"It does what it says it does"

 The debate over natural language in rpgs has been around longer than I've been playing them, some like it, some don't. One of the chief points in this is that most people's introduction to the style is through 5th Edition DnD, which attempts the style…badly (see for instance the difference between an attack with a weapon and a weapon attack) and it is that I want to focus on. Because, setting aside taste for immersion and such (I personally love me some gameyness), the key thing a rule or ability or whatever needs to accomplish is this:

Does the thing do what it says it does?

This feels obvious in some ways. Of course you want your rules to be comprehensible. What I think is neat is the different ways that happens, depending on your design goals, so I'd like to take us all on a tour to see how different design paradigms handle this idea. 

Pathfinder 2E: Reach for the Sky

Pathfinder is the RPG equivalent of perfectly cutting a piece of paper. Its so clean.

Pathfinder 2E is by and large a descendent of Fourth Edition DnD, and inherits a lot of its formatting as a result. Looking at Reach for the Sky, before getting any sort of flavor text we can tell:

1. It takes two actions to use (the little symbols next to the name).
2. You have to be Level 12, have the feat Pistol Phenom Dedication, and a loaded firearm. 
3. What book it comes from (this is an Archives of Nethys exclusive thing).
4. It has the Archetype, Auditory, and Visual traits, each of which impacts how it works.

Only then do you get a sentence explaining what is actually happening in the fiction.  Following that, we immediately get back into rules text, down to explaining what it means for every creature to have their hands in the air. It is beautiful, it is clean, it is precise, and it is gamey as hell. I love it. 

Blades in the Dark: Expertise and Reflexes

Blades is a game I like to call “Deceptively crunchy.” A lot of the game's design is about how to mechanically incentivize telling the story of a bunch of no-good crooks and all that. Its amazing and I love it and these two abilities show the gamut of it pretty nicely.

Expertise is an ability to call out a specific Action Rating (like a skill), and limit the acquisition of Stress (an abstract meter you don't want to fill) when working together. How does this work in the fiction? Good question! You're an expert I guess.

Reflexes, meanwhile, can be encapsulated in a single sentence and functions entirely within the fiction. You just go first, like Han Solo or whatever. 

Cairn: Spellbooks

Cairn has Spellbooks, which players can cast, simple enough. It even has a little bit of text about what the books themselves are like. They entirely function within the realm of fiction, which is intended to preserve a sense of wonder, but they are also short, snappy, and to the point.

Dungeons and Dragons (2014): Time Stop

Family Guy what the hell is this dot jpg

I'm gonna pick on poor Time Stop for a second here at the end as an example of what not to do. It has the same basic formatting as Reach for the Sky above (since both are part of the same lineage) but the way the "This spell ends" section goes makes things unnecessarily confusing by repeating itself. In the pursuit of natural language, it ended up a bit too flowery, when it could have been "You or an effect you cause affects any other creature or any objects they wear or carry, or you move more than 1,000 feet from where you cast the spell." Probably ain't perfect, but hopefully a bit more clear. 

Why does any of this matter? 

I wanted to highlight this because it has (as best I can tell) gone largely unremarked upon. Like so much good editing and layout work, it's only noticeable when it's done badly, and I think that it's important to shout out good craft when we see it. So the next time you're making something, ask yourself, does it do what it says it does? Because if it doesn't, then someone is gonna get really confused.