ADLG: Learning Materials Part 1

As I began my preparations for my first ADLG competition I was inspired by a post on the ADLG Yahoo! group to develop my own reference sheets.  The first full version was finished a week later.

At the outset the idea was to:

• Create a sheet on how to start a game.
• Tabulate the factors for each of the four major processes in ADLG.
• Combine the main tables and all the special cases.
• Create sheets that could be used to look up factors during a game.
• Act as a half way house between the full rules and the standard QRS. 

My plan was not to create a playing aid for long term use but rather create a learning aid to hasten the day when I could play with just the standard QRS.



Whilst working on the sheets I realised I had an opportunity to straighten out some of the logic used. I've written about this issue before; inconsistent phrasing of individual rules can make things far more difficult to memorise than they need be.

With these ADLG sheets I tried to standardise how the many criteria and exceptions were structured.  I wasn't always successful but I did iron out quite few kinks. The latest version of my efforts is available to download but use at your own risk. Please leave any feedback, suggestions or corrections in the comments.

Having created the process sheets the next thing to do was test them during a game.  I've now played three games with the sheets and I am very pleased with the Game Setup pages.  They worked really well and starting a game using them is fine. I am less pleased with the other pages.  They didn't really help me during play. In fact I sometimes struggled to find even the basic factors.

Overall, a mixed bag.  I was really surprised that the process sheets weren't more helpful.  I expected them to be much more useful.  I think this was because:

• Sometimes I just didn't know where to look. I hope this is because I am still learning ADLG and the sheets are also still new to me (despite the fact I designed them). 
• ADLG is a fast paced game with lots of dice rolling.  The former is a good thing but the later is not ideal if you are scrabbling with pages trying to work lots of factors out.

In the future I hope all the process sheets will become more useful to me.  I suspect this will happen once I have mastered the basic factors.

In the meantime I have decided I need something far simpler.  What I came up with is covered in Part 2.