Why aren't comics more common in TTRPGs?
(This is about game design and presentation) In school one of the things I discovered is that I have trouble absorbing info from a big text book. And most TTRPGs are presented as text books. Once I understand the basic information in the book (chemistry textbook or RPG sourcebook or whatever) I can deal with the book on my own terms. I can dive into individual parts and learn, and slowly absorb the book as a whole. But I need help to get there. I need an access port. Sometimes this comes in the form of someone explaining the book to me. Explaining the rules of the game or the outline of an essay. This is great, and gives me a way in so I can absorb and master the book myself. But I don't always have someone in my life who can do that. Interestingly, I don't have this problem with novels at all. Narrative feels easier to access, at least for me.
In school I also discovered Scot McCloud's Understanding Comics. This is a pretty fantastic book which I'd recommend to everyone. It helped me understand how I process information. More importantly, it helped me understand the different people process information in different ways. I hadn't realized that at age 16, although I was starting to suspect it. Before I started making comics or games I used to be a teacher. As a teacher I could see that some of my kids were struggling with the information I was giving them, in the same way I had struggled in school. I started using comics in class to help reach these students. I'd draw little comics on my handouts or on the whiteboard to explain what we were learning. The goal wasn't to provide an entire lesson in comics form. I'm not Scott McCloud! Instead, I was trying to find an access point for my students. An on ramp. A port of entry to the ideas and material we were covering so they could engage and eventually absorb the information. It worked so well. It worked like magic. Why don't we do this more in TTRPGs? I used comics in my early games, Panty Explosion Perfect and Ocean. These were narrative comics, not rules comics, but the goal was to provide both an example of what play looked like (from a narrative standpoint) and a point of access for players who weren't sure what the game was or how to engage with it. My thought was that if you understood what the game was supposed to look like it would be easier to approach the rules. (A short comic from Ocean. The book has a bunch of these)
When my brother Nick and I started working on The Magical Land of Yeld I knew I wanted to use comics more directly as a teaching tool. Especially because part of our target audience was new and younger players who might look at a big text book (Yeld is a giant 400 page hardcover) and just bounce right off it. Like I did in school and like I often do with big games. So I needed to teach with examples and illustrations, and especially comics.
The first comics you'll encounter in the Yeld book are narrative, and designed to get you into the ideas and themes of the game. But in the first few pages we also start sprinkling in rules comics. These are presented along side the rules text. They don't replace that text, which is important. The text explains the rules in greater detail, and includes information that just couldn't be added in a single page comic. Instead, the comic is intended to be a point of access to the rules text. A player can read the comic, understand the basic concept, and feel comfortable engaging with the text. That's the goal, to make players comfortable and to make the rules text accessible.
We use comics to teach basic game mechanics, but we also use them to explain specific player facing systems. Sometimes these are things that really do need a comic to explain them, but sometimes we use comics as lures to draw player attention to mechanics that we're afraid they might otherwise not engage with. For example, in playtesting we found that when characters died during a fight the player would just sit there for the rest of the fight and not engage. It turned out, since you don't do anything in D&D once you die (except slowly die more), most players assume that's how all games work! So they hadn't even noticed that in Yeld you become a Ghost and get to ghost around and do fun Ghost stuff! I decided to create a comic that not just explained this but drew attention to it and showed why it was a fun (and important) part of the game!
Structure of play isn't always obvious to players, especially if they're new to TTRPGs or have only played D&D. You pick up habits from the games you play the most, and since most gamers play nothing but D&D there is a tendency to assume EVERYTHING works like D&D. Yeld doesn't, so we decided to take nothing for granted and make comics that very specifically show what a session of play looks like. In this example, it may not look a lot different from D&D, but the adventure is specifically divided into 5 parts. The comic illustrates these parts in a way that is easy to understand. The accompanying game text explains each part in more detail and illustrates how they are important to play. The comic serves as a ramp that gets players to the info they need.
