Current Circulation

I forgot about the Twitter account to post brief ideas as they come along, should probably start actually using that though @sntrmstudios

Anyways, I have had some ideas lately, but between travel and my other work, I haven't had the time to write them in any posts.

 The Tactical game. When designing the rules, I always compared with other rule books, which use what I call filler. Endless amounts of pages about... stuff. Three pages here just talking about what a wargame is, another page about rolling dice, another page on using other tools, twenty pages on how to move a model. Maybe not that bad, but it always felt like I was unable to write in the similar style. Which ruined my rulebook.

When I first wrote the initial rules for the Tactical Game, it was seven pages. Now it is about 50 pages; still with no artwork or real graphic design. Admittedly most of the current content is getting cut from the initial release, although I have the rules for vehicle written, initially I will forgo that option. I know, I know, taking all the fun away of doing a tank army... for now.

I seemed to keep getting input that the seven pages was too... loose. Rule Nazis especially take advantage of that and go with whatever they want to accomplish, instead of just playing the game to have fun. Or it isn't refined enough to make proper sense. As I identified a few days ago, it is like the Bill of Rights versus the other Seventeen Amendments: The Bill of Rights covers the principle of each point in a sentence or a paragraph, whereas the other seventeen amendments need about three pages to briefly cover an idea of what they want while still leaving some major inconsistency or "imbalance".

Which does lead to the problem of fifty pages. Most of what is in the fifty pages is crap. And a lot of the rest is confusing and potentially inconsistent or imbalanced. Which, spoiler, everything is imbalanced.

Lately I was looking at the latest releases in some games and finally the companies are coming around to my originally preferred method: Why say a sentence when a word will do. So let's go back to the seven pages. Okay, I probably will never get it back down to the seven pages, because to tell you the truth, there is a lot more detail to the rules now then when it was just seven pages. But I can probably narrow each column to a paragraph, so we will call it one hundred paragraphs, say four paragraphs to a column, let's go with a nice round number like 15. Once I get some people great at graphics design then we can bump that up to 20, adding nice shapes and ascetic features in between the words; get some artwork people to throw stuff in and bump it up to 30-40, final release of 50ish pages, publish it for 15$.

Sounds like a plan?