Snark's Laws of Gaming: The Law of Attention Spans

[athelind]

Snark's Law of Attention Spans:

Players who will read and memorize two dozen volumes of background material for a published setting won't read a three-page background summary that you wrote for your own world.

Also known as "The Second 3W Rule".

Comments

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

LOL. I don't know if I pointed it out to you specifically about literary criticism, but I certainly have talked about it a great deal over the years! That, y'know, when someone a person knows writes something -- anything -- in the eyes of many readers it isn't nearly as legitimate as published material, even if the published material is awful. To this day I have trouble getting people I know, who are active readers, to read my stuff. Not in the sense that they've read it and don't like it, but in the sense that they will not read it. It sometimes hurts my feelings, even more than the critique they might have leveled at me. :p

However, with gaming material, yeah, I've run into that problem time and again. The notion that published material is somehow legitimate as opposed to the material a given player or GM might make. Even tho', y'know, that GM knows the players, the situation, the scenarios, etc., and one would think given that knowledge a reasonably competent GM would be able to make material that was far more interesting and relevant to the actual gaming situation than a professional (who might be a fine game designer but lacks specific knowledge of the players, their style, situation and the specific needs and wants of the specific players in any given game . . . but who might also be a total boob churning out a hack job). It vexes my gaming life quite a bit. Er, in theory. My current group doesn't seem to have much of a problem with it, thankfully.