What Do I Know?

Everybody’s blogging for the weekend. Everybody needs a little question number nineteen. Oh yeah.

Hey, it’s been nineteen days of trying to come up with opening comments. Sometimes you’re going to leave the audience a little cold.

Anyway, our  question today is:

Which RPG Features the Best Writing?

This is a big huge gigantic question that can in no way be satisfactorily answered. Next question!

Okay, fine, I’ll twist it a little.

Everybody that had the first edition AD&D books remembers Gygax’s prose and dungeon master advice. What I had forgotten about, until I recently started reading through it again, was the tone of the Marvel Super Heroes game.

When I had only been exposed to very serious commentary on rules, Marvel Super Heroes talked to me, directly, as a gamer. It make jokes. It even admitted when it made bad jokes. It used the personalities of the characters in the setting to illustrate things, sometimes by having them introduce sections.

It was a neat change of pace, not just because of the tone, but because it felt so in tune with the Marvel comics of that era.

I don’t know if it was the best, but it was probably the first time I noticed that you could tailor your writing both to engage your audience and to use the style of your rules presentation to elicit the feel of the setting you were emulating.