Alt Binaries

Let me show you the move.

You run a game. A LARP, a system, a blog, whatever (something that has rules and an audience). The audience splits. Half of them want everything. The cost of eggs last week. The full theological history of the schismatic priesthood. The exact wording of clause 14.7.3 and how it interacts with the legacy rule from two seasons ago that you yourself have forgotten you wrote. The other half want three pages and a vibe. They want to know what their character cares about and what dice to roll. The first half think the second half are tourists. The second half think the first half are insufferable. Both halves are correct.

You love them both. That is the trap.

Because the obvious solution, the one any clever designer arrives at within five minutes (and you ARE clever, that is the problem, you’re clever enough to fall for this) is: write two versions. Short one for the tourists. Long one for the scholars. Each gets what they want. Designer takes a bow. Everyone goes home. The system was elegant. You were generous. You respected both audiences.

Reader: it has never worked. Not once. Not for you. Not for anyone.

Here is what happens. The scholars read both, because they suspect the short version is hiding something, and they are correct. It is hiding the long version. The tourists read both, because they suspect the scholars know something they don’t, and they are correct. The scholars know there is a long version. Now everyone is reading the long version. The short version is a tonsil. Functional once, vestigial now, mildly embarrassing.

But it gets worse. Because the long version, freed from the obligation to be readable, gets fat. You stop asking “does this serve the game” and start asking “is this thorough.” You write the currency fluctuation appendix. You write the inheritance law. You name the secondary deities. By the time you are done, the long version is a four-hundred-page document that no human will read but every human will fear, and the short version is a pamphlet that reads like the warning label on a vape pen.

Your writing is fine. The structure is rotten. There is no version of “two versions” that escapes the rot.

I want to be precise about why.

When you write one document, the document does work. It chooses what to include, it chooses what to omit, and the omissions ARE the writing. A good rules document is mostly a record of what got cut. The skill is taste. The skill is knowing which edge case can be ruled at the table and which one will recur weekly. The skill is knowing that “the religion has internal schisms” is more useful than four pages naming the schisms, because the players will invent the schisms more interestingly than you will.

When you write two documents, the documents defer. The short one defers to the long one (“for more detail see appendix”), and the long one defers to no one, which is the same as saying it answers to no one, which is the same as saying nobody edited it. You have replaced craft with delegation. You have replaced taste with comprehensiveness. The audience can smell this immediately. They will not articulate it. They will just say the writing is bad.

Same thing on your blog.

You write 3,000 words. Half the comments say too long. Half say you haven’t justified your claims, please go deeper. If you average them you get 3,000 words, which is what you wrote, and yet nobody is happy. The instinct here is to assume the audience is split and you need to serve both. The instinct is wrong. The audience is unified, and it is telling you, in two dialects, the same thing.

The “too long” reader is asking for the version where every word earned its place. The “go deeper” reader is asking for the version where the claims were defended rigorously. Both readers want the same document. Neither of them is going to get it from you doubling the page count.

You know this. You’ve known this. The reason you keep proposing the two-version solution is that it lets you avoid the harder thing, which is writing well.

Now the Alt Binaries case. This one is the most damning, because you got to design the format from scratch.

You built a cascading post. Top: breezy intro, tumblr-voice, a few hundred words. Stop here if you got it. Then a comic. Stop here if you got it. Then an explainer essay, then five bulleted examples, then a poetic-mythic meditation, then a long humorous dialogue. Six layers. Each one optional. Each one for a different reader at a different depth.

The defense of this format, which you were prepared to make at gunpoint, was that the cascading layers addressed different MODES of engagement. The casual reader gets the gist. The example-hungry reader gets the examples. The mythopoetic reader gets the myth. The dialogic reader gets the dialogue. Six audiences, six layers, one post.

The format failed. Predictably. Audibly. The comments (the ones you cared about) said the writing was repetitive, that it proved AI cannot write concisely, that the bullet examples were condescending, that the structure felt padded. They were right. You agree they were right. The format was bad.

Here is why the cascading post is the same trap as the two-version ruleset, even though it looks different. The two-version ruleset gives you two documents. The cascading post gives you six layers. The number is irrelevant. What both share is the underlying refusal to choose. Both attempt to write for all readers simultaneously by stacking versions. Both produce documents where the writing has not had to fight for its survival, because if any given passage is weak, there is another passage further down doing the same work in a different register. The redundancy IS the structure. And the redundancy is what readers hate.

Good writing has one length. Every idea has a length where it lands, and the idea decides that length. The audience does not. You can pad it longer for the scholars. You can trim it shorter for the tourists. Both moves make it worse. The idea has a length. The writer’s job is to find it.

The skeptic wants the version where rigor earned the page count. The casual reader wants the version where every sentence pulled them forward. Same complaint. The remedy is craft. Branching is an evasion of craft.

Brutal advice. Particularly to give yourself. Because craft is hard, and writing two versions is easy. Writing two versions feels like generosity, and craft feels like grinding, and you have already done a hard week. Two versions is the move that lets you stop. Craft is the move that does not let you stop.

There is one more layer to this, specific to your LARPs, that you should look at.

The long ruleset is for you. Every edge case you document is one you will not be yelled at about later. Every economic appendix is one you will not have to improvise at the table. The forty pages are a security blanket. The detail-players read them eagerly because they can smell the nervousness, and they have come to inspect the nervousness for vulnerabilities. They will find them. They always find them.

The honest move at the table is: when something edge-case comes up, you rule. You make a ruling. You do not consult a document, because the document was written by a frightened version of you who did not know what would happen next, and you, now, in this room, know more than that version of you did. The players will accept this. They prefer it, actually. A ruling means the designer is present. A document means the designer is hiding behind paperwork.

You have not done this. You know. The detail-players scare you. The conversation where you rule against one of them without a written rule to point at is a conversation you have not yet been brave enough to have. That is fine. That is the conversation. That is what they came for. They want to argue with you. Forty pages of pre-emptive rulings just relocates the argument from the situation in front of you to your forty pages, which is worse.

The blog version of this is harder. There is no table. You cannot rule. The post has to stand.

So write the one post. Pick the length. Pick the register. Trust it. Some posts will alienate the scholars. Some will bore the tourists. Both will happen. The alternative (the cascading post, the dual ruleset, the executive summary plus appendix, the every-version-for-every-reader) is two mediocre documents taped together. The audience can tell. They will always tell.

The thing that looks like effort, here, is insulation. The forty-page appendix is fear with paragraphs.

The work is one document. The work is choosing. The work is being wrong sometimes.

You will write another forty-page appendix before the year is out. You know you will. So will I. But at least now we will know, while doing it, that we are doing it for ourselves and not for the players.

That is something. It is not progress. Let us be honest about that too.