Apologia for Plain Paragraphs

Markdown doesn’t play so nice with text formatting stuff. You can read the cleareroriginal Google Docs version here.

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What was the last book, article, or essay you read that was, by sentence count, composed of mostly bullet points? That is, a piece where the number of sentences begun by or contained within a bullet point outnumbered the sentences without, the “regular sentences.”

I can’t think of one.

Alternatively, what was the last book you read that contained numerous instances of bolded inline text? Not titles or headings, but actual words mid-sentence that the author or publisher printed in bold, regularly, multiple times a page? While some magazine articles use bolding to, say, differentiate between interviewer and subject, I can’t name any essay or article that chose to regularly bold certain words or phrases mid-sentence or -paragraph. The same goes for books where parentheticals follow most every sentence, or articles loaded with nested sequential bullet points, or essays with “important” words printed in a half-dozen colors, fonts, or weights. I simply have not seen such practices.

Except, of course, in tabletop roleplaying games!

Crack open any of the most recent popular tabletop RPG books and witness the positive flood of boldings, italicizations, underlinings, smallcaps, parentheticals, bracketed asides, sidebars, lists, tables, bullets, nested sub-bullets, color-coding, font alternates, and all the innumerable other invented methods to display text. Sometime over the past decade or two, it has become wildly in vogue to saturate the page of an RPG book with as many typesetting and graphic design features as possible. This extends across more or less all RPG scenes, at least as far as I can tell—no matter your preferences for storytelling or simulation, big hefty tomes or slim little booklets, the ancient behemoths or the tiny indie outfits, nearly all adore their barrages of graphic design features.

I want to be clear: this is weird! These practices are strange and unusual! They defy explanation!

But it also seems like this sort of textual busy-ness is here to stay, or, at least, it is now deeply embedded within the broader design palette of tabletop RPGs. As an easy example, scan through the winners and finalists of the ENnie Award winners for “Best Layout & Design” over the past five or ten or fifteen years: Mythic Bastionland, Wonderland, Shadowdark, CBR+PNK, Impossible Landscapes, and the rest. While they vary in their precise application and methodology, the overwhelming majority show a stark aversion to straightforward, plain sentences and paragraphs.

Many of these stylistic choices exist at the intersection of editing and graphic design. A list of bullet points exists not only as a structure on the page, visually, but also as a structure in the writing, linguistically. One influences the other: graphic designers make changes to the text visually, which influences how it’s read; editors alter the text in the manuscript, adding changes for a later graphic designer to employ. For this piece, however, I’m not going to draw a strong distinction between where one ends and the other begins. While obviously those lines matter for reasons of both academia and labor, I’m talking about the broader, more directorial decision to write RPG books in this way, regardless of where it comes in the pipeline.

It’s critical to note that I am not guilt-free in this regard. I’m about to castigate some popular design decisions in tabletop RPGs, and I want you to know that I do this in large part because I have made many projects following this general method (and brought in a good deal of money doing so) but am now convinced it’s incorrect. But I, too, am guilty, not only of employing these methods but also of publicly advocating their use. The Big Wet, Lowlife, Seas of Sand, Time After Time —I filled each to the brim with bullet points and boldings, but now I wish I hadn’t.

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Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about. Here’s a sample text, a description of a room in a haunted house.

B13. Trophy Room

A stuffy, musky room opens, the taxidermied heads of deer, wolves, and boars lining the walls. Three glass cases on the north wall hold clusters of other hunting trophies: horns, fangs, claws, tusks, mummified organs, instruments made from horn and gut, and lengths of hide and fur. A central table holds comprehensive sets of tools for both hunters and taxidermists: knives, scalpels, scissors, oils, hooks, cotton, wooden racks, wire armatures, and lengths of chain.

Disturbing the tools causes the mounted animal heads to bray and shriek with pain and fear, quieting down only after long minutes of panic. Removing the tools from the room causes the animals grow to friendlier, eagerly gazing towards the removers. Those who can speak with animals then find them calm, kind, and helpful—especially to those bringing their favorite snacks.