Not all of our comics are player facing. Yeld has a rotating GM (which is awesome, btw), and this means every player gets a chance in the Game Master roll. Which means every player needs to understand how this roll works. Comics like this one, which explain how to build monsters to use in your game, help make the process easy to understand. Again, its about building a point of entry for players. A player might say "I don't want to GM, it sounds to complicated!" But its not. You just need to make it easy for them. Make the mechanics and responsibilities easy to understand. Show why they're fun! In Yeld, its important that each player takes on the GM role from time to time, since we're building a story together. Making it look fun is important! Comics help with that. What's more fun than comics?
Narrative comics are important too. At least for Yeld. I don't think every game benefits from them (although I always love seeing them). Narrative comics show players what the game is supposed to look like. What the characters do and say. What environments they visit. Narrative comics set a tone. Narrative comics let new players understand what a game is about immediately! We can hand a Yeld book to a new player or customer and they know what's up in seconds, just by reading a short single page comic. That's a powerful tool. So why don't more games use comics? Part of it is that game creators are usually not comic creators. There's not a lot of crossover. That always surprises me, but both disciplines take a lot of work. Who has time for both? Even when you have game designers that are comic creators, they often don't include comics in the games (Lancer???). I don't think this means game designers don't recognize the value of comics. I've had this conversation with so many game designers, and they usually agree that comics are useful tools. But if you don't know how to make comics, making comics for your game can be daunting. What rules should you focus on? How do you present that information in comic form? How many comics should you make? How do you hire someone to make comics, anyway? Hiring artists is expansive, btw. You know that, of course. Hiring an artist to make a set of comics for your game could cost you thousands of dollars (or more), depending on what you want. Of course, you can try to make your own comics. And you should! Really! A poorly drawn comic is not necessarily a bad comic. The point is to get your information across to your reader. to provide a point of access. You don't need great art for that (although great art can help attract people to your game). Stick figure work just fine. Here's an example, the layout for the Tea Dragon card game. Another artist took this layout and redrew it in their own style. But my goal here was to be simple and concise with my explanation of the rules. To make the game accessible.
There's a few more pages of this, but you get the idea. The purpose is to explain, and make the player comfortable with learning more. The art matters to the extent that it serves this goal. In fact, flashy or complicated art can get in the way! You'll notice in that most of the Yeld rules comics I posted above the art is pretty simple, with solid color backgrounds. You want to make your comics as easy to read as possible, and that includes avoiding clutter, overpacked word balloons and messy layout. Readers are easily distracted. It doesn't take much for them to set down a book at all. A complicated phrase or hard to read font can often be enough. And once they set a book down they may not every pick it up again. That's more true for a big text book than it is for a comics, but its still true for a comic. So our goal is to make our comic the easiest, smoothest point of access it can possibly be. So easy and smooth that the reader can slide right into the rules text without noticing! Here's my general process for creating a rules comic. This is from my friend Brian's game Scofflaws. I start by taking the basic mechanics that need to be illustrated and breaking them down into panels. The goal is to make each panel readable and not overwhelm the player. At this point I'm just doing a rough sketch. It may not eve=n be readable, but that's fine!
Next, I refine the text and art. I decide on the exact language I'll use, and I finalize where characters and other elements will be placed. As you can see, the actual layout didn't change much here. Sometimes it changes a lot!
Finally, I create the finished art. Honestly, the previous step was just fine. It explanans the rules I wanted to explain. But this last step allows me to add in some narrative flavor. The first panel contains a complicated background in order to present the game's setting. The characters look like the kind of characters you'll play in the game. This isn't nessacary for presenting rules, but it helps present the game as a whole. You want players to engage with every part of your game. The last thing you want them doing is picking up your dungeon crawling game and going "Oh, this would be great for playing Star Wars!"
(I probably shouldn't have chose than shade of red for the background. It makes the text a bit hard to read!) So again, why aren't we seeing more comics in games? Its not as if they don't exist at all, and I'm personally always excited to see them. I recently opened the Final Fantasy RPG box set and was so happy to find the rules were accompanied by cute comics. And there's lot of other examples (maybe you can post some in the comments). But I think comics are a clearly underused tool in game design and presentation. And as a comic person, let me tell you that you're leaving a valuable tool on the table if you're not considering using comics. Are they right for every game? Maaaybe not? But I think MANY MANY MANY games could benefit form them. Are they expensive? They can be. Are they hard to make? They can be. Are there people you can go to for advice? Hey, my door is open.
