Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I am not sure why your staff would worry about it as long as you are the one paying for it. It is your credits, not theirs.
CT Only: Efficiently Written
- Thread starter tbeard1999
- Start date
I am not sure why your staff would worry about it as long as you are the one paying for it. It is your credits, not theirs.
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
The modern trend I think is actually in the opposite direction. There's even a bumper crop of "one-page RPGs." The tension between simplicity and detail goes back and forth. Right now, simplicity is king.
Also, many of the larger core books detail settings, which understandably pushes up the page count.
The Traveller Book, in its very readable format and including adventures, is a mere 162 pages. Even that's less than one third of the AD&D and modern D&D core, not to mention Pathfinder or GURPS (where Characters + Campaigns core books total 576 pages).
But I think that the most efficient part of the system is that game stats are very simple and straightforward, yet rich in implications - you can have a completely usable "character sheet" in three or four rows of text (an index card if you want a detailed equipment list); an interesting world in a row of text; and a full starship in a paragraph written in more or less plain English. That's immensely beautiful game design in my opinion.
But I think that the most efficient part of the system is that game stats are very simple and straightforward, yet rich in implications - you can have a completely usable "character sheet" in three or four rows of text (an index card if you want a detailed equipment list); an interesting world in a row of text; and a full starship in a paragraph written in more or less plain English. That's immensely beautiful game design in my opinion.
It's not unique to CT...
- The Fantasy Trip (which just had a $300K kickstarter) easily fits PC's on a 3x5 card, complete with all talents and gear.
- Star Trek Adventures does as much on that score - perhaps more - by it's 6 attributes, 6 skills, and a handful of subskills only noted if they differ from the baseline 6. It's quite easy to write an STA character on a single 3x5 card, notable gear included.
- Many Fate flavors can fit a character on a 3x5 card - 10 skills, 3 damage scores, and 5 aspects. Maybe a line or two of significant gear.
And, just because one can doesn't mean one should... The real price of CT's terse sheets and few weapon states is that combat is chained to the tables, or to being replaced with the much shorter Striker stats, or to having a table...
CT weapon data: 5 range mods, 7 armor mods, 1 damage dice rating, and one ammo datum. 14, minimum.
Striker Weapon Data: 2 ranges with [range, pen mod, damage mod], and if one is being a hybridizer, the CT damage dice rating, plus one ammo datum. 6 or 7.
The same sort of thing could be done with Heroquest - though a full A4 character sheet was provided there was an awful lot of empty space on it, and the attributes and keywords weren't very many. Very much in the broad Fate storytelling vein.
The economics of the printing business and customer expectations. The former all but mandates books over a certain size while the latter mandates content which is not an indispensable part of the rules. I'll cover the latter.
If they were released today, the Little Black Books would be howled down. Rules without a setting? No art? No fiction? No examples of overall play? Only one chargen example? No personal or ship combat examples? No ship building examples? No aliens? A few scattered charts? It's like they didn't even bother to finish the books.
We've been playing Traveller for 41 years starting with those "unfinished" and "barebones" core books, but what content people currently expect in core books has seen huge changes. Take fiction for example.
While pieces of fiction in a core book can help set the tone of a RPG setting they're in no way indispensable. They're not needed, but there they are adding to the page count. Our own member Major B recently wrote a spectacular product covering the Gazelle-class close escort. The product opens with a two page fiction piece. It's nice, it's well written, and it doesn't really do anything. It's there because almost every RPG product contains fiction these days and almost every product contains fiction because customers expect it.
While fiction doesn't actually help, in some ways it can hurt. A couple years back I bought a system free sci-fi setting called A Star For Queen Zoe because it used the same concept as Pournelle's King David's Starship. The product wasn't worth the 5 bucks I spent on it and, naturally, it starts with a 3 page piece of bad fiction. The rest of the material was bad too but you can't help wonder if it could have better had the typist not wasted his time and limited abilities on the fiction piece.
Comparing 1981's LBB:1 and 2014's The One Ring core book illustrates this customer driven content bloat.
