RPG Layout

[Paganini]

For Cindi, a bit, but also I want to present an idea I had for the layout for Cornerstone. :smile:

Cindi, and anyone who's interested, I have an RPG Layout FAQ up on my http://paganini.knightswood.net">website.

It has a lot of nuts and bolts info about what fonts are good for what tasks, what sort of tools are available, and so on.

The layout idea I had for Cornerstone is this:

As a small, freeform game, I intend Cornerstone to be relased in the form of a small booklet. This game will be e-published (most likely in PDF). Being a fan of conserving paper and ink, and of the small profile of the BESM books, I intend for this to be printed out doublesided on letter sized paper, then folded in half so that you have a nice 5.5 x 8 sized book. The page count will probably beo somewhere above 10 pages, but certainly not more than 50. :smile:

This will have room for about one collumn of text per page, with headers and footers for page numbers, and a smallish margin.

I think that the nature of this game will work well without chapter divisions at all. The game will be sectionalized by paragraphs, but not divided into actual chapters.

I will do this with ease of reference in mind... it's been my experience that chapters do not actually aid you in looking up the rule you need to know. What I intend to do us have a thumb heading in the margin for each section. So, for example, in the section that explains descriptors, I'd have descriptors writen in the margin next to the paragraph. In the begining of the book, rather than have a table of contents, I'll have an index of these thumb words, giving the page numbers for each one. I doubt if this would work with a large game, where you might have hundreds of such headings, but for this game I could probably put all of them on one or two pages. This will make it really easy to flip right to the rule you want to reread.

What do you think?

[Cynthia Celeste Miller]

Cindi, and anyone who's interested, I have an RPG Layout FAQ up on my http://paganini.knightswood.net">website.

Yep, I read that.  Very good information.  I suggest everyone check it out.

As a small, freeform game, I intend Cornerstone to be relased in the form of a small booklet. This game will be e-published (most likely in PDF). Being a fan of conserving paper and ink, and of the small profile of the BESM books, I intend for this to be printed out doublesided on letter sized paper, then folded in half so that you have a nice 5.5 x 8 sized book. The page count will probably beo somewhere above 10 pages, but certainly not more than 50. :smile:

I like this format for games will small page counts.  

I think that the nature of this game will work well without chapter divisions at all. The game will be sectionalized by paragraphs, but not divided into actual chapters.

Yeah, putting chapters into such a nice, small book would be overkill, IMO.  Like shooting ducks with an elephant gun. lol

I will do this with ease of reference in mind... it's been my experience that chapters do not actually aid you in looking up the rule you need to know.

While this may be true in many cases, I think chapter divisions are a great thing for books with a lot of pages.  Why?  

1) Because, in my experience, chapters give a certain "mental organization" factor.  They keep the book from looking like one big mound of pages.  The smaller the book, the less need for chapters there is.

2) Memory purposes.  Okay, let's say you've bought the 350 page rulebook for a game called "Jive Turkeys: the Discoing".  As GM, you've absorbed the book and know your way around decently enough.  Your player is now on the phone with you, asking where Rule X is.  If your memory is up to snuff, you might be able to say, "Oh it's on page 173".  But most of us can't do that.  It's much easier to reference a chapter.

What I intend to do us have a thumb heading in the margin for each section.

This sounds like a reasonable approach.  In fact, I'd say that it's the best approach....at least IMO.  I would recommend framing the margins or something to set them apart from the main text.  You probably already thought of that, but still....

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

My concerns regarding layout are as follows.

1) Digestible blocks. One's gaze takes in a page, before taking in words and sentences, and it relates that page to the ones preceding and the one following (if visible). A person quickly evaluates "effort" that is going to go into keeping the big picture straight, and if that effort looks irritating, the person becomes easily distracted and the mind begins to enter a back-burner wandering mode.

People generally do not realize that they do this, and often cannot coherently explain why they can or cannot read certain texts.

I realize that this point does not apply to story prose. It does apply, in full, to any argument-based or explanatory text.

A related point is to consider bullets, boxes, or other set-off text devices, but this requires "payoff" - the reader has to learn, early, that these devices do indeed represent different or special or example-based material. The cherished sidebar in many game texts becomes useless when it is simply more text that could well have been in the body page.

