[quote=Jig]
I definitely think having a core "How do I get stuck in?" speed-guide is a good idea. When you get a video game, you throw the instructions out of the way as you get the disc out the box, tell the annoying tutorial level where it can stick its helpful advice, and it's only when you get slaughtered on the first boss that you start to look at what you're doing wrong.I also totally agree with advice #2-5, but I think for a detailed guide in any one topic, going into detail is kind of the point. Leaving out important stuff for the sake of brevity results in missing information. For more basic guides, as you've shown above, the 1,000 mark is probably sufficient.OT: Are you looking for advice on the What is PbPRP guide, btw?
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[quote=Brovo]Average readers get through about 200 words per minute. So try to aim for no more than 1,000 words [b]per concept[/b].[/quote]

If you have a hundred things to say, it's fine to make it a long, essay-like structure, because you have a hundred concepts to convey. It's not fine if you use the same amount of space for fifty concepts: That means that you just wasted 50% of your total space, which harms clarity and generally annoys readers. As I mentioned (I think) the PbPRP Guide would be the shortest and most brutally simple of the three since it's just hitting the baselines.

Also, yes, I'm looking for advice if you want to offer it. No reason to say no to another pair of eyes and another brain giving input. :lol

[b]@Prince:[/b] Couple of things.

[b]#1:[/b] Why do we need twelve chapters? I mean even in your skeleton, there's only one chapter with a name. The fourth 'unit' doesn't even have a clear purpose: It's just question marks. Rather than building a giant architecture straight away, if we're going to write this... We should probably address what actually needs writing. What points need to be hit, and in what order, and how important they are for the general role player. For instance, GM's probably need to understand how plots work. That could be a "chapter". Systems in a PbPRP sense are entirely optional and usually heavily simplified from their D&D uncles, so that could probably also be relegated to a solitary chapter instead of being separated and alienated entirely from "text-based role play" (which is a bit of a misnomer really: All role play in PbPRP is text based. :hehe). Especially since "text-based" and "systems-based" share a lot of common ground: They both use plots, they both have characters, they both are set up near identically on a forum, etc. Nation RPing is more of a subset or niche, so it would have less priority, and be further down the line.

The best part of making them individual modules that can stand relatively independently of one another would be that the consistency problem essentially disappears. Since every "chapter" would be written with the purpose of focusing on that specific concept or set of concepts. For instance, a guide on Nation RPing would focus far more heavily on mechanics than it would on story or plot, so it would naturally take a somewhat different structure. Then, anyone in the group could write a guide that they think is necessary, everyone else could have a gander at it, take turns putting it through the [url=http://frombehindthescope.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/peer-review-nick-kim-cartoon3-resize-1.jpg]scientific gauntlet[/url] until it's at the utmost it can be, then deciding if it's worth keeping, then putting it as a "chapter" in the structure based on how many people could possible need it.

Also, the less talk of sub-chapters, the better. If a single concept cannot be organized appropriately within a chapter and it requires sub-chapters, it's already too complex for the average high school student to understand and/or care for, and we will have lost the target demographic's attention.

[b]#2:[/b] [url=http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/elitist]Elitism in general does not have a good connotation[/url], especially on this forum. The purpose of stating it wasn't to imply anything about your personal beliefs on the term, it was to make the point clear that taking a tone of superiority will not sell well to the demographic we are aiming at, (which by definition an 'elitist' tone [i]is[/i] implying superiority as per the definition of elitism), whether or not the tone has anything implicitly wrong with it is beside the point. No offense was intended however and I apologize, though I can't promise that it won't crop up because it's a natural part of my vocabulary.

[b]#3:[/b] The PbPRP Guide is modeled after the "For Dummies" guide books. It's meant as an intro for people who have no idea what forum role playing is, ergo why it's also the shortest, since it's really just an over-glorified introduction that spends the majority of its time giving tips for rather self-intuitive concepts rather than explaining them. The conclusion (which isn't finished there) is meant to immediately shove people towards the Player guide, which would actually teach the advanced concepts about how characters function both in the mechanics and the story. It's also something that, after the player and GM guides were written up, I was completely happy with scrapping if it felt redundant.