I appreciate the detailed review. While I think we're still a bit apart, the effort you've made to explain your position is quite helpful.
so i guess the closest example i can give is palladium fantasy.
Not familiar with that one, sorry.
that book explains how to build the character piece by piece, telling you what each part is for, then gives you an explanation on how to play the character you've made & explains what the skills and traits do in detail, then give you the equipment before getting into the game world. each phase builds on the part you've already been reading, so you're not trying to work in the dark on building the character and being ready to play.
I'm still not seeing the issue.
ATOW first explains the BT universe to you, so you have a crude grasp of the setting. That helps put everything else in to context for people who've never been there before.
Then it covers its various core concepts (what's an attribute, etc) and its basic gameplay to you on page 34-43. 9 pages that explain to you how everything works except combat.
Next follow 60 pages on chargen, including sample characters. As you work through that, you're able to put things in to context if you've read 34-43. Reading those pages, you don't need to know what each skill is to grasp that it's a 2d6 roll, you add the skill, and you subtract modifiers. It's just a mechanism.
Then a more detailed explanation of both the Traits and Skills you've just been exposed to in Chargen. Now's a good time since they can now inform decisions you make during chargen concerning what each trait or skill does.
Next is combat, including tactical combat, and other special case scenarios. You now have a grasp of the whole system, which allows you to evaluate the next section, equipment. Until you've worked through the preceding rules, context of what the gear does, and how it influences things would be non-existent, so doing Combat after this will just have you flying blind.
Finally, the gamemaster guide. There's no place to put that any sooner.
while providing examples on how they work with....partial explanations as they go along.
What's an example of a partial explanation?
and the metric system is there, for some reason.
Cause BT is metric, and not everyone who plays BT is familiar with metric?
then it shows you some example characters tells you about traits (which cost something called TP which i'm going to presume is the level you purchased of that trait in XP) skills,
Again, that's explained on p. 85.
then goes into combat in detail before showing you how to buy weapons. there's a lot of backtracking involved to figure out what you're building and how it works, and it feels mostly like guesswork unless you're already very familiar with the system's in and outs (i'm assuming the grognards aren't having this trouble!).
How would you be able to evaluate what gear to get unless you know how combat works?
How can you know how combat works unless you know about traits and skills (since both affect combat)?
on top of that, the equipment lists and charts are.....difficult to understand at best. Euipment all starts with an availability list that doesn't seem to ever explain the order i'm supposed to read it in in spite of them using the same letter codes for everything.
Again, that's explained on page 254-255, literally the first pages of the equipment section. Including the order in which you read them. Tech / Availability (3 eras) / Legality.
the charts are worse, as they seem to be in mostly random parts of their chapter.
What's an example of that?
Finally, the entire book seems to be written with the assumption the basics are already obvious and simply skims them to put as much focus on resolving unexpected occurrences from combining the tabletop game or with normal play as they strike the person writing them without giving the reader any real description of how to handle something.
What about p.33 - 43? Yes, the book does assume you've read and understood those 10 pages.
This isn't so much a game guide as it is a rules compendium, you can't give this to someone and expect them to learn how to play it without an game vet doing the job the core game book should be doing: teaching them how the core game mechanics operate in a simple digestible form.
There's quite a few examples in every rule section. I'm not sure how to break it down any more, though you're welcome to try out the free Quickstart rules, which eliminate some detail. Maybe approaching it from that angle will be useful to you.
The bare bones of the complaint is this: the book doesn't tell you how to play the game. it tells you how to resolve rule conflicts while playing the game from what i can make out, and the two are not the same thing.
I would agree that they're 2 different things, but I do not agree that the book doesn't tell you how to play the game. There's quite a bit of pagecount devoted to doing just that. I reckon a good 50 pages could be cut if it was only intended to be a book that vets can use. Heck, 2 pages are used to explain what an RPG *is*. It's definitely made with the presumption everything has to be explained because 0 pre-existing knowledge might be in place.
To be clear: I'm not trying to brush off your concern. I recognize that part of my problem is that I'm fairly deep in to it. Good chunks of it were written by me, other chunks had the benefit or misfortune to be exposed to a lot of my input or influence. So, that bias is impossible for me to avoid completely, I'm sure.
Still, WJP might have a point when he suggests that you may be dealing with information overload. I would agree that you're not likely to retain it all if you read through it quickly once. Most brains (mine included) just aren't going to retain that volume. So it may be worth while to look at the quick start rules, or to just get an initial grasp of the stuff on p.33-43 before going through the rest of it.
And maybe initially, just do a brief session with a couple of archetypes so you can get your hands around combat and basic gameplay. Once you've mastered those elements, perhaps it's worth while to look at chargen with fresh eyes.