2) Illustrations. I've mentioned this on the Forge before, but I think Greg Stafford is absolutely correct in saying that illustrations serve an organizational purpose, in addition to accompanying text or setting a mood. I also think the organizational purpose is the primary one - the pictures serve as place-markers and useful

Thus design elements and pictures that are too similar from page to page, too common as well as too rare, or that show no pattern at all, are not useful; the person says it's distracting or too busy. But it works great if pictures and design elements permit me to go flip-flip, past the lizard picture, oh, but not past the babe picture, and here in this part just before the black boxed text on the left - there it is, the text I was looking for.

Right now the prevailing design aesthetic says more art is good, but I have come to think that a piece per four pages is, in addition to well-done boxed/listed text with a distinctive design, is much more satisfying over the long term.

3) Organizational help - in Sorcerer, I hit upon the idea of having all the chapter sections listed across the top left page, as well as the chapter name listed across the top right page. On the top left, the section that one happens to be in is solid, whereas the others are grey. This worked so well that I did it for both supplements too. I may be biased, but I think it works better than any other device I've seen for keeping one's place or flipping to the right spot.

Finally, it so happens that I'm also considering doing some  "booklet" style products, and I agree that chapters are not really the right unit within them. Designated and recognizable sections, however, would be crucial.

Best,
Ron

[James V. West]

Good advice from everyone here. Thanks.

Layout is vital to understanding and digestion. I agree with you, Ron, that artwork not only serves as an atmosphere-builder and information tool, but also as place markers. I unconsciously use pics all the time to keep my place. So, in that light, too many illustrations clouds things up. If you're going to have a ton of art, it helps to stagger the size and/or style of the drawings. In other words, have a full-page pic here, then follow with a series of smaller ones, then another full page pic, etc..

I remember picking up a comic book years ago called Ms Mystic. I think it was drawn by Neil Adams, who is a fine artist. But the layout of the comic was so unusual it was a struggle to read. Panel borders were non-existant in most cases and the flow of the narrative ran in strange, counter-intuitive lines. The same thing can easily happen in any book or any page layout.

I heard a few people complain about the layout of DnD3e because the text is hard to read. Personally, I like the layout, but I can see where it may push the boundaries of what is comfortable and practicle.

Some of this "poor planning" comes from the so-called "Jurassic Park" sydrome: we're so thrilled that we have all this neato computer-aided stuff we don't spend enough time considering when we need to use it and when shouldn't.

[Laurel]

RPG layout in general is an important topic to me right now.  I posted some things in a different thread, about what I value in layout.  I'll add in my .02 on the importance of subsectioning.  Good points were made by Ron on this and art as an organizational tool.  That wasn't something I had considered.

Too much art defeats this purpose, however, because as you skim through, all the pictures blend together in your mind.  I'd rather have a text-only block of 3-4 pages with clear subdivisions than a half page picture on virtually every page, most of them mediocre in quality or barely pertaining to the text.  

[Matt Snyder]

I intend for this to be printed out doublesided on letter sized paper, then folded in half so that you have a nice 5.5 x 8 sized book. The page count will probably beo somewhere above 10 pages, but certainly not more than 50. :smile:

How can you make this work on a PDF without confusing the hell out of consumers? I assume you're taking about taking a number of pages, printing them, then taking that whole stack and foldling the stack once to form the book (effectively creating one signature).

To do this, the pages of PDF must be arranged in such a way that makes NO sense to most folks. Signatures (i.e. folding double sided pages) can get real confusing with out some detailed instructions. For example, assuming you make just a 12 page booklet using only 3 sheets of legal paper, this means the pages must be printed in the following format:

Side 1, sheet 1: Page 12 facing Page 1
Side 2, sheet 1: Page 2 facing Page 11
Side 1, sheet 2: Page 10, facing Page 3
Side 2, sheet 2: Page 4 facing Page 9
Side 1, sheet 3: Page 8 facing Page 5
Side 2, sheet 3: Page 6 facing Page 7

When someone sees this PDF & prints it out, they'll be confused as hell. I know the few times I've put books together with signatures, it boggles my brain, and I need a detailed thumbnail map to keep track of everything.

