Everything you think about Game Mastering is probably wrong: Part XVII - Reading is for Nerds
I have written and rewritten this post almost a dozen times, each time trying to make it seem just a little less like an old man yelling at a cloud. The basic premise though is that nerds don’t read books as much as they used to. The imagination space is less dominated by books and the written medium than it is by movies, shows, and the visual medium.
In my youth it was the case that most people who were fans of fantasy interacted with the genre primarily through reading fantasy books. If you sat down to play an RPG it was a certainty that everyone there had read The Lord of the Rings, and Dune, and dozens of other books besides. They probably had a paperback with them in their backpack that they were reading right now. When they finished that book, they would go get another one from the library. Some people in the group probably spent most of their lunch hours reading whatever was available.
This should not be taken as a lamentation over some sort of horrible loss of culture, or as me ranting about “those kids on their facespaces not reading the classics and just watching garbage movies.” For every book like Dune or The Lord of the Rings I read, I also read a whole pile of absolute shite fantasy books. Seriously, look at this list of D&D novels and tell me those are all worthy of the time one could spend reading them? Likewise, there are some truly great pieces of fantasy filmmaking and video games that absolutely should be held in as high regard as any piece of fantasy literature. This is not a post about whether the written medium is better than the visual, that is a pointless debate.
It would also ignore that there has always been a voracious appetite for visual fantasy among the older crowd of fantasy fans. Sure Krull was stupid, but what were you going to do? Not watch it? There didn’t used to be a very large selection of “fantasy” media to watch so horror, Hong Kong martial arts cinema, and historical swashbuckling movies tended to be considered “close enough” (which goes a great distance towards explaining monks, bronze plate, and rapiers all existing at once in early RPGs). Technology has changed though, video entertainment is only a click (or even tap) away and you have access to a vastly larger library of genre content.
So what point am I making with this observation? It's about how players interact with games in the first place. If you look at older RPG modules, the expectation was that you would read the whole thing in detail before trying to run it. The same would be true for any game book. You were expected to read the rulebook before trying to play the game. This made intuitive sense to people who primarily interacted with the genre through the medium of reading. Why would you buy a book if not to read every word it contained? You read the book in its entirety and then you would run from memory and use the book only as a reference, much in the way you might discuss a book at a club or when writing a book report in school.
If your primary interaction with the fantasy genre was through video games though, this would seem daft, up there with expecting people to watch an entire playthrough before pressing start on their own run. You would instead expect to be able to just pick up the game and run with it, learning as you go through a design that mixes early play with a tutorial.
Even beyond how you start playing, this will factor into the pace of the game itself. Reading is by its nature a very slow medium. It may take you fifteen minutes to read a scene that takes place over thirty seconds, but (if well written) you will enjoy all fifteen minutes as you savour the minutiae of the scene. This then tends to lead to gameplay with slow and deliberate actions. The mechanics might be either simple or complex, but the gameplay itself has a slower pace.
If you are used to a visual medium you will be far more likely to expect fast paced gameplay, where things “keep moving” , or events ensure things are always “moving forward”. The terms themselves are a give away. This isn’t unusual, even in TV shows when they want a discussion to “move the plot forward” you will usually see the protagonists talking while they walk to feed into that illusion.
I don’t have any solutions to this, because it isn’t a problem. This is just a change in the audiences of RPGs and it's only a problem if you aren’t aware of it. If you have more of a visual experience with fantasy, then be aware that some works (especially older ones) are meant to be experienced differently and that it isn’t a flaw. Likewise if you are looking to appeal to a larger audience, be aware that you might have to adjust the way you layout your books to be easier to pick up and play without having read the entire work.