This month I reviewed Thaumaturge by Austin, a game of player-generated spells in the Thaumetic Age. You are probably wondering when the Thaumetic Age was and if you missed it. Do not worry, I will cover that and you did not miss it, you would have noticed.
Thaumaturgy is just a fancy word for magic -- angel granted magic. Thematically, player-made spells are “psalms”. Pretty thematic right? So now we are all caught up. Here is what I found reading this game from the perspective of a new player. The document was missing some of the core chapters that make up the “why would I want to play this game”. This does not mean that this game is bad, it just did not highlight its strong points.
When I say “Why would I want to play this game” sections, I mean the introductory 1-2 pages/paragraphs of why the game is great and unique and the “what I will be doing during a game” sections. Also known as, “how do I string together skill checks to make a game”? Often, the abilities that are selected during character creation are enough to indicate what the characters will be doing. Because of this, the “why should I play this game” sections can be easy to miss. This can be especially if you are making something similar to the industry giants like D&D or Pathfinder. I think this boils down to the fact that dungeon crawling and loot gathering in fantasy times seems to be the norm, so it often times feels like you do not need to write down that information. Do not skip it, it is a great opportunity to explain the cool and unique points of your game within the familiar framework of RPG “norms”.
The last part I noticed a lot in this read through was confusion in rules due to poor word order. Austin told me that some players struggled understanding how combat works. My first read through of the combat section made this apparent. Often a lot of work is needed to fix issues like this, but sometimes, proper word order is all that is needed. This was the case here for combat, and in the section on psalms later on. The fix was actually rather simple, explain the rules in the order they are encountered in the game when resolving an action. In Thaumaturge, Wounds and Damage was before Making an attack for example. So my advice for this is while some rules may seem more important, thus making you want to explain them sooner, the order at which the rules are introduced greatly helps in the understanding of the how the rules are used. The updated order for combat that I suggested was the following: Overview of combat, Making an Attack (also mentioning how attacks are initiated), wounds and damage, reacting to an attack, Turn of Attack, Healing, Death, Abnormal statuses.
When writing a book as dense as an RPG, little things like this often get overlooked since you, as the creator, know everything. This prevents you from seeing when rules are out of order, even if the individual pieces themselves are explained well. I know I am guilty of having this problem when writing my games. The easiest way to solve this, is by having new players read your book and then you asking them to explain how to do something.
Let me know if this was helpful, if you like the content, or any questions you have about your own creations. You can let me know on Twitter (@c22system) or join the discord (https://discord.gg/VQ3UM36Bjp)