So, I guess my question is, do you know another way to fold double-sided, facing layout pages? Am I missing something?

[Paganini]

So, I guess my question is, do you know another way to fold double-sided, facing layout pages? Am I missing something?

No, you pretty much nailed it. :) Unless someone out there has a cute trick, I'll be printing out something like this:

First sheet front:

Front cover / back cover

First sheet back:

First page / last page

etc. etc. etc.

So, yeah, it'll be really confusing to just read. However, it'll be easy to do in practice... with PDF, you do a "print odd pages only," and let the whole thing run. Then you flip the whole stack over and do a "print even pages only." Then you fold it in half and staple... viola.

Most likely I would give buyers two PDFs, one formatted for screen reading, the other formatted for printing.

[Matt Snyder]

Most likely I would give buyers two PDFs, one formatted for screen reading, the other formatted for printing.

You know, after some more thought, I realized this isn't as horribly confusing as I made it sound. If they can print both sides, then it really is just a matter of not disturbing the sheets and folding the thing. Voila!

Of course, you already answered my next question -- whether you'd offer 2 pdfs. One for printing, and one for reading (in "order").

Thanks for the reply. By the way, I liked your information on typography. I'm a typography nut, so I found it interesting. Bringhurst's book is already my bible!

[Paganini]

Thanks for the reply. By the way, I liked your information on typography. I'm a typography nut, so I found it interesting. Bringhurst's book is already my bible!

No problem! I'm not that much of a typographist myself, but I know some guys who are really into it, so I've picked up a few things. If you're interested, I've got a layout FAQ on my website: http://paganini.knightswood.net/

[Jack Spencer Jr]

And as a note on fonts, I had a devil of a time read Hero's 4th ed Champions.  I never knew why, although I did blame the font, but it turns out it's because they used a form of Sans Serif.

As it has been explained to me, "serif" refers to the curves in the characters and sans serif is without curves.  (As I understand it)

Sans Serif works for anything that is mean to be seen on a computer screen.  Less curves, I guess.  But Serif works better on the printed page.  Or such is one guy's opinion and I can tell you the Champions font seemed to swim in front of my eyes.

One more thing to keep in mind.

addendum:

Another note, and this goes along with the Capturing the Spirt thread.

In a past edition of Rolemaster, the ever important critical hit charts were written in a fancy Old English-style font.  This was in the spirit of the fantasy game, but rendered the charts nearly illegible.  Later editions used a less fancy but more legible font.

[J B Bell]

Sans Serif means the little "curlies" around the ends of the strokes are absent.

Sans Serif fonts are considered more "legible"--in the arcane world of typography, that means that it's easy to tell one letter apart from any other (apparently no one noticed you can't tell a lower-case "L" from a capital "I" to save your life).  So this makes it nice for posters, and good for computers with crummy, less scalable fonts (like the thrice-damned X Windows/Linux I'm using right now).

On the other hand, serifed fonts, like Times-Roman, are considered more "readable"--that is, it's easier for the eye to travel across several lines of the stuff and not get lost, supposedly because of subtle horizontal cues provided by the curly bits.  (This is also why you usually want to avoid full justification, unless you have multiple columns of text.  Since the right margin is the same on every line, you can't tell one line from another and are more likely to accidentally skip ahead or behind.  If you have several columns, as in a newspaper, however, you need the full justification because it creates a very distinct visual "fence" that you can easily avoid breaking, so you don't read right into the next column instead of down to the next line.)

So there you go.  Of course, Ron Edwards uses both full justification and Helvetica (or something like it) in Sorcerer, and it's one of the most excellently laid-out texts I've ever seen.  Clearly this is because he has a Demon that Boosts his Cover significantly.

Or it could be I'm just kind of stuffy and traditional, since I was traumatized in my youth by such hideous, misbegotten abortions as Wired magazine.

--TQuid

[Bailey]

I'd just like to give props to my favorite font, Janson.  When I was young I loved Anne Rice novels.  Years later when I reread the only thing nice I can think to say is "That's a damn sexy typeface."