaked on enough projects to sabotage your early promise in the gaming industry.  You then state that you've been working on this RPG for several years, and we can therefore infer that it's incomplete.

I admire your candor, but that's about as offputting an intro as you could manage short of insults, strobe lights or Goth poetry.  Why would the reader get invested, when right off the bat one can reasonably infer that this is a project you'll never finish?

Quote from: Ravenswing;689685Coincidentally, my own gaming blog's less than a week old.  Maybe people other than my players will care.  Maybe they won't.  It is what it is.

Would I get warm all over if I turned into a gaming celebrity through my dulcet prose?  Well, sure.  I'd also get warm if Bill Gates showed up at my place with a $10 million check, but I'd better not hold my breath waiting for either.

Considering the vast majority of gamers already have complete games they're playing, I'd say the weakness of your blog isn't so much your writing style as your premise.  You state upfront that you've been a chronic procrastinator, and that you blew enough deadlines and flaked on enough projects to sabotage your early promise in the gaming industry.  You then state that you've been working on this RPG for several years, and we can therefore infer that it's incomplete.

I admire your candor, but that's about as offputting an intro as you could manage short of insults, strobe lights or Goth poetry.  Why would the reader get invested, when right off the bat one can reasonably infer that this is a project you'll never finish?

I hear you. I guess the proof will be the completed game, and continued posts on the blog. I started the blog to help me get my playtest document into working order. It's largely complete, I'm just using feedback in order to come up with a way of getting the game across before I begin plugging in the numbers.  

Hopefully my candor in the post should make it clear that I'm not bullshitting when I say that.

Ultimately, though, it will be ready when it's ready, so I fully get your point. I don't have a firm deadline in mind, though I'd like to get to playtesting as soon as I have something that won't piss off my oldest gaming friend and math nazi when we try to play it and it breaks right away. I'll dip my toes in with him, and if it all works, I'll put up a playtest draft for the public. From there, we'll get to fixing any issues that come up and publication. I already have a publisher lined up.  

I think the extra time and effort I've taken (and will take) with the system will prove worth it to the people who would want it.

First, I'm assuming you want to get attention for your ideas, not just generic blog hits and the cheap heat that comes from sexism/racism/edition wars/rpg micro-celebrity gossip/hot elf chick posts.

Fellow RPG tinkerers are a .... unique audience because most have a predisposition to like and use their own or favored system,and are not looking to adopt any time soon. The number of players or GMs sans allegiance who read these blogs is vanishingly small, on par with the number of actual women in the "hot lesbian sex chatroom".

The stuff that gets most attention and kudos is stuff that can be grafted and ported to other systems - not whole systems in themselves. It's why stuff based on d20/old school and implicit fantasy settings predominates in the attentions of the blog sphere.

If you care about attention, your main hope (not guarantee) is to do what so few do:

1. Present a cool and interesting setting and have the system grow from that (cf. Numenera)

2. Develop your system through actual play and show us that people actually enjoy it. If you can't find anyone who genuinely has their fun facilitated by your game, you are designing it for your navel.

Thanks, Roger. I'm not looking for abstract attention at this stage, I'm interested in feedback on the expressed concepts and in refining them simply by writing them in a format that the intended audience can understand. I also felt with the first few posts that I should lay out the common terms that will be used in any examples I give.

Later, when I playtest, I plan to do a writeup of part of the session. I can also build a setting and describe everything in Tribute terminology. In fact, that's my main reason for writing the game- I love creating settings and wanted a system to hang my hat on. I've tried with other generic systems but they didn't work out for me.

Even if they had no flavor of their own, they always seemed to have an aftertaste. I wanted to write a game without one.

Also, Ravenswing- I read your blog (except for the character write up) and I liked it quite a bit.

Hey there.

You're trying to get a lot of difficult concepts out to the reader, and their motivation to read is going to be reduced by

• jargon
• big blocks of text
• mechanics that require leaps of comprehension

Don't dumb your content down, find a better way to express it and you may get the engagement you want. May I humbly recommend Jakob Nielsen's usability articles, including my favourite:

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-users-read-on-the-web/

I'm a big believer in scannable text. It's less appropriate for prose, but for our hobby which is quite technical scannable is the way to go.

I'm going to read the article, but what do you mean by scannable text? I think I get the gist, but is sounds useful and I'd love to understand it fully. Oh wait, Let Me Google That For Me.

I am trying to work out a way to make the Expressions more easily read without making them too long. I have sort of an idea on how to do so. I just want to make sure I don't lose anything.

I've read the article, which incidentally was the first link on Google. The inverted pyramid was also eye-opening. I come from a prose background, and learning from journalism seems like the way to go for expressing game concepts.

Quote from: Monster Manuel;689692Also, Ravenswing- I read your blog (except for the character write up) and I liked it quite a bit.

Why thank you, sir!

I admit I've a bit of an advantage.  I'm a packrat, and I save things: e-mails, forum posts, suchlike.  Not counting other gaming forums, I put up nearly six thousand posts on RPGnet, and have my posts from a couple hundred threads saved.  If I decide "Hey, how about I do a blogpost on my feelings about alignment?" I don't have to write the sucker from scratch; I've got several thread's-worth of my views going back a decade.

My problem was the writing.

For instance, it would be "1. You're a TinkerER" not "You're a Tinker". To be a Tinkerer is to refine an object with workmanship. To 'tink' is to make a light metallic sound. "You're a Tinker" means you make little metallic sounds, or you are the character Bug from the Marvel Comics adaptation of the toyline "Micronauts".

I think the problem you're running into is that you're fighting a war on two fronts. It does not matter how marvellous your mechanics are if you cannot present them adequately as a writer. These are really two entirely separate skills. Lots of writers write very well some mediocre rulesets, and do reasonably well for themselves, but poor writers rarely get anywhere even with a great system.

I don't necessarily mean beautiful language - I mean the ordering of your ideas, the delineation of information; the sequential presentation of the material.

We all have our own hangups with the written word and they can be hard to get over - as I go on and on - but the cruel fact is that no one pays attention unless you present the information well.

...which is just practice. I agree with earlier posters - don't expect this to happen overnight, but like a castle siege you should be prepared by having everything in order.

Remind yourself why you're doing this - because if it's for fame and glory, it's going to fail. If you're doing this because it makes you happy, then damn the rest.

//Panjumanju