Robin D. Laws - The Wireless RPG
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The Wireless RPG
Okay, so let’s pretend for the sake of discussion that we live in a near future world where wireless ereaders have become as ubiquitous as iPods. What cool things might this enable us to do in the the world of RPG publishing?
First of all, it’s a natural fit to have our products on ereaders. With its burgeoning cottage industry of items produced solely for the PDF market, hobby gaming is already a pioneer in the e-publishing sector. Searchable rules text, if used adroitly, cuts dead time from rules-heavy game sessions. A Kindle, or its successors, might be less of a focus stealer at the gaming table than the laptop, which has all the distancing effect of a GM screen, and has YouTube on it.
Those are all examples of ways in which a wireless ereader would do what we already do, in an incrementally better way. I’d love to see a day when the format permits innovations in actual design and content.
For example, one of the frustrations of game book design is the eternal tension between instruction manual and reference document. If my main priority is to teach you a new game, I’m going to organize the book in one way, giving you only the details you really need first, and then allowing you to explore special cases later. However, this results in an apparently disorganized text when you’ve learned the game and need to find a particular rule. Is it in the tutorial section at the beginning, or has it been situated in the advanced rules at the back. (Some folks go so far as to attach a bizarre emotional importance to this issue, becoming offended on behalf of their favorite rules if they’re not deemed central enough to appear alongside the guts of the system.)
A future in which the ereader is a major format allows for the possibility of dual-organization books. One is the tutorial document that teaches you the game. The other is the book you refer to after you’ve mastered it.
Constant, easy updatability is also vastly tempting, creatively. I’ve enjoyed, with GUMSHOE, the opportunity to work on an evolving rules set that appears as a series of modular components. Eventually people are going to get tired of repurchasing the core rules, however modified, in pulp & paper format. Ereader publication allows you to add boilerplate sections of text as required, guilt-free.
Also, as I write more scenarios for the system, I often find myself running across instances where it feels right to add a new optional rule. If you I could sell you an ongoing subscription to a new game, optional and special case rules could appear on your wireless reader as they’re developed. Each new update provides you with a fun moment of exploration, giving you a “hit” of the game that, if done properly, reinforces your commitment to it. Errata goes from a source of deep-seated pain to any designer, to a routine opportunity to improve the game. The rules get to evolve in real time, in response to questions and feedback.
Wireless ereaders could also lead to a new offshoot of adventure gaming specifically geared to the medium, which I’ll talk about on Wednesday.
Tags: e-readers, gaming hut, publishing, tech
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As far as I'm concerned, e-copy of games rules has one huge advantage over paper: I can search it. That makes a lot of the layout questions redundant.
And yes, I do have PDF copies of the HQ rules, and a lot of the background books, on my PDA.
I'd rather read them via a PC (which of course with the format being PDF, I can), the overly-fixed layout means a lot of scrolling on a small screen, but it's still a huge improvement.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/67483463/1467002) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) forvrin |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 02:47 pm (UTC) |
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I've been using my laptop with my Qin game lately, and its been alright. It really helps with the combat.
What I need is a better interface. The QWERTY keyboard is really good as long as I give it its full attention. I can single hand interface with a QWERTY without taking longer than I would if I just dropped everything and typed.
A numpad that did ABC cell phone style dialing might not be a bad idea.
Qin? As in first emperor?
| | From: | forvrin |
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| Date: | November 27th, 2007 04:26 am (UTC) |
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Sort of. Its about the period of the warring states, but I'm using it for a simple Wu Xia revenge novel set during the Tang dynasty, about two clans, Ba and Zhao, with an ancient history and the future of the Wu Lin. Also, dragons. Here's the link.
The biggest concern with subscription-based rules is that it makes it much more challenging to develop mastery with a game. You want players and GMs to be able to know the rules without opening the books often, and that means them having a strong familiarity with the rules set. Transparent errata updates and rules inserts make rules a lot trickier to memorize.
I remember this being a stated design goal of 3e D&D: if you're going to change something, change it a lot, not a little bit. D&D 3.5 didn't do this, and to this day it's common for us to run across a spell whose minor tweak has irritating repercussions. I'd imagine that's also one of the reasons that WotC only issues errata for rules that are really, truly broken.
Mind, a subscription-based game is a great thing for a publisher. Who doesn't want a continuing and predictable income stream? But to be effective a wireless ereader might need a way to keep desired new rules completely separate until flagged for merging, or allow for new rules to be clearly flagged as such.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/84386854/1311633) | | From: | jdurall |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 03:23 pm (UTC) |
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Three obvious utilities leap to mind with the wireless ereader viewed through the gaming lens:
1. Clue banks become easier to maintain, especially when the GM merely has to pass the file along. Scraps of newspaper, fake letters, etc. are now centralized rather than in some folder.
2. Published investigative scenarios might even be partial face-to-face, part etext. For example, when the "hacker" character in a group says he's going to go investigate, a "choose your adventure" style interface or locked pages might help guide him to the info he needs, as well as letting that character play effectively "offline" (while at the table) while face-to-face interactions are occurring.
3. Obvious stuff like keeping records of game sessions, etc. become easy if the GM (or group archivist) is able to publish the material as .pdf or a browsable/searchable text file. The best I've seen of this now are done in paper (notebooks or typed session summaries) or online wiki/game pages. Neither is optimal. The first isn't electronically searchable and creates a pile of paper, while the second requires laptops and/or other web-enabled devices at the table. An ereader can lower the amount of crap on the gaming table, which is always a good thing.
Call me a crazed old crank, but I'd miss being able to flip through pages. For an ereader to work for me it'd have to give me the ability to "flip through the book" without repeatedly jabbing at little buttons all the time.
Right now, paper and post-its are a lot easier (and significantly cheaper) than any ereader. Most of the people who participate in the cottage industry of PDF games and supplements still print their stuff out.
On the other hand I'm hopelessly addicted to audible.com, because it's the best way to get the entertainment value out of a book while painting miniatures at the same time.
Of course, one of the reasons that people still print out their PDFs is because the screen format of laptops and computers is not terribly conducive to easy browsing. Sadly, the current offering of ebook readers isn't much better. The Kindle is closer in format, but can't read PDF natively. Instead it has to be converted to it's own format, which loses the layout and design. A four color grey screen just doesn't have the fidelity to display PDFs.
Once I can purchase an eBook that actually can display a readable full page PDF (that I already own) without having to convert it to some other format or pay extra to do so, I'll consider it.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/4100464/515883) | | From: | fengshui |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 05:09 pm (UTC) |
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PDF is not the solution here as it's really not designed for e-readers. What we need is a new format that is designed for e-readers or e-reader-like devices.
I disagree, if only because I have a significant investment in PDFs and I have no intention of buying them again just so I make use of a device that I don't reallly have that much of a need for.
Besides, it's not like they couldn't make an ereader or ereader like device that would be suited for PDF. I say make the reader fit the format rather than force everyone to switch formats.
| | From: | fengshui |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 06:14 pm (UTC) |
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That would be a very expensive reader, effectively a laptop/tablet PC. PDF is a raster format, and isn't desgined for dynamic spacing, variable size fonts, etc., etc. Some pdfs are literally a list of x,y positions on the page for each character; others are collections of TIFF images enclosed in a PDF container. How do you display a 1024x2048 pixel image on a 800x600 e-ink screen without scrolling while retaining readibility?
If that's what you're looking for, I suggest just getting a Thinkpad X-series Tablet PC.
PDF is a raster format
Umm, not as far as I know.
PDFs can be built based solely on scalable (vector) content. However, the page-size is not (I believe) dynamically changeable, so what you essentially are left with is a zoom-level and view-port method of looking at a document.
But just because the page-size is fixed (for any given page) in the document, doesn't mean that the content on that page is rendered with raster images. It can be, but it's also possible that the content could be rendered entirely with vector forms. This makes the content much more compact and better rendered at a variety of zoom levels.
But you can't resize a PDF page and then re-flow the content the way you can with some content rendering systems, and also the way that many publishers (esp in the gaming industry) produce PDFs, makes them bulky and slow and not really readable within the natural page size, because the PDFs sold to customers are essentially pre-press electronic versions of their eventual press products. They're not designed for online use with modest page sizes, but rather comparatively large page sizes, with portrait orientation, and lots of raster graphics (illos, page chotchkies, etc) which are carried whole-cloth into the PDF.
Most of the pirated PDFs I've seen are just collections of page scans, so it could be that most of the PDFs fengshui has seen are just collections of raster images. There's a lot of them out there.
| | From: | fengshui |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 07:13 pm (UTC) |
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Actually, I was more thinking of the PDFs coming out of the indie scene. Most/many of them, attempt to re-create the format and layout of the paper version including color page backgrounds and full images (as viktor_haag describes above). That's just not going to display well on a black-and-white e-reader, even if the text itself is vectorized.
Yes, I agree on that front. Especially with old gaming products, that's the case, when the means for delivering them digitally amounts to scanning the pages and then bundling the images together into a "book".
| | From: | fengshui |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 07:11 pm (UTC) |
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I stand corrected. You said what I meant to say much better than I ever could. :)
Use a better screen then.
Hypertext stacks are a wonderful way of organising rules. Read one way, you have an linear document for learning the rules. Read another way, you can trace various rules mechanics quickly and easily. If you set it up properly, then supplemental and house rules can be slotted right into the main body of the text in the appropriate locations. While actually updating the rules isn't going to happen in real time, adding comments after the fact can ensure consistency within game systems. It also allows the author to write the cards and then integrate the notes into a whole document with a lot less hassle. |
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/47686873/10459102) | | From: | skiriki |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 03:46 pm (UTC) |
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When you visited Ropecon, Mr. Laws, I showed my game group's wiki interface; I've used it for a good while to write up my games, too, and it is a BLESSING.
For me, it has made it possible to use those hard-to-remember rules (one click away!), insert errata smoothly, and notify its presence fairly easily, keep lots of things updated as a player (changes to character, which allows our DM to see what kind of party he's DM'ing for; character backgrounds intertwined with the world background -- I mention a nation in my character story, and it is just one link away for everyone to see) and so on and so on.
It has also made it very easy to do things like "read this part aloud" and what is for the DM's eyes only (we have multiple DMs, each with their own wiki and one big communal wiki with various SRD rules, characters, world info and so on); I can also embed audio if I like and it is just one click away to let people hear how the ominous chanting of the evil cult sounds like. Images and maps are easy: I can make them image maps and just click on various parts of the picture to bring up a relevant page, with monsters, traps, treasure and all the goodies.
At the moment my table is burdened with two laptops, one for the DM and another for the players, but this hasn't proven to be a distraction yet. Kindle and similar could do a LOT to improve our game table's available surface, because since we're D&D maniacs, of course our characters contain rules from tons of books. Which means that more and more table surface must be sacrificed for these sanctified tomes.
While a laptop has helped to solve some of these problems (along with less paper -- I, for example, keep my character's spells purely listed in wiki and under my character, and just click on the spell's name when I need to see what it really does; I used to print the spells I know and use on paper and as the levels went up, the number of spells went up...), Kindle and its ilk could make the entire digitalization even easier, less obtrusive and so on.
Putting some of my points together:
1) Organization can be vastly superior to paper format (especially for rules) and search capabilities make it even better.
2) Errata-insertation possibilities.
3) Adventure-enhancing: embedded sound, good use of image maps, easy to remind a GM about existing rules for a given circumstance.
4) Linking characters and worlds together more seamlessly.
5) Resource-saving: less paper consumed IS kind of nice.
I’ve enjoyed, with GUMSHOE, the opportunity to work on an evolving rules set that appears as a series of modular components. Eventually people are going to get tired of repurchasing the core rules, however modified, in pulp & paper format. Ereader publication allows you to add boilerplate sections of text as required, guilt-free.
Is this really anything new? Games have been sold as loose-leaf notebooks, with extra material added in supplements. Think Advanced Squad Leader or (in the RPG field) the Monstrous Compendiums in AD&D2, or the Underground Notebook. The idea made sense but for some reason never seemed successful.
Heh. With the Monstrous Compendiums, I blame supplements that had monsters from two different letters on opposite sides of the same page.
I liked the ability to take pages out of the MC as a reference for any particular game, but I had two problems with the idea. First, that the monsters were usually printed one to each side, and that inevitably resulted in the entries not being in alphabetical order after a few supplements, especially if the two back-to-back entries started with different letters (L & M for example). The second problem was the physical integrity of the product. Folders get ratty quicker than books and the individual leaves are more susceptible to ripping around the binder. (Another problem I just remembered was that the MCs came in a three hole format, so I couldn't add my own pages neatly, and had to re-punch the sheets if I wanted to put them in a different folder. But while two-hole binders are certainly the norm in New Zealand, I'm not sure how widespread this problem would have been).
The modular format Robin is imagining would circumvent those problems.
| | From: | skiriki |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 05:09 pm (UTC) |
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VERY typical problem. USA uses three-ring binders and pretty much most of the world does not.
Having an e-reader that also provides computation is, for me, the killer platform and that's why I'm holding out for the iTablet that I suspect is coming from Apple (i.e. a trade-paperback sized iPod Touch that uses the Touch interface, has Bluetooth for integration with wireless keyboard/mouse, and has WiFi for integration with the home wireless network).
On this platform, along with your PDF game books (or some other format), add computation and database capabilities.
Now you can have all your characters' stats right there, and you can manage their state as they change during the game. You can have a dice roller or other random generator (pulling cards from a deck, fore example). You can have utilities to help you manage the details of tactical interaction (when playing in your group, I was amazed at how the Palm utility you had for managing D20 tactical turns greatly improved the flow).
And, eventually, you can have networked applications so that all the players at the table can have access to this information as well, with their own tablets.
And you can network all the tablets together with a 'cyber-board' monitor table: all your minis and setups can be done on the table, with much reduced setup and cleanup time. (I'm wondering if the monitor table is the eventual home for modern boardgames.)
I think this is the way to go if one is going for digital; while e-Ink is intriguing (ie. something like the Kindle, which can't even handle PDFs at this time), there is really no advantage over other digital display products.
While PDAs are cheap now (if becoming obsolete and increasingly hard to find in big box stores), products like the iPhone, iTouch, other smart Phones, Blackberries are increasingly popular. Ditto cheap laptops (OLPC anyone?
The long battery life is cited as a reason for using eInk products like the Sony Reader or Kindle or Illiad, but this is really only an issue for those on long airplane flights or back-packing; you can plug in and recharge nearly everything I mention above pretty quickly or use is connected to AC Hydro via a power cord. If the price comes down to within a few hundred bucks, they start looking a bit more attractive.
Rather than static rules for a person to read, you can have dynamic rules that only appear in the electronic text as the situation requires; easy digestable rules that one can read during a 'teaching' phase, then the entire rules that are visible when certain mastery is achieved.
Also, if going digital, why not include electronic PC and NPC generators and modifiable character sheets with the final product?
I'm a little surprised no one has written an RPG for the iPhone or iTouch that could be downloaded via iTunes. I can also see some enterprising person writing an RPG that can be read on the OLPC.
::B::
P.S. Another option if going digital is to include embedded in your product a podcast or video file a tutorial where one teaches you to play the game, or shows the rules in play with a play-test group. I learn boardgames much faster when someone teaches me, but second best is to watch a YouTube video where someone goes over the basics so that when you read the rules it all makes sense.
written an RPG for the iPhone or iTouch
Well, three things here.
Firstly, I'm not sure that the iPhone or iPod Touch can actually render PDF, or whether it's limited only to the content that WebKit itself can render (i.e. I'm not even sure that it can handle Flash, for example).
Secondly, it's hard enough to get people to write RPGs as it is, getting them to do so for this specialized platform would be next to impossible, I suspect... rather it would be up to some passionate publisher to offer this as an option.
Thirdly, I suspect the intersection between gamers willing to try a new product and owners of iPhone or iPod Touch is probably not all that great.
I considered the iPod Touch, but I'm not really interested unless it's a bona-fide tablet (i.e. a real OSX computer in tablet form).
The iPhone can display pretty much anything Safari can display. There's a few places where it fails, but they're closing those up.
I think if you do a clean web design, you'll be able to view it on iPhones.
For example, I've frequently done searches on www.d20srd.org during games using the iPhone, and that site works AOK.
Yes, when I said "limited only to the content that WebKit itself can render" that's what I meant: that it can display pretty much anything that Safari can natively display. However, as far as I know, WebKit doesn't render PDF itself, rather it uses a plugin to do the rendering (by default, the same library that Preview uses to render PDF on OSX; however, if you install Adobe Acrobat, it, annoyingly, inserts a hook to its own rendering library instead). I'm pretty sure that it does this also with Flash (i.e. it uses a plugin to render the Flash content).
I'm not sure how much support either the iPhone or iPod Touch have for non-WebKit-native content rendering. I suspect that PDF being as computation heavy as it can be, the PDF rendering libraries might not be supported on these devices. OTOH, it could be that they are. I'm just not sure one way or the other. I understood that the Preview app itself was not available on these devices, but that's not necessarily the same as not rendering PDFs through the Safari browser... what's needed is the underlying rendering engine, and not necessarily any particular application using that engine.
I guess viewing digital RPGs this way would be a problem only if tied to the PDF/book format. While a collection of hypertexted HTML is an alternative, you've already pointed out the problems opened by that can of worms (ie. HTML/XML/SGML, etc).
::B::
if you install Adobe Acrobat, it, annoyingly, inserts a hook to its own rendering library
Even more annoyingly, it does this even if you tell it you don't want to use Acrobat to display web documents. And changing the preference settings inside Acrobat has no effect on this.
One of the reasons I've resisted upgrading Acrobat (or any other Adobe software) is that I have bad memories of having to clean up my system after installing it the first time.
| From: | rpmiller |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 04:29 pm (UTC) |
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Technology has been heavily integrated into my gaming as of late. We use PDFs extensively for looking things up; graphics applications for making handouts and whatnot; mapping software, and MapTool from RPTools ( http://rptools.net/doku.php ) as a replacement to the crystal battle mats, and finally character generators and combat programs to speed up creation and combat. All of these combine to make our gaming sessions much more feature rich and dynamic and actually saves time. This also allows us to game even if we can't get together physically and in a couple instances, I'm playing games with people from all over the country.
One big problem with that is that rules woudl change with an update, without the reader being aware of it. At least with the old fashioned "paste this over the second paragraph" system you knew that the rule had been altered. You'd need to have a change log, and also the ability to selectively ignore bits of the update. (I can see a group saying "good rule, but we'll wait for the next campaign to use it".)
I would see a bigger advantage being the ability to customize rules. Something like BESM, for example, that has a lot of design 'switches', could be written so that the user could set the switches they wanted and then only see the relevant rules. I would dearly love to be able to say "moderate space tech, no magic, weak psi, space opera style" and have the rules (and examples) magically fit that setting. A rules system that did this could be truly universal without being overwhleming :-)
As a publisher, you would absolutely want to make the user aware of any changes--it's the jolt of recognition that occurs on each update that reinforces the bond between gamer and game.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/63069124/441534) | | From: | louprosperi |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 06:25 pm (UTC) |
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| | Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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Hi Robin,
The seeds of your "dual-organization" books have already been planted within in the technical documentation field. The current trend in that field is towards "Structured Documentation" in which you document things in a format where text is broken down into discreet topics which can then be arranged in different ways for different purposes (online help vs. users' guide).
This approach utilities topics written using XML tags, and uses XSL to transform the XML into a presentation format (PDF, Word, HTML, etc.).
One approach to what you're looking for would be for publishers to produce multiple formats for their ebooks (in your example, that would be one tutorial format and one reference format). This is possible with technology currently in use today.
A more dynamic approach (and the one I think you're really looking for) would be that the ebook contains both the underlying data (the topics which comprise the content of the book) and the different presentation formats, along with the ability to switch between the various formats. This is something that I don't believe is being done currently, but would certainly be cool.
I'm going to be getting into structured documentation in the coming 6-10 months, as we migrate our existing documentation from Adobe FrameMaker into XML. I'll try to keep you posted as I learn more.
Take Care,
Lou
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/40569308/8297788) | | From: | viktor_haag |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 06:48 pm (UTC) |
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| | Re: Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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Lou, as a worker in the field of technical writing, I have to say that the primary motivation for topic-based writing is, in my opinion, for the companies producing that documentation to save money when dealing with maintenance and production issues and has very little to do with making the documentation better for the customer.
While I agree that the "task-based", minimalist approach to technical writing does have some advantages, it comes with lots of disadvantages as well. Like so many other revolutionary techniques in technical writing over the past few decades, it solves some problems elegantly while completely ignoring or exacerbating others.
| | From: | louprosperi |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 08:33 pm (UTC) |
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| | Re: Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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I didn't mean to promote structured documentation as a Good Thing(TM), just to report that technology that might one day enable publishing dual-organization books exists and is currently in use.
On the whole I agree with you. I think many of the recent "advancements" in technical writing in recent years put too much emphasis on "technical" and not enough on "writing." To be more specific, I think the driver behind structured documentation is clearly cost-savings in maintenance, production, and (especially) localization of technical documentation, and whether or not it helps the consumer of the documentation hasn't been a big consideration. That is part of my resistance to moving along that path, but since my company was recently acquired by a Big Company, I have little choice in the matter (unless I pursue an alternative career path).
That being said, I don't think that structured documentation is a totally Bad Thing(TM). Just because the primary motivation for its adoption has been cost-savings don't mean that it's impossible to also improve the documentation when using that approach.
To try to bring this back to the topic, adopting a structured approach to RPG writing would NOT be a trivial matter. It would require publishers to use a very different approach to how they print and publish their material, one that effectively separates content from presentation, which are typically very tightly linked in most publishing. Thisis especially true in RPG publishing. In addition, the tools used in structured documentation are more expensive than the more traditional publishing tools (Word and Quark or InDesign), and the skills required are different too, requiring more technical knowledge than most RPG writers are likely to have.
Take Care,
Lou Prosperi
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | November 26th, 2007 11:09 pm (UTC) |
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| | Re: Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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I was asking myself all along why people only refer to pdfs when thinking about e-books. I'm just a user of technology, not a technologist but it seems to me that html is much closer to the adequate usage of the medium than pdfs. Yes, as an user I know it is much easier for me to just write down something in word and next print it with Acrobat Distiller to get a pdf than to try to do a similar operation to get a html file, but still html seems to be a much better format since it is a purely electronic format, while pdf is an electronic format trying to mimecry printed documents. Am I wrong on this? Why?
| | From: | viktor_haag |
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| Date: | November 27th, 2007 12:10 am (UTC) |
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| | Re: Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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From my understanding, PDF does what it does quite well, and was designed to do. Distribute documents in a portable way that preserves the formatting intentions of the original creator, with opportunities for preserving the original creator's control over distribution to a certain extent as well.
PDF is much more a boon than it is a carbuncle. The problem is that folks have either not really made use of what PDF can do when they choose to use it, or have tried to make it do things it's not well suited to do.
If you're an e-book publisher and you think that your customer base is buying your PDF to actually use online, then you'd be well advised to spend a lot of thought on how they will really be using your PDFs.
But I suspect that most publishers actually think that their customers are going to print out their PDFs, or are just not equipped (for various reasons) to do much else than to distribute the same version of their book that they send to their paper printers.
HTML comes with all sorts of other issues. It, like PDF, does what it does quite well. However, it's not really a medium for distributing books. And when you come right down to it, the established structural mode for nearly all gaming products is the book (or booklet).
HTML is a unit in a larger, web-like hypertext structure, and to make proper use of its capabilities that's how the user needs to receive and use the product. Most gaming writers are composing within an established tradition that has next to nothing to do with writing text in the web-like mode.
Combine this with the extreme difficulty in controlling content when you distribute your IP through HTML/XML/SGML, and, well, I can understand why most publishers would just rather not do it.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/52222110/1025549) | | From: | robertprior |
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| Date: | November 27th, 2007 01:31 am (UTC) |
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| | Re: Dual-Organization Books | (Link) |
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Slag! from BTRC assumes you will be using it on your computer: it's formatted for a landscape screen ratio, and is extensively hyperlinked.
I used to prefer have books in my hand while designing, but as I got used to using PDFs, I began to find them much faster and easier to use.
Your post has made me to think about actual possibilities for adventure creation and I have thought about Wikis as support for them. I´m working with TiddlyWiki for making myself an adventure skeleton and being able to use it for the design and play of my own work. What do you think about it?
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | December 11th, 2007 07:08 pm (UTC) |
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| | As always, que key word is content | (Link) |
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Let me quote, "Okay, so let’s pretend for the sake of discussion that we live in a near future world where wireless ereaders have become as ubiquitous as iPods. What cool things might this enable us to do in the the world of RPG publishing? // First of all, it’s a natural fit to have our products on ereaders."
Have you seen that Cuthroat, The Shadow Wars rpg on the net? Or Steve Perrin's SPQR? Now, do you know who was that guy that actually payed for their net games? yes, that's me.
My point is, people tried to use the net as a sell and develop at the same time for almost a decade and it got nowhere. Of course, my examples are from the first batch of experiments. A good deal of things have moved forward and now we have models that work. But the basics still apply: If your concern is content, think about content. If your concern is delivery, think about delivery.
Why am I saying this? Because, no, it's no a natural fit to have our products on ereaders. After all, ereaders are not a novelty (what may be a novelty is dedicated ereaders), and that natural fit didn't materialize so far. |
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