Whipstitch, could you be more specific on that subject? JE, myself, and Frank all seem to be saying that the organization can be improved, we're just not all thinking that it could be improved in the same way.
JE wants to make character sheets match chapter order so that you can fill in the page as you flip through chapters. This serves new players because they can get a printed off character sheet from the GM and go down the sheet filling in sections as they go through the chapters in the book. I hadn't even thought about that before because I always just use blank notebook paper and write it all in, "oldschool" style. So either we can reorder the chapters or rearrange the character sheet print-off so that they match more closely.
Frank wants to put setting up top before character creation so that players know what they're getting into before they create characters. This serves new players because it gives them an idea of what sort of characters are and aren't appropriate to the game at hand.
I'm not entirely sure how most people actually go about the process of creating characters though. From what I've personally seen, if someone is new to the game, they usually create a character with the other players around them, at least one of which knows how to play the game already and can answer questions. In that context, players usually pick up a book or open a PDF and then just start leafing through pages until they see the "This Is How You Start Playing Right Now" rules section. Of all the players I've gamed with, probably less than 25% have actually read the "welcome to the shadows" timeline and setting outline at the start of Shadowrun before starting in on the character creation process. Same goes to the explanation of The Scourge in the Earthdawn books, and all the weird bullshit at the start of any of the nWoD books. Instead, they rely entirely on the GM to explain major plot details like that to them the same way they expect the GM to tell them what time of day it is and where they're all standing when they start the game.
Now this might be because in DnD (most people's first RPG) there actually
isn't a setting at all expect what the DM makes up, so players are used to just making a guy and then waiting to be told what's going on. It might be because in a board game or other "game" non-RPG players are used to playing, the players sit down and have someone that knows how to play show them how to play, so they just wanna "make a guy" and get playing. Either of those kinds of players probably just expect the rule book to be a reference manual used later on for looking up how to do a thing you forgot, or to resolve arguments about a rule.
Now personally I think that spending Chapter 1 on all the introduction stuff and the presenting the rest of the stuff in character creation order, with setting and danger and magic after that, might be the best ordering of things. The intro chapter would have the outlines on stuff you'd need to know to make sane choices, but wouldn't give it all at once. Basically, the "After Sundown" and parts of "Terrible Places" should be stuffed together into an "Introduction" chapter. Chapter 2 can actually be called "Character Creation" or just have that put 'higher' in the chapter's ordering of sections, and then go from there.
FrankTrollman wrote:Lokathor wrote:As I recall, officially the term "discipline" isn't used in the book. There's "powers" (little p) which are each grouped into the "Powers" (big P). That needs to be fixed up.
Yeah, also power points. The word "power" is over used and we need to go to the Thesaurus. For starters, would people rather that power points stayed being called "power points" while the powers you used them with got renamed "talents", "boons", "crafts", or something? Or would people rather that you had powers and activated them with points of "energy", "cruor", "force", or whatever?
Activating "powers" with "power points" is something I'd strongly suggest sticking to. When the sheet or the character creation section says that you have powers and that you also have power points it becomes very intuitive that you'll probably be spending these power points in a way that's related to those powers you have. It makes Power Points more immediately obvious than Edge and Potency for sure.
If Potency could get a stronger explanation of what it is, or if it could be given a reason to be used directly more often, that'd be cool.