The Gaming Den

Schwarzkopf wrote:That...is not very verbose.

I was looking at Light Pistol offenders like the Yamaha Sakura Fubiki that uses eight lines of pure description as a fluff intro to 3.25 lines of special mechanics.

I stand by the Synaptic Booster text. You could cut that down to one line instead of four without losing a thing. For example, do you really need to say "With this bioware..." considering the Booster is deep in the bioware section? It's pretty clear some writer was saying to himself "Cha-ching! Thirty extra cents there, you bastards!"

I mean, you could change the Colt America L36 description to a tag under the picture that says "An easily-concealed classic of the people." and save two or three lines and say the same thing (possibly in a more stylish way) and it's not even the most egregious offender.

And that's how the whole book is written. It's full of unnecessary redundancies and fluff text that people will read once and then never look at again. It's not like I'm going to be re-reading the Light Pistol section and choosing the gun that sounds the coolest; all those decisions are going to be made by looking at the stat chart at the bottom.

So, if you compare dnd 3 vs AD&D 2, you get an example of the other extreme. The earlier one had only tables, the latter had nice descriptions which really added a lot. But the descriptions there were only just enough space to fill in around the table and illustrations.
I actually think layout has more to do with "too much" vs. "too little" than the objective length does.

K wrote:I mean, you could change the Colt America L36 description to a tag under the picture that says "An easily-concealed classic of the people." and save two or three lines and say the same thing (possibly in a more stylish way) and it's not even the most egregious offender.

The description Frank quoted sounds like something I'd write in a first draft. What you just wrote sounds like what I'd cut it down to later on, because good writing means saying it in as few words as possible. Except, the short version requires editing which means taking more time, not less.

fectin wrote:So, if you compare dnd 3 vs AD&D 2, you get an example of the other extreme. The earlier one had only tables, the latter had nice descriptions which really added a lot. But the descriptions there were only just enough space to fill in around the table and illustrations.
I actually think layout has more to do with "too much" vs. "too little" than the objective length does.

Don't get me started on the layout. I could cut five pages just by taking out the unnecessary indenting in SR4.

Personally, I'd at least make the weapon pictures a little bigger. Considering that you probably paid between $25 and $100 for each, you should be able to at least see the stupid things.

The ideal solution is to just make fake ads for the guns. That's both stylish and cool, even if it's hell on overall page count and art budget (although, it is the perfect thing to farm out as a contest).

Layout and word count are both "Goldilocks situations." There is a "just right" solution for both between too much and too little. Sometimes tables are a bigger waste of page-count, and sometimes they are the most efficient means of collecting often-used information. Most SR tables are about a third too big, for example.

A good editor makes those choices while a bad editor is just correcting grammar and punctuation.

K wrote:Personally, I'd at least make the weapon pictures a little bigger. Considering that you probably paid between $25 and $100 for each, you should be able to at least see the stupid things.

The ideal solution is to just make fake ads for the guns. That's both stylish and cool, even if it's hell on overall page count and art budget (although, it is the perfect thing to farm out as a contest).

I second this. I still cosnider the Street Samurai Catalog one of the best crunch books ever, simply because of the ad-style weapon blocks and the banter.

Borderlands was pretty cool about that as well, with advertisements for guns everywhere. I could get behind something like that.

I would like to point out that sometimes extra verbosity makes things easier to read; there is such a thing as excessive terseness. When I started reading/writing math papers I noticed that there was a lot of filler text that really wasn't necessary, and figured I should cut that out. The first time I handed something in to my advisor, he pointed out that that text was there largely to take up space on the page in between the actually important stuff--because otherwise the writing is too information-dense and people's brains freeze up.