The Fundamental Theory of Rulebook Design

For two weeks I’ve been hammering away at the rulebook for Cyberpunk Legends and in doing so I realized something shocking…

Rulebooks are tough.

Ok, all joking (and stating the brain-burningly obvious) aside, delivering a good rulebook is huge endeavor. Many great games have died due to poorly written rules. But why?

If this fact is universally true then there must be some underlying reason for it. Something inherent in tabletop rule books…

Which leads me to what I’m calling The Fundamental Theory of Rulebook Design:

Every tabletop rulebook is trying to deliver three things to varying degrees:

1. Clarity
2. Brevity
3. Narrative/Immersion

Because every rulebook wants to be short, clear, and suck you into the world of the game…

But all of these things are directly opposed.

 

 

What do I mean by that? Well let’s take Narrative and Brevity. Any Narrative you put in your book, even if you’re using it to explain your rules, is going to increase your word count. There’s no way around this. Even if you aren’t putting in big sidebars full of story you’re going to be using more adjectives and spicing things up with fanciful descriptions. You buy Narrative at the cost of Brevity and Brevity at the cost of Narrative.

But what about Clarity? Well, I’m using Clarity here a little bit technically. I’m not using it to talk about how understandable the rules are, but rather how fully explicated they are. Id est: is it clear what every interaction in your game does? In a fully clear rulebook every single interaction in the game could be understood without interpretation, just from the rulebook alone. Every edge case would be elucidated, every seeming rules contradiction would be resolved.

Now that, of course, is ridiculous unless you’re going to deliver something like the 300 page, pictureless, MTG Comprehensive rules. Players adjudicate stuff and that's ok.  But for any given game there is a level of Clarity you need. Many of you reading this have, at some point, probably been frustrated when you encountered an interaction in a game, flipped through the rulebook for 20 minutes and still couldn’t figure out how it worked.

But the more rules minutiae you go into the longer your rulebook is going to be. And the more Narrative you have the more you’re going to be breaking up the rules flow - or, if you’re delivering the rules through Narrative the more you’ll find yourself forced to be less than perfectly precise and specific to keep the Narrative flowing.

So you have to choose what’s most important for your players and your game, because each word is a tradeoff. And when rule systems fail it’s because they’ve failed this balance.

 

 

Now many of you might be saying, “Wait James, you forgot the most important point of all: That the rules are clear and easy to understand.” But when they’re not it’s usually because of a failing in one of these three categories.

When we say the rules weren’t clear enough we often mean either:

“The rules weren’t concise enough for me to follow all of them (or perhaps to even want to read all of them).”

(Brevity Failure)

OR

“The rules didn’t explain enough of the game for me to feel like I really understood how to play.”

(Clarity Failure)

OR

“The rules were explained in such a fashion (i.e. badly) that I didn’t understand enough of them to feel like I knew how to play.”

(Clarity Failure)

OR

“The rule book was boring and technical so I couldn’t finish it.”
(Narrative Failure)

OR

“So much time was spent on worldbuilding it felt like they wanted me to read a novel before I could jump in and play.”

(Narrative Failure)

At least that’s my first pass theory…

Post Scriptum:  Anyone reading this want to help out? We're taking feedback in Discord and continually updating the rules… HELP CURE THEM OF MY DODDERING FAILURES!