2025-02-03T16:23:34Z
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This is not what you’re expecting from the thumbnail.
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Well, that did a great job of dismantling the central claim. Good work NPI
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Indeed. I’m glad someone told me it was worth watching, because I certainly wouldn’t have bothered based on the thumbnail.
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I was reading a similar article recently: “Spinach in Blunderland: How the myth that spinach is rich in iron became an urban academic legend.” DOI, PDF
In that case, there’s a standard wrong explanation (“a decimal point error in measurements in the 1930s”) which itself can be traced back and analysed, but there’s a very similar effect here: a poor (and tiny!) initial study, incorrectly quoted by Rob Daviau, and picked up as Obvious Truth by people who want to appear serious and scientific but not to the extent of actually reading the studies they’re citing.
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I think there’s something underlying though. Like while it might be academically flimsy when Daviau says it in a talk - the laugh it gets (and the confidence to say it in public) comes from a truth that we can not thoroughly dismiss the statement outright. It feels believable because everyone can feel or has felt that graph of disappointment in a game night or when one buys a game.
If the study said “the most excitement people have is when someone starts reading the rules” it would smell so far of nonsense nobody would say it again.
Even if it’s merely an inspiration to try new things it doesn’t mean creating weird and different forms of rule book are a bad thing. This rule book itchiness seems to be the inspiration to the whole video.
Do we get legacy games (and the concept of adding rules to a mostly empty book without Daviau thinking rulebooks are a bit of a limiting factor in games?
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The legacy games I have played had the full rules for the games (Pandemic, Risk) from the outset.
Yeah, I think the only mostly emptyt rulebook was Seafall.
But @mistercrayon 's point is still good; I can see that as Daviau’s momdnt of inspiration for the idea that you can start playing the game without having learned all the rules. (And without calling the first games “tutorial mode”.)
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Seafall notable for being a total flop though.
I think the kind of rule/tutorial formatting NPI took aim at is pretty terrible, so I’m onboard with their criticism. I don’t see any way past the necessity of reading comprehensive rules myself. I suppose there are video explainers for people who like that sort of thing.
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I have given a lot of thought to rulebooks, and I do agree that the best way to support both initial learning and in-game reference is two documents. But not in the FFG style where you have to guess what a thing is called: as far as possible the reference book should be in the order things happen in a game.
Agreed: a complete rulebook and a reference book is the best way to go for complex games. In my experience FFG fails mainly because a lot of the rules are only in the reference book. Anyway, this is completely counter to the “wisdom” based on a terrible study that leads to by-the-nose tutorials, incomplete rulebooks, app tutorials, and all the rest.
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I have various qualms with the changes they made to the rules, but having fully read through it, the new version of the D&D Player’s Handbook is a vast improvement when it comes to clarity and teaching players the rules.
But it still makes this mistake. The bulk of the book walks through teaching you the rules (and detailing character options, etc), but there are still some rules which are only actually stated in the rules glossary at the end of the book.
It’s a matter of perspective and inclination. New Box Rules of pandemic legacy are 100% of the rules to play game 1 but it is certainly not 100% of the rules to play game 5 of pandemic legacy.
Perhaps also the full game 1 of Pandemic Legacy can also be considered the same thickness as Pandemic (normal).
I do think though it’s entirely possible that the spark of a legacy game comes from shrinking something giant.
I think too much stock is placed on the study.
I’ve watched my partner’s eyes glaze with a long explanation (and I have almost certainly glazed just reading a book). It’s extremely possible for designers to try and overcome solutions they have experienced in weird and wacky ways.
even things like Chvatils jokes or “thematic reasonings” are about softening away from just explaining literal actions.
Which is also to say: if these “solutions” are failures they will get dumped along the way to some rulesbook utopia.
I liked what Wilmots Warehouse (boardgame) did with its rules. It’s like a five page book with absolutely no chat about how to set up for ages.
The traditional RPG argument is that you learn the game once, you refer to rules (ideally) more than once, so while you can have external teaching aids the main rulebook is deigned for reference. I have some sympathy with this, especially now that we have PDFs and videos.
As you may have noticed I’m a very theme-first player most of the time. But even I found the rules for Faraway overdone, with the actually quite simple rules lost in the verbiage.