Round 2 rules

[Anthony Adam]

Revisions will help - my first draft came in at 160 words over. 6 edits later and it's now just inside the maximum and so far I haven't dropped a single thing.

It's amazing - on your first cut, you tend to write how you speak, spilling words onto the page. Now look at those sentence, look for structures like "The archetype name may throw a special punch to shatter a prismatic wall." (This is contrived I know)

a) The archetype - well, considering you probably started with "At nth level, the archetype name gains the ability to...", in the ability description, do you need to repeat the archetype name so much? Look up the iconic, we now get...

"He may throw a special punch to shatter a prismatic wall."

b) special - it's a nice to have word, but not necessary, so get rid.

Also, is the "special punch" a prior gained ability... try rewording something like...

"He can shatter prismatic walls with his punachabilitynamehere".

So the final sentence loses nothing, has about 7 or 8 words depending on the ability name, compared with the first draft of 13 - now imagine if you can trim 5 words of fat off every sentence!

Other things to look at:

Every ability will start with "At nth level, the archetypenamehere..."

So if you are replacing say 5 abilities, that's at minimum 5 repetitions of your archetype name - so for this round, many word archetype names will hurt you bad - try to have no more than two word archetype names if you can.

Ability names - "Dancing Kick of Baba Yaga's pet Crane" could simply be "Dancing Kick". Keep the ability names short and snappy, then when you need to refer to earlier abilities from later ones, you are helping your word count.

I hope these tips help.

[Dan Jones]

Yeah, I did some more trimming, and now I have 7 words to spare! That's like a small sentence of flavor I can use! :-D

It can adverbly verb an adjectiveish object!

[Anthony Adam]

Dan Jones wrote:

Yeah, I did some more trimming, and now I have 7 words to spare! That's like a small sentence of flavor I can use! :-D

It can adverbly verb an adjectiveish object!

Now that's a convoluted way of saying "It can do it!" :P

Bet you could trim your archetype a bit more :P

I thought I was stumped when I was 160 over, but now my draft is a lean, mean, kickin' archetype :)

Well, I think it is anyways :D

[Celestial Healer]

I knew archetypes would be tough, but not so much in the ways I would have thought. There's a lot of fiddly bits, like, "This new ability replaces this other ability, but that other ability was only one possible option the class could have, so if you choose a different option..." Ugh!

*gets back to the grindstone*

[Eric Morton]

(Warning: shameless self-promotion follows.)

If you have a few bucks to spend and want to see lots of examples of archetypes that weigh in at 200 words or less, consider grabbing a copy of my 101 Simple Archetypes from Rite Publishing (also available at RPG Now).

This book uses a different format than the one you need to use for Round 2, and some of its archetypes are more functional than Superstar, but it has plenty of examples of concise game mechanics. The longest archetype in the book is, I believe, the clockwork gunslinger; that one's only 330 or so words, but includes a complete set of rules for building and using clockwork crossbows instead of firearms.

EDIT: I take no credit for the timing of this product's release. The folks at Rite Publishing were the ones clever enough to release this book of short archetypes just as folks are trying to figure out how to write short archetypes. Rite Publishing is just savvy like that. I've enjoyed working with them on this project.