Personally, I view the examples of play much like proof. They are demonstrations of principles, showing the why and how of the game. Interestingly enough, I’ve never remotely considered them representative of real play. I find it surprising and intriguing that there are people who do.

I like long, completish examples of play. The ADRPG, Theatrix; I think first-edition BESM had some of them too. Princes’ Kingdom is good on this, though it could stand more. Nobilis gets close, but then cheats its ass off with the cutscenes. Requirements: Must show the actual system in action. Must distinguish between what players are doing/saying and what characters are doing/saying. Ideally in dialog.

Are you disagreeing? I’m confused! Long completish examples of play are great, it just important to know where to put them. In my mind, they’re the “Longer more involved play examples that follow a complete module of your game”. Do you mean that there shouldn’t be the shorter, parsed examples *as well*?

That makes me think of another really important consideration, though: consistency. If for you, the long complete examples are what help and in the first chapter(s) you’ve parsed small example through text followed by a long complete example at the end of the chapter, then you should feel safe skipping through the short parsed examples in knowing that there are long completeish ones coming up. The text shouldn’t fail you in delivering.

What I insist on, at whatever length is, tentative claim: an RPG session is a conversation inflected by rules producing an experience. There’s more to say about it than that, but I want play examples that show how the rules inflect the conversation and what kind of experience can result from that. I think that imposes a brute minimum on length. Frex, it MAY NOT play fast and loose with the character-player distinction, therefore it has to be at least long enough to distinguish between what, say, Jim does and what Citizen Simian does. e.g., if you write that “Captain America rolls for initiative,” I’m going to get angry at you.

How far apart are we?

I don’t think play examples should be skipped or be written to be skippable, fwiw, maybe because my learning style makes them really important to my understanding a game. Perhaps, and I’m reluctant to even suggest this, other people have different learning styles and different needs/interest in play examples than I do.

I don’t think you’re disagreeing with Mo at all until your last point “must not be skippable.”

To which I’ll answer, yes, that is your learning style. But writing them so they can’t be skipped by someone with a different style is a sure way to make sure that people with those styles hate your game.

Writing to fit as many different learning styles as possible is a huge goal in education, and I don’t see why in RPGs we should possibly set the bar any lower and insist that one style be catered to over the others.

What I would be able to agree with you on (and think Mo might too) is to say, “Its really important to have good AP examples that really do show off the game as an intrinsic part of the text that gives people who learn through those play examples what they need to learn the game.”