LBB:1 opens with the title, copyright, publishing info, dedication, and content index pages. On page 5, the first with text, the book introduces RPGs in general and Traveller in specific. One page 6, the second with text, die rolling conventions are introduced. By page 8, the fourth with text, character generation is introduced. Now look at TOR.
Open the cover and first page is credits and publishing info. The second is the content index. The next two pages are art. Beautiful art, but not necessary. The next page is, you guessed it, a fiction piece. Well written, helps present the mood of the setting, and, again, not necessary.
Page six, the same page LBB:1 uses to introduces RPGs and Traveller, contains a very general introduction of the game and another piece of art. The intro just repeats what you'll read later and the art, while beautiful, does nothing at all. After that unneeded introduction and art piece, another two page art spread tells you the Introduction section will now begin. The introduction section which needed a two page art spread to announce it is all of 9 pages long. One page of the 9 is half text/half art while another is a useful map.
With the introduction finally complete, the TOR core book begins talking about "How to Play", it's unique dice, and unique die rolling system on page 19. That's a point LBB:1 reached by page 6. This section contains three pages of general information, a two page character sheet, 3.5 pages explaining the game's dice and die roll mechanisms, and a 2.5 page glossary. Two quarter-page sized art pieces are embedded in the text. Beautiful art that does nothing but take up space.
With that section over, the next section begins, of course, with another two page art spread. Again beautiful and again useless. This section is "Creating a Hero". For those of you scoring at home, this is page thirty two. TOR take 32 pages to get to where LBB:1 was on page 8.
This content bloat continues for the rest of the 333 page book. The section on elves is a good example of the rest. It's seven pages long, two of those are full page art and another two are half-page art. That seven pages used to present all of 4 pages of text detailing one of the book's 6 playable races.
Why are RPG rules written this way? Primarily because RPG customers expect them to be written this way. We often talk about rules bloat and skill bloat, but content bloat exists too.
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It's a lot easier and cheaper than the late '70s. The LBBs were produced off typeset galleys (IIRC GDW had their own photosetting system). You can even see bits of slightly rough pasteup in some of their publications. Full-page composition software like Pagemaker made the process of putting together a book much easier. With Pagemaker I could lay out a 30 page 'zine in a day or two. By the mid 1990s you could run this software on an ordinary PC.
I used to see FATE described as a 'rules-lite' system. I like FATE but the FATE core rulebook has something like 300 pages. With a bit of judicious editorial work you could probably get it down to 50 pages or so.
It's easy to put out a tome these days. Blaise Pascal's comment applies - it's quicker to write a long tome than edit it down to something shorter. Now that you can publish an arbitrarily long rule set electronically *cough*T5*cough* there's really little incentive to be concise.
It's always been easier to write than edit. Cheaper is a bit more complicated.
That removed one of the incentives for editing. With physical paste-up, there were good reasons to cap page counts. Composition software did away with those reasons. While word processing programs made editing much easier, it was composition programs which ended up "controlling" page counts. Why? Because there were no longer any reason to edit with an eye towards being concise.
This is where the economics of printing take over. When you own a piece of costly equipment, you want it to run as long as it can doing whatever it is it does. Power plant? You want it running at 100% capacity 24/7. Wave solder oven? You want it running the same heating and cooling "profile" for the same electronic boards 24/7. Automated turret lathe? You want it making the same part from the same feed stock 24/7. Printing press? You want it running the same job with the same plates or cylinders 24/7. Post-press process? You want it cutting, folding, collating, and gluing the same number of pages in the same format 24/7.
You'll have to shut down for maintenance sooner or later. You'll need to shut down to shift between products too. The costs associated with any run-to-maintenance time ratio are relatively fixed. The costs associated with a run-to-changeover time ratio are not because you can charge customers premiums for runs whose total unit production number falls below a certain amount.
As odd as it seems, a run of a 1000 single book units at 300 pages each will have a lower per unit price than a run of a 1000 three book units at 50 pages each despite the fact that the latter has half the total page count. Why? Because the three book run requires three different setups of the press/post-press equipment and more handling to bind three separate books and the smaller page count doesn't use enough press/post-press time.
When people talk about how buying in bulk saves on unit costs, they need to remember that is due in part to equipment run time.
If you walk into a commercial printer today with the paste-ups of Three Little Black Books wanting to print, collate, and bind three separate, 48 page, stapled, half Quarto-sized books the price you'll be quoted will include several premiums no matter how many units you want to print.
There are several factors at work. It's easy/quicker to write tomes, it's less costly to print tomes, and - most importantly - customers prefer tomes.
Customer expectations have changed. Not for the worse, not for the better, but definitely changed. Dividing the ~150 pages of CT77 into three separate books made sense in thanks to both economics and customer expectations in 1977; More small printers could handle the job and OD&D came in a box with three books. Having no art and no fiction made sense too; Why waste page space when you only have ~150 pages to lay out an universe? None of those things make sense today.
In it's first 32 pages, the TOR core book devotes 7.5 pages to art and 1.5 pages to fiction. Neither of those things are rules and thus neither are actually necessary. However, if the TOR core didn't include art, the chief complaint you would have read in any review of it would have been about the "lack" of art.
We play RPGs differently than we did in 1977. Look at the squeamishness over TTA's museum burglary of 76 Patrons. We need more and different things from RPG rules than we did in 1977. Look at the rules and skills "bloat" since the early 80s, even current OSR-style games are still "bloated" compare to OD&D or CT . We want our RPG books to include different things than they did in 1977. Look at the ubiquity of fundamentally useless art and fiction in RPG books.
While advances in technology and economics have helped create the current "tome" style of RPG books, customer expectations are more responsible than any other factor.
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Timerover51
SOC-14 5K
I would go a bit easier on Marc. He included in the Big Black Book the following: Gun Maker, Armor Maker, Vehicle Maker, Beast Maker, and Thing Maker. Those typically would be been released as supplements to previous sets of rules. Then he included the material on Sophonts and Robots. That adds quite a bit to the book, but means that you do not have to buy a bunch of additional supplements, and then keep track of them. The 1980 edition of High Guard is 60 pages, so the 100 plus pages of star ports and starships does not look that out of line. The same holds true for world creation. Basically, he was trying to give the buyer everything that he or she could possible need in one volume, rather than several.
He could have gone a bit lighter on the graphics, and I am not sure about a separate map for each size of world, which does eat up pages, but does give you the understanding of how Marc views the worlds.
Could he have used an editor? Yes, but I am not sure how much smaller that would make T5.0.9. Nor am I certain that an editor would have made it better. Just maybe a bit smaller.
Page count is always a motivation to be concise.
Every page costs money, every page affects the price, and every binding has its limits.
For example, you can't make a 49 page or 50 page LBB. Because of how they gang and print the pages. I don't know what the next bump was after 48, (56? 64 pages?), but all of a sudden your pricing just went up 10-25%. Perfect binding vs staple binding, etc.
Today, it's much less of an issue because we can easily have "13 page books" or "49 pages", etc. due the fact the books aren't printed at all.
Maybe somebody familiar with the specifics might weigh in, but the LBBs look like they were produced on a smaller sheet-fed press (like maybe a Heidelberg GTO or something similar) by a printer used to smaller print runs. The books are saddle stitched and they use a coated matt art paper. That's not stock for a web fed press.
This is short-run tech, 1970's style. You can change the plates on a GTO in a couple of minutes (I used to work in small jobbing printers at one point). On something like the LBBs the costs of the paste up and plates would dominate the run up to a few hundred copies1 but from about 1,000 copies or so the setup costs would be in the minority.
I don't think a small jobbing printer would be charging a 'taking the piss' premium. If you tried that on with a print broker they would take the business elsewhere.
Today you would print something like the LBBs on a xerographic device - essentially a high speed laser printer. However, the stock used in the LBBs would not be suitable for that type of device - toner doesn't really like to stick to coated papers, although you can get laser-friendly matt art stock for a price. If you buy stuff from a print-on-demand outfit like DriveThruRPG you will find B&W books will be on an uncoated stock that's much the same as photocopier paper.
1 - The plate making for the LBBs could be done with a basic process; most of the artwork is line art with no halftