Post originally by Ralph Mazza at 2005-01-31 15:24:50
Converted from Phorums BB System

The book does read like a text book. That's partially my background in technical writing, but also a concious, intentional decision.

Many of the rules that we use when we roleplay are implied standard things that we're all familiar with from a dozen years of gaming in 2 dozen different games. Whos the GM, what are PCs. Combat always comes down to initiative order and to-hit rolls...its just a question of how any given game does it...etc.

But Universalis was so unique in the moment to moment specifics of how it plays (pretty much ignores all of the standard techniques of traditional roleplaying) that I thought it was most important to be very specific and very precise about exactly how the game works.

For that reason I didn't want people to do the usual "skim through the rules and fill in the blanks from my own experience" thing. I wanted to walk them through the game and how it works step by step.

So to do that, I wrote the book more like a technical manual rather than a game book.

I think it was the right way to go, but I can't argue with the fact that the writing is very dry and un-punchy. Fortuneatly, once one learns to play, there is little need to reread the rules.