And here’s how that same key might be rendered in the more contemporary style:

[ B13] TROPHY ROOM

Stuffy, musky (smell of old animals, chemical oils). 3 glass cases sit on the north wall. Animal heads line the wall (deer, wolf, boar, stuffed). Central table holds various tools.

• Glass cases: clusters of hunting trophies: horns, fangs, claws, tusks, mummified organs, instruments (gut, horn), hides, fur.
• Animal heads: stuffed and taxidermied animal heads of many animals: deer, wolves, boars.
• Table: old wooden table, with two toolsets:
  • Hunter’s tools: Knives, scissors, oils, hooks, wooden racks.
  • Taxidermist’s tools: Scalpels, oils, cotton, wire armatures, lengths of chain.
  • Disturb the tools: The animal heads bray and shriek with pain and fear for several long minutes.
  • Remove the tools: The animal heads grow calm, kind, and helpful, especially to those bearing their favorite snacks.

Note the differences. And just in case you think this simply a matter of how these display on my rather minimal blog setup, here’s a side-by-side of what they might look like on the page:

Plain paragraphs vs. bolded bullets.

Next, consider an NPC’s entry, a dungeon-dweller merchant type:

Gediminas the Barber

A sloped, slick man, forty-three years old, with a stained bandage wrapped over his eyes and a pair of elongated skeletal arms emerging from his shoulder blades. A pair of special holes cut in the back of his dirty poet’s shirt allow the skeletal limbs full access, the bony hands darting this way and that, complementing his normal fleshy pair. Gediminas bustles about the shop floor, always in a rush, skipping between trimming a client’s hair, mopping his brow, ringing up charges, powdering a brush, and sharpening his scissors. Unable to see, he often jostles people and objects as he passes, now misplacing an item, then losing his place as he moves. His skeletal hands, however, work with great precision, regardless of sight and independent of vision. He mumbles to himself as he works, murmuring prayers to Blind Io. Gediminas offers full surgeon-barber services at the standard prices: haircuts (10sp) and shaves (5sp), but also surgery (50sp), stitches (15sp), cauterizations (5sp), amputations (75sp), and leechings (25sp). He pays half again the full price for healing potions, white and red salves both, and bloodcap mushrooms.

To clients whose hair he’s cut five times, Gediminas also shares his most dear desire: to travel to the Far Floors (pg. XX) and visit his nephew and former apprentice, Mindaugas the Monk (pg. XX), gone now for two years. To those bringing word from Mindaugas, Gediminas offers both free surgery and haircuts, grateful tears streaming from beneath his bandage.

And the same entry done again in the contemporary trendy style:

GEDIMINAS THE BARBER

Sloping (bent over, hunchbacked), slick (oily, shiny) middle-aged man (43). A bandage (stained, dirty) wraps around his eyes (cannot see), and skeletal limbs (elongated, deft, independent of sight) extend from his back beneath his poet’s shirt (filthy, grimy). Roll 1d6 to determine Gediminas’s current activity:

1. Trimming a client’s hair.
2. Mopping his brow.
3. Ringing up charges.
4. Powdering a brush.
5. Sharpening his scissors.
6. Mumbling a prayer to Blind Io.

• Services offered:
  • Haircuts (10sp)
  • Shaves (5s)
  • Surgery (50sp)
  • Stitches (15sp)
  • Cauterizations (5sp)
  • Amputations (75sp)
  • Leechings (25sp)
• Wants: healing potions, white and red salves, and bloodcap mushrooms, which he buys at 1.5x price.
• After getting 5 haircuts: Gediminas reveals he wants to travel to the Far Floors (pg. XX) to visit his nephew and former apprentice, Mindaugas the Monk (pg. XX), gone now for two years.
  • Bring word from Mindaugas: Gediminas offers free surgery and haircuts, grateful tears streaming from beneath his bandage.

Once again, note the differences. Finally, as a third example, some rules text from a crunchy punchy space fantasy project:

Armor

A gladiator’s armor is divided into individual pieces for the torso, head, arms, and legs, each of which has its own armor rating. Armor negates damage beneath its rating. Each time a piece sustains damage in excess of its rating, it reduces the damage by its rating, then lowers its rating by 1. After reaching rating 0, the armor piece breaks, and must be repaired at a hub. Certain weapons and effects can ignore armor (like vibro-blades) or further reduce armor’s rating (like magma shot).

