(Children themselves don't give a fuck about this - it is totally lost on them. My daughter prefers looking at mail-order catalogues.)
People publishing RPGs, particularly self-publishing them, will find it next to impossible to match the production values of your average children's title, but there are a few things that I think could be replicated.
The first of these is the use of smaller formats. A4 (or "letter size" as you Americans charmingly call it) is horrible to read. There are plenty of kids' books that employ it, but they do so unwisely. It is too big to focus the eye and annoying to hold and a hassle to page through. You really notice this more when the person you are reading a book with has small hands, but once noticed, you realise it's crap for adult hands too.
The second is giving space for the text to breathe. Many children's books have a single sentence on a page, aligned in the centre. Nobody would advocate that for an RPG rule book. But it is a very nice and uncluttered way to present information. Imagine an RPG book with this sort of design, with text (more text, of course) nicely arranged on one side and art on the other, all the way through:
The third (but then I would say this) is the use of landscape format - small landscape format. Big landscape format just makes things more unwieldy. But small landscape format works very nicely: something about having the pages spread out across your lap makes the information much more easily digestible than squashed into a trade-paperback or even A5 portrait format. See for instance:
And the fourth is the use of cardstock. I have increasingly wondered whether there might be space for more rules-lite, or fluff-lite, RPG books to be presented on cardstock rather than paper. Perhaps it is only due to nostalgia, but the experience of holding and turning cardstock pages really is rather nice indeed - you really want to know what is on the other side. Something in the weight of the pages, and their relative scarcity, makes turning them an event. It works. And it's also robust to continual use at the table.
All very nice ideas, but for those publishing in electronic format: please make sure your fancy stuff can easily be printed out at home. For what it's worth, I like pdf stuff that can be printed in booklet format, which is indeed nicer to handle than full A4.
ReplyDeleteGiving text space really works. I don't have an RPG example, but the Rogue Planet miniature rules nicely illustrate this. The game comes in 2 editions, one is A4 with pretty dense text, the other is a smaller square book where sections are split up over several pages in ways that make sense logically. This makes it easier to find what you need when flipping through the rules as it immediately jumps out. even though the small book has more than double the number of pages than the A4 edition (ok, that's partly due to more artwork as well).
ReplyDeleteI'd buy an Each Peach Pear Plum gazetteer all bedtime long. Brevity and clarity are what I really admire about children's books. Many RPGs and adult books would benefit from more attention to those two things.
ReplyDeleteChildren's books and RPG books have one thing in common: neither are purchased by the actual "consumer" of the product. However, there's a big difference as well: the consumers of RPGs -- the players -- may never even see a particular game book, even if their gamemaster makes heavy use of it. It's as if a parent got a children's book for bedtime read-aloud but never let the kid look at it.
ReplyDeleteAnd gamemasters, who buy the books, are likely to want to maximize the quantity of stuff they get, rather than value the presentation of said stuff. When you look at older games it's amazing how much text they could cram into a 24-page stapled book.
Not a fan of heavy boxed text adventures then?
DeleteOn the main post, if I ever make a book, it'll probably be in A5 landscape too. Done a few trial runs for things, and I thought it'd be a pig to print out and test the layout, but it's actually not too bad:
The tricky bit is reordering the pages, but if you print them double sided with two A5 pages to an A4 page in alternating order, going cover,2,1,3,etc. and print 2 to an a4 sheet, you'll always get the right pages matching up.
You can do that yourself doing print to pdf, take that to a any print shop, get it cut with a paper guillotine into two piles, alternate the piles again to get them back in order, then get it comb bound. Bit more labour intensive than just duplex printing an A4 document and comb binding that, but lets you test it in play.
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThat is actually a really interesting observation.
DeleteA4 paper RPG books tend to be really aggravating to read as a PDF as well. Landscape also works better for reading on laptops which is a big help.
ReplyDeleteThat was part of the thinking behind the Yoon-Suin format.
DeleteThe children's book format is perfect for the OSR mind.
ReplyDeleteHi, Kent.
DeleteHi David, you are making the sort of posts that Grognardia made which were bland and yet aroused a fuzzy feeling in readers stomachs.
Delete