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Saturday, January 19, 2013

One question

First, I had a blogging question: is the plain text for narrative/italics text for rules interesting or helpful?  I sometimes find myself writing things like

Robb turned and saw the zombie down the street.  He fired twice with his pistol, and one of the bullets took the zombie's head clean off.
Robb fired twice with his BAP, hit once, and got the Obviously Dead result thanks to the Easy to Kill rule.
See, I'm basically saying the same thing twice, without a lot of elucidation.  Do I keep the italics for every action, noteworthy ones, or drop it altogether?

Comments welcome

8 comments:

  1. I personally like it. The Blogs that do this are really helping me learn the rules.

    If you wanted to shorten the explanations a bit I'm sure I'd still find it useful. Maybe you can do less rules-talk as you go, until eventually you're only going over odd things, or special circumstances.

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  2. I like them too. Please continue this format.

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  3. I like it, as well. It's helpful, since I really don't know the rules of the game well at all. If you feel like it needs streamlining, then I would suggest moving to only the noteworthy things (such as "rolled xx, got an obviously dead result"), but I would caution against dropping the italics sections altogether - then it might read more like disjointed attempts at fiction and less like a chronicle of your game with narrative descriptions.

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  4. As you know it is my preferef style. I like because it helps the reader underdysnd some of the odd things that happen. As a sideline hobby I transfer my batrep into prose and the bottem section allows for fillin on. My Zombie novel is 38,900 words long now. Would have thpught. Keep it up.

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  5. Keep it buddy, its helpful for us understanding whats going on especially when Robb gets given a curveball.

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  6. You should definitely keep it. I also do a similar thing on my blog for my batreps and it is amazing how many times I get thanks from newcomers to the game for explaining how the rules work and why such and such an action happened. You are providing a very useful service to those who don't know the game as well as we do. Please keep up the good work. Believe me, it is appreciated.

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  7. I'd go for keeping it when it's not too obvious from the narrative what has happened. A lot of bloggers do this and it's very useful.

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  8. I am pretty much in agreement with everyone else. Some times you need to state the clear statement "out of character" so those who are not familiar with the rules understand why some thing happen through game mechanics or because of a decision by a player. I have done it on my previous AAR's that I have based on my blog. It is also nice to ask players after the game why they did certain things and see how some times the Fog of War effects their judgement.

    Joe

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