Armor is heavy. A gladiator can wear armor pieces whose total ratings are equal to or less than their Brawn score—past that, they cannot deploy maneuvers, and suffer a disadvantage on checks made to move nimbly or swiftly.

And the same rules done up in a more contemporary style:

ARMOR

Gladiators wear armor, divided into individual pieces for the Torso, Head, Arms, and Legs.

• Each piece has an armor rating.
• A piece negates damage beneath its armor rating.
• When a piece suffers damage in excess of its armor rating, it reduces the damage by its rating, then lowers its rating by 1.
  • After reaching rating 0, the piece breaks, and must be repaired at a hub.
  • Certain weapons ignore armor (like vibro-blades).
  • Certain weapons further reduce armor’s rating (like magma shot).
• A gladiator can only wear armor pieces whose total ratings are equal to less than their Brawn.
  • If they exceed their Brawn, they cannot deploy maneuvers, and suffer a disadvantage on checks made to move nimbly or swiftly.

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I could keep going with these. While I acknowledge my precise application of bold, italic, and underlined text is a little arbitrary—typically the editors and graphic designers who use such methods employ style guides—it’s based on real examples I’ve seen over many a project.

Now: read these examples! Which is easier to read? Which is easier to process and comprehend? Which is easier to return to return to and reference later? Which sticks in your head after reading?

Here’s a simple acid test: find two RPG books, one with bolded and bullet-pointed entries (say, “The Feast of Tegny Wood”) and one written with plain paragraphs (say, “Sag River Extreme Cold Research Facility”). Read an entry or three from each. Then, on a piece of paper, write a brief summary of each in your own words. Compare your summary to the written entry. Is it easier to write an accurate summary from the bolded bullet points, or the paragraph?

In theory, there are two basic reasons to bold, underline, italicize, or otherwise emphasize a chunk of text: to indicate that it’s an important term, like a rules keyword or reference term, or else to draw the eye and create a visual hierarchy. Both of these have their purposes in the design of RPG rulebooks. It can occasionally be valuable to signify important terms in-line, and visual page hierarchies remain extremely useful for organization and clarity. You’ll notice I didn’t put any emphasis on the headers of my sections, but I think a basic bold or underline would be very appropriate.

Overdone, however, these overwhelm. Text emphases draw the eye. They call attention to the emphasized words, pulling your focus across the page. Where the text of a novel simply flows top to bottom, left to right, an RPG book page full of bolded text presents no clear place to start and nowhere to go next. The level of complex emphases and other elements becomes too much, it all begins to feel merely chaotic. Your eye jumps from bolded term to bolded term, less reading the words themselves than browsing the emphasized text and letting the rest merely wash over you. It looks fantastic in a store page preview, or when flipped through at the shop, but it’s a style built for those who skim.

As these emphases appear in great quantities, they begin to reduce everything that isn’t emphasized: if a word or phrase isn’t in bold, can it really be important? If it really mattered, wouldn’t it be emphasized somehow? Editors and graphic designers work desperately to ensure that all critical details appear higher in the visual hierarchy, and readers learn that anything not emphasized rarely matters. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: designers are afraid readers won’t read and so put anything important in bold, thus leading readers to stop reading everything else in plain text (since it must not matter), so more must be emphasized, and so on. Summaries beget summaries.

These days, much of this impetus also comes from inertia. We’ve reached the point where a page full of bullets and boldings is “What an RPG book looks like.” A page without such emphases and intricacies looks empty, blank, boring—certainly not, the designer says to themselves, the kind of thing to win an ENnie for “Best Layout & Design.” A page stuffed with tables and lists and nestings and elaborate color-coded sections feels more RPG-ish, regardless of its ease of reading or its value at the table.

In decades past, though, RPG books looked different. This widespread trend toward bullet point-ification started only in the past ten or twenty years, largely as a reaction against the endless bloated paragraphs so common from the Eighties onwards. Those monstrously inflated columns of text are still around, of course, and still thick as peanut butter, but the editors and graphic designers react against not an issue of form, but execution.

