So much editing “advice” given in TTRPGs is basic copyediting advice. An example is Sams’ recent post, but it’s just one example among many. Why?

RPGs aren’t journalism, so the AP Stylebook (or New Yorker House Style, or Elements of Style, or etc. etc.) doesn’t apply, and even if we did have a unified style guide for TTRPGs, I don’t think we have a major copyediting problem that needs addressing. Copy editing is concerned with clarity, coherence, and consistency, but there is not epidemic of unclear, incoherent, inconsistent TTRPGs, in my opinion as someone who closely reads far too many of them.

I do see an editing problem, though. It’s not because we don’t have a good enough style guide, but rather because we have no clue what this medium actually is, and accordingly the greatest thing we can do is experiment with how to present information in a way that works for the conflicting needs of the format. How to edit in a spirit of experimentation that befits our hobby? Developmental and line editors need to pioneer those treacherous waters, and that requires a lot of thought and creativity. It’s hard. Copyediting is straightforward, comparatively. That’s why, in my opinion, we get so much copywriting advice. That’s the answer. But what should we be doing instead?

Consider the conflicting needs a TTRPG must address: TTRPG writing both attempts to be readable cover to cover in the style of a novel, but simultaneously be a reference manual for the pragmatics of running the game. These two things, I suspect, cannot be fully reconciled: You’ll be finding your middle ground; the balance between the two that you find most satisfying for the specific text you’re writing as well as for your personal needs or perhaps the needs of a fickle theoretical audience. Reconciling these things, in my opinion, is an information design problem at multiple levels, and resolving that involves layout decisions, ordering decisions, and word-and-sentence-level decisions. What should you be considering when you, as someone performing a developmental or line edit on your (or someone elses’) book, try to reconcile this conflict? I’m going to make eight suggestions for principal considerations, with examples.

Disclaimer 1: This is a blogpost about editing, so someone’s going to get sassy about a typo in the comments. It’s a blog post, I ain’t going to edit this. I’m a working mother of two writing on my phone. Typos are annoying, but they don’t invalidate anyone’s opinions.

Disclaimer 2: This is TTRPGs. There is no authority on how to best write, edit or present them. In my opinion that’s what makes it exciting. At the moment there’s just the legacy of cheaply put together xeroxed pamphlets holding us back. The advice of your aunt who edits the church bulletin’s needn’t apply (thanks Aunt Karen for your input), and you sure can claim my advice doesn’t if you wish.

Disclaimer 3: I’ve added a bunch of visual examples. I talked about all of them in both the context of the section they’re included in, and the broader context of this post, so you definitely could go back and re-read them once you’ve finished to see if you agree. Also, you might look at them and disagree, which is also fine: Figure out your preferences.

1. Consistency and redundancy

Consistency is important, because it helps the reader predict what comes next, and hence navigate the text more fluently. It’s equally important to choose what to have consistency in — if you’re always consistent, you’re boring, and if you’re consistent with the wrong things, then you clog the text up with unnecessary dredge (see: the problem with Stat Blocks, that I’m sure someone has written). You need to figure out what things need to be consistent in your TTRPG text for it to navigate to what’s important specifically in that text.

In the same way, you need to choose what redundancy is necessary and identify why that redundancy helps the reader navigate or understand the text. Does that particular section, concept or rule belong in a summary at the beginning of the text? Is it best split up and peppered throughout the text? Is it an appendix? Should it be all three, or just two?

Think about redundancy, consistency, and repetition when you’re setting yourself rules to add to your (real or imaginary) style guide. Some key questions you might ask yourself are “Does this pattern occur regularly enough I need to set myself a rule to consistently govern it? Will doing this consistently render the text illegible in some places?”

2. Highlighting

Highlighting is my generic term for bold, italics, colour, Capitalising and other ways to make certain types of text easy to identify in a block of text. Highlighting is very important for navigation during play, and using multiple kinds of highlight can be useful for the purposes of highlighting different types of information. But if I use a different type of highlighting in each word, we quickly have an illegible text, particularly replicated over many pages. Your choice of what to highlight has significant impact on how the text reads and navigates, though, so choose wisely how to use it or not use it.

A key question you might ask yourself is “Are the key pieces of information easy to find? Would they benefit from highlighting in some way?”

3. Hierarchy

So, how do we manage this tightrope of consistency and complexity? Well, the most important decision is what order to present things in. This is called hierarchy, but here it doesn’t imply superiority, but rather the order in which you want things to be understood or recalled. One important psychological principle that applies is the advice “Put the ghoul last” (i.e. We humans remember the most recent fact most clearly): When describing a rule, you may choose to put the inferring rules first, so the key points, provided at the end, are easier recalled. But it’s not the only thing to consider: When writing read aloud text, definitely don’t tuck the critical information in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph, where it can be lost amongst the other concepts. But, when describing a room, the thing you see first may be more important to write first. You can also present hierarchies in more obvious ways: Bullets and numbering come to mind, as subservient to their preceding body text, and numbering is often subservient to preceding items in the list. Sidebars and boxed off areas are often visually defined as subservient to the body text. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some other ways to do this. You can be creative with hierarchies: Even indentation, padding or decoration can be used to imply hierarchy.

Some key questions you might ask yourself are “Is this information presented in an order or format that allows the reader to optimally locate the information as needed?” “What is the best format to present this hierarchy in?”

4. Referencing

Another way to walk the tightrope of consistency and complexity is through referencing, the bugbear of the editing world. Referencing, particularly in large documents, is hard to implement. But, page referencing goes a ludicrously long way to reduce the need for redundancy and hence reduces complexity by a significant margin when done well. You can minimise the difficulty of referencing as well by being clever with how you number or alphabetise the text. You can also use footnotes and indexes to address some of the same issues, dependent on complexity. Genuinely, where are the footnotes in RPG writing? An under-utilised tech in TTRPGs given we were all raised on Pratchett.

A key question you might ask is “Does this section provide enough context to be usable without searching the book?”

The question to ask yourself is “Do I think this is important for the reader to remember and to return to? How am I using space, art and typography to signal that?”

5. Headings

Headings are important, mainly for the purposes of navigation. You need to be able to find different information, and headings are one of the major ways you do it. This means the headings have to be descriptive, clear and easy to find. This in turn means that usually, you put them in the same place on the page, and give them some padding around them so they aren’t crowded out by the rest of the text.

Heading levels are for different levels of navigation, so they need to be differentiated clearly from one another: Identifiable padding, typography, or decoration, or whatever clever thing you can come up with. Level 1 headings help you navigate through the book, level 2 headings help you navigate within a section, level 3 a subsection, etc. More than 2 levels of headings can get confusing in my experience; consider using other ways of setting out information if it’s this low in the hierarchy, such as sidebars, boxes, or parentheticals.

A key question you might ask is “Does this heading stand out when I flick through the book as a whole?” Substituting the word section, page or spread for book as required.

6. Sufficiency of prior information

One major challenge we face in RPG writing is that they’re highly interdependent texts, which means that information that appears on page 2 might lack immediate meaning without the context on page 25. Creative ordering of information is our mantra here. When we’re reading through a section, for each section, we should be either familiar (fairly immediately in the text) with the context that is needed to make sense of it, or we need to be able to find it easily. And if we can’t do that textually — through reorganising or rewriting — we rely on referencing and redundancy.

A key question you might ask yourself is “Does this make sense in the context of the order the reader is reading the book, or do I need to change the place in the book or how it’s presented so that it does make sense?”

7. Visual significance

Text is a visual medium. What I mean is: You see the text on the page with your eyes, which means how that text is displayed on the page is important. This both goes for low-art texts and high-art texts — how you position and arrange the text on the page has meaning. You can actively make a choice to ignore that aspect of the medium, but you would be doing the medium a disservice.

We use space, art, and typography to manage visual significance. In terms of typography, we’re talking about size and uniqueness. In terms of art, we’re talking about using it to thoughtfully identify certain pages as more relevant and to draw the eye (not just to fill space, or at least clearly identifying space-filling art from art used for identification of significance). In terms of white space, we’re using it to set apart the sections of text that are significant.

Visual significance is super important for navigation — all of these are cues to the significance of a section, which means that they allow the eye to find significant text easily while flicking through the text or skimming it in digital. The impression the page makes is a key thing we use to find things and to differentiate the significant from the insignificant: Both the shape the blank space leaves, and the art that accompanies the text, but also consider the layout.

8. Poeticism

Surprise! RPG writing is neither technical writing nor is it literary writing. In my opinion it’s better to think of it as akin to writing a user’s manual, but using poetry as a primary text form rather than prose. I’ve spent plenty of time talking about the technical aspects of the writing already, so I won’t harp on that here. If you consider the evocativeness of the text as key to good RPG writing, as I do, specific prescriptions on text looks a little foolish — poetry can choose to ignore convention on the name of communication. So, I wouldn’t ascribe or offer you any prescriptions, but rather consider how your words and arrangement of words communicate the feelings and images you’re trying to convey. There’s a spectrum here, and you need to find where you lie on it — swing too far towards poeticism and you can be incomprehensible. But, careful consideration of the other principles here render poetic writing very comprehensible. I’d also challenge you to learn from poetry: Experiment with the words on the page, where they are placed, creating your own, going abstract. I see a reluctance in authors to let go of Gygax’ legacy of mundanity, but where better to let loose with language than in works of fantasy?

Some questions you might ask yourself: “How can I rearrange these words or sentences to be the most impactful on the reader? Will they be excited to describe it to the table table?”

Conclusions

This is my perspective on what we need to be considering in an RPG text edit (or for that matter, as we write our first draft). I think that focusing on the minutiae of copywriting trivialises our interesting and not yet fully formed hobby. We are equal parts poet and technician, and we should be editing accordingly, not treating our text as simply copy to be streamlined. And we should be editing towards grander, more broad-stretching concerns around information design and visual impacts on complexity, in the context of our strange and unique medium. I think we have to embrace the weirdness of TTRPGs rather than assume they follow the same rules as everything else. Embrace the visual elements of the medium and its tactility. Experiment. Make mistakes. Push our informational design, visual design, our poeticism, our understanding of the form forward. We’re not novelists. We’re not journalists. Let’s not look at our texts through their eyes.

I hope these examples and questions help you bring our medium’s uniqueness out in your creations.

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