20190628.0430

Of the six posts in this webspace I've made in previous years on this date--2011, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018--that from 2014 seems the most relevant to me at the moment. In that piece, I offer an amateurish review of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game fourth-edition supplement, Sword and Fan. Now, while the game has since progressed into a fifth edition, and with a different company holding the rights to the intellectual property, I find the supplement--and the line of which it is part--still of some use. I play and administer games in it, and am gearing up to help run yet another game that will make much use of the materials in the book. Revisiting the review, therefore, seems like a useful thing to do.
There are problems in the piece, of course. As I note, it is amateurish, overly brief and skimpy on details that would likely make for a better piece of writing. (Indeed, the scholar that is still within me chafes at the lack of specific textual detail and explication thereof. And I was a scholar then, or at least was trying to be so, so the lack is even less acceptable from then than it would be from now, when I am more or less out of academe.) Too, certain features expected of book reviews are flatly absent; I do not give the ISBN or the MSRP, for example, both of which are standard features of book reviews. (I see enough of them, both in my pleasure reading and in the scholarly reading I should have done more of when I was trying to be a scholar. I ought to know better.) Neither is a point in favor of my writing's quality.
But I do follow the overall form of a review, giving a brief synopsis of the contents before identifying problems I found in the text and expounding on what it does well. And, following a form I learned while doing freelance writing I still miss--largely because of the pay, yes, but also because of the ways in which it forced me to sharpen my writing and to expand my skills with it (including working in AP style and beginning to learn HTML coding)--I spend more words on what Sword and Fan does well than what it does poorly. My overall notion is that the book is a good one, and it helps to have subtle textual features align to that idea. Neglecting problems is a foolhardy thing, but if the overall idea is that a thing is good, it makes sense to put more words into noting how it is good than how it is bad. It's not paratext, as such; it is in the words themselves. But it is not in the denotations of those words--or even the connotations of the individual words. It is in the connotations of perceived effort as indicated by the number of words. So that much is to the good in the review, at least.
Written reviews are not particularly prized for RPG products at this point--or even at the point when I wrote my review of Sword and Fan. I should be making videos, probably, or at least including graphics to encapsulate and condense my prose for ease of reading. In another webspace, I likely would. But in this one, I remain bound to text (and with some light attention to paratext, I admit). Whether that is a good thing or not, I am not at all certain.