Writing rulebooks for games is hard. Yes, it’s a cliche, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Writing rules is both art and science (a bit more art than science, IMHO), and there’s a whole host of reasons why it’s so difficult, but the core challenge is that rulebooks are trying to be two things at once.
A good rulebook needs to be both
- a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game, and
- a reference that explains, in excruciating detail, how the game works.
These might feel like the same things, but they’re not. That feeling is a trap. If you try to do both simultaneously, you end up with a document that’s so full of explanations of how the game works, the reader has a hard time learning how to play. In order to figure out “What do I do on my turn?” I need to wade through details of rules that only matter on the last turn, or come up twice a game, or only apply when my opponent is wearing a fedora.
As a reference, the rule have to cover everything.
As a tutorial, the rules only have to cover what you need in order to play.
There are as many ways of addressing this challenge as there are rulebooks. If you’re doing an RPG, for example, you’ve got between 64 and 640 pages to work with, so it’s easy to have “What you need to know in order to play” in chapter 1, and save “An exhaustive list of injuries your character can suffer and their effects on your stats” for chapter 28. In a hobby board game, you can again front-load the tutorial aspects into the first few pages, and save everything else for an “other rules” section in the back part of the booklet. Some games literally divide the tutorial and the reference into two separate documents. And then you’ve got games like Magic: the Gathering, which features a comprehensive rules document that’s like hundreds of pages long… but ships with a tiny little booklet that tells you just enough to get you playing the game.
There isn’t a single One True Way to write rulebooks. If there were, it wouldn’t be so hard. But keeping in mind that you’re trying to do two things at once will hopefully help you find the best way to write your rulebook for your game.
