I would like to get people's personal experience with gaming texts. Which were clear, which unclear, why, the problem people had, reactions, etc.
A couple of games really interesting with respect to this are
In a Wicked Age and
Poison'd; they are interesting because (so far) I know only two (IaWA) or three (
Poison'd) people who understood them only by reading the rules, without further explanation and game session (beside, obviously, those bits who were missing or unclear in the rules, like that in
Poison'd the maximum profile for a pirate is 4).
Anyway, a game that really bothered me was PTA: it was the first game I felt the need to play with someone who already played it, in order to understand it, because I wasn't really sure about how to play it (then I found I already understood it, in its general principles, but before playing it I wasn't sure at all). I don't know why, but the text was clear enough, but didn't give me confidence about my understanding.
But this could depend more on me than on PTA, since it was like the third - I think - non-D&D-like game I read (DitV and NCaS being the first two).
Jason's games (
Grey Ranks,
Fiasco) are mostly clear, also if in
Grey Ranks sometimes I found some unclear bit (like: the extras can be non-Grey Ranks, but this in the rule is not so clear, in my opinion).
