Modern Sagas Development Log Entry 4
Posted by: Ruel Knudson in Developer Blog, Modern Sagas Development LogWell, I am happy to report that I have finnished yet another chapter in the Modern Sagas Player’s Guidebook. So far, the opening chapters: Introduction, Character Creation, and Skills have now among their ranks Vehicles.
 However, completion is rather misleading. You see, each chapter, completed in of itself, is not really completed until the book in its entirety is completed. So you call a chapter completed only when it has reach this point of development where it is full and complete, yet still lacking in that there is further information that is defined elsewhere. This might sound kinda odd, but it works.
You see, I am quite proud of the feedback I get from the Fantasy Sagas. Even those who may not like the game still share a respect for one single, but ultimately critical, aspect of the book. Hands down I have read comments that cite the books as being well laid out, well written, clear, and concise. This means, to me, that I have done my job. I understand that not everyone will like this game. I understand that the mechanics are not everyone’s cup of tea. The rules are not easy to develope, but to like them or hate them is a matter of personal tastes. However, whether or not the game can be read, and much more, understood, has little to do with personal tastes. Although some rules may be easier to read based on one person’s opinion, making a game readable and easy to understand is something you can strive for on a larger scale. Can someone have an opinion that the game is not readable? Sure. But that may be more of a matter of the reader, not the material, if almost universally the game is regarded as being a well written, well laid out book.
I was able to prevent the book from falling into that horriblezone of ambiguous rules and content by constantly leaving a chapter unfinished to flesh out sections as other parts of the book helped me to define them. You would almost think that because the rules are the exact sam as fantasy that I wouldn’t need to do this, unless I was adding new rules. I’m not. I am determining resolutions using the same rules, but not making new rules. However, writing them so that these resolutions occur as they do is not exactly easy. The difficulty is compounded when you have other sections of the game that could potentially compliment or alter them in some way. So care is given. Care is given to presentation, to flow. Even each simple heading, sub-heading, sub-subheading, bolded type, flavor box, etc. is all carefully crafted to not only make things easy to read, but flow into a natural path of understanding. Each section leads logically into the next.
I can give you a perfect example of how this is done. Using the Fantasy Sagas PGB as an example, look through the book. You first chapters cover all the basics right. Intro -> Character Gen -> Skills. Next people expect equipment and combat. That’s the usual flow, right. That’s because these are more interesting to all players. However, what are we doing right now (if we are reading the book)? We are generating a character. The rules explain concepts of the game, then teach us how a general character is developed around these concepts. Next we flesh out our character with skills. We learn how they work. Also, we are learning more of the depth of our skill resolution system. If we were to do what most books do we would then jump to equipment. Then to combat, then back to more skills (magic and psionics). So we are bouncing around and we are forgetting something very important: our flow has deviated away from how skills work. So we put the magic and psionics right after skills because they are using the same mechanics. So by now we have a really good idea of how skills work in a large variety of ways. We go next to tools for your skills, calling it equipment. Now we have learned skills, how to augment them with tools. Now we need to know what they are good for and why. So now we learn about other game mechanics. This is our Adventuring chapter. Next we get into specialized mechanics in combat. The rest of the book is a bunch of examples (yes your spell appendix is a collection of example spells).
 So maybe combat is more fun and should be closer to the front to catch attention. However, by pushing things into the right places we understand things in greater depth. It reads easier not only because it is digestable, but is made digestable because we gave you the tools to be familiar enough with how everything works. Each page is written this way. Each paragraph is the same.
So, I say that another chapter is done. It still has a long way to go. It is not a draft. It is done. However, by the time you read it, it will not be the same thing I saved to my desktop this weekend.
Hapy Gaming!
Note: as an aside I have left this document un-edited. Not even a spell check. I just wanted to give you all an idea of what James, Courtney, Willie, and Nadine all go through with my writing. Hey, I am a writer. I put thought to paper. I never said anything about being an English major!