To be clear, the complaints against these trad behemoths are very real: key details end up buried in the morass; secret details lie nestled alongside obvious features a GM might read aloud verbatim; the flow and order of information end up confused and circular; description, rules text, and advice blur and smush against each other; and there are just too many words to get to grips with. All of these matter, and all of these complaints are valid! But each of these, too, is possible with bullet points and bolded text—and each can be solved without abandoning the sentence and the paragraph. That critically examining the text in RPGs and thoughtfully correcting known errors leads to bullet points is not a foregone conclusion, but an incidental occurrence. It’s been long enough now that we have an excess of bloat in both RPGs written in paragraphs and RPGs written in bullets, just as we have carefully written examples of each as well.

The popularity of bullet points endures also, I suspect, because bullet points feel more intuitive for writers reading their own work. When I take notes on a lecture or textbook, I do it in bullets; when I’m keying a dungeon for my home game, I write those in bullets, too. Bullet points are good for notes, the kinds of notes that almost always summarize a larger reality. When I write “7 hungry crocodiles eating goblin carcass” in a key for my home game, I know that those crocodiles are actually the missing villagers now transformed to animals, and that the goblin carcass was actually poisoned by the nightshade well. When you already have the broader context of a situation, simplified notes can prove extremely effective, but when you come in fresh, you need the clarity that sentences and paragraphs provide. I don’t doubt the many writers of bullet-pointed RPG books who proclaim their bullets easier to read and reference when compared to paragraphs—I merely doubt that their readers experience the same.

Like text emphases, bullet points have their place, of course. When a writer genuinely needs to present an unordered list of entries, bullets remain perfectly acceptable. But RPG books are not composed solely or even primarily of unordered lists, and so the relevance and prominence of bulleted lists are overstated. Indeed, many of the editors and graphic designers espousing bullets explicitly pair them with an emphasis on the ordering of information in an entry, creating an odd juxtaposition: after all, if a list needs ordering, it shouldn’t be bulleted but numbered.

Now, I have read many arguments in favor of this bullets-and-bolding style. The most popular technique involves bolding (or otherwise emphasizing) the most important or detailed elements within a given entry, then adding further details to those bolded elements in bullet points beneath the main paragraph. This is another style that I suspect feels better to writers than readers: it self-organizes as you go, sorting elements of the entry into the important parts in bullets, and the unimportant in not-bullets. (It’s a variation of this style that I mimic in the examples above.) What’s odd about this style is that it resembles less novels or nonfiction than a different written mode: interactive fiction, “I.F.,” otherwise known as a text adventure or parser game.

When you play a parser, like Amy Briggs’s Plundered Hearts or Sam Barlow’s Aisle, you get a chunk of descriptive text, and then type various commands like “look” or “examine” on various words based on the description. For example, if the game says “You stand just outside the narthex of the cathedral, ivy curling along the tympanum, graffiti overlaid atop stained-glass windows. The narthex’s doors stand open,” you might type “Examine ivy,” “Look at stained glass,” or “Read graffiti.” When you write a parser game, you have to go through and detail each and every object in all the rooms, like the ivy or stained glass or graffiti, but also the doors or the tympanum or the narthex itself. A room’s description both conveys its overall picture while also suggesting the various interactive elements within that room—the exact same style as these popular contemporary boldings-and-bullet RPG books.

Two issues emerge from this: first, while I suspect that this is an at least somewhat intentional resemblance, it’s misguided to regard to parser games and tabletop RPGs as similar mediums. A parser game, like all videogames, exists only to the degree that its developers program the software to exist: it’s a joy to discover new verbs in a parser in part because it’s exciting to discover the new modes of interaction the developer now affords you. In an RPG, though, effectively all verbs are available at any given moment, with characters able to smell, bend, lick, kiss, and ensnare with a complex trap right from the get-go. Likewise, while each environment and object in a parser game needs to be created by a developer and only exists within the confines of that programming, objects and spaces in an RPG end up much more fractal and open-ended. You can knock down the walls of any dungeon, just as you can examine those walls’ fine-detail brickwork, lick them for flavor, scrawl on them in chalk, or brush off small brick-particles study in a lab for their molecular composition. In assuming a level of “programmedness” in an RPG ruleset or adventure, we yield some measure of the fractal beauty of imaginary spaces.

But, as we all know, some degree of abstraction can prove helpful. The second issue proves more grievous, and far more pertinent to my overall message: the point of an RPG book is not solely to convey detail to a GM, the point is to make something worth reading. Defenders of bolded text and bullet points often state that they care less about the flow of words on a page or the aesthetic qualities of writing than they do ensuring that the GM receives the maximum amount of information transmitted directly from the writer’s brain, with as little room for interpretation or artistry as possible. If you agree with this idea, I offer a simple suggestion to you: play a videogame, then run your RPG sessions from that videogame.

I’m not kidding! If you don’t care about the medium of transmission and only value the volume and accuracy of detail conveyed, you can just as easily find dungeons and storylines from videogames. A session of a roleplaying game is not bound to books! Boot up Skyrim and run through Bleak Falls Barrow: that is a dungeon, one that’s just as ready for play in a session of a tabletop RPG as any that exists in a book. If all that matters to you are the features and contents of the imaginary world, the medium should not matter, and there exist far more efficient media at conveying the details of a non-existent space than words in a book.

Likewise, it’s trendy to advertise an RPG book as not needing to be read ahead of time to run a session. To continue the example, this feels much the same as if you looked at a map of Bleak Falls Barrow but didn’t actually play the videogame. Can you run an RPG session from such a summary? Of course you can. You can run an RPG at the table with anything, or with nothing. Summaries have their purposes, of course, but they’re no substitute for actually engaging with original material.

It’s the same thing with ordinary prose. The writers, editors, and graphic designers of books that eschew plain text strike me as afraid of their audience, or mistrustful. They want to sell RPG books because RPG books are, we seem to have decided, the objects required to play an RPG sessions. But books are difficult! Reading is hard, much harder than vibing with illustrations or examining a diagram or skimming a list of bullets. Bulleted lists full of bolded terms stand as executive summaries, just the highlights, only the most important bits. The craft and art of writing gets shoved aside in favor of communicating raw information—RPG book as product, rather than as piece.

As I alluded to earlier, there’s a reason humans don’t write most books like RPGs. When you intend your audience to read the words, you need to trust them to actually do so. Bulleted lists and emphasized text may draw attention and look glamorous to those who only skim, but for the genuine reader, they prove more difficult. RPG books exist as books specifically because the written word allows imaginary spaces and situations, the stuff of which RPG play is made, to be conveyed in ways that are unique to the medium of text. The character of writing should be embraced as humans have written for millennia: in sentences and paragraphs, one after the other.

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Or, if you’d prefer:

RPG books exist as written text used to convey imaginary worlds. Text possesses unique qualities that allows it to do so in ways other media cannot. Accordingly, we should write RPG books in same method as other books: sentences & paragraphs.

• RPG books: The rulebooks, adventures, supplements, modules, and other material used to run a session of a tabletop roleplaying game. Considered essential.

  • If questioned: RPG sessions can be played in numerous ways. Because they are imaginary worlds, they can draw from any and all media.
  • If believed: Save or spend 1d6 × $500 on Kickstarter RPG Projects over the next five years. Save again to run a session with a project.

• Written text: A persistent form of documented language, as depicted with specific visual images combined in numerous ways, such as letters and words.

• Imaginary worlds: The primary medium of a tabletop roleplaying game, consisting of one or more imaginary spaces and their contents, imagined by the players of a roleplaying game.

• Unique qualities: Malleable (infinitely), available to all those literate at any time, requiring little-to-no upfront cost to produce. Limitless possibilities, including the use of metaphor, theme, symbol, motif, and emotion.

• Other media: Film, music, sculpture, painting, architecture, dance, software, etc.

• We: the players, readers, writers, and other artists producing tabletop RPG books. (Much disputed.)

• Sentences & paragraphs: Secret method of encoding language thought lost to time, now practiced only by sages and occultists. Save to comprehend. Save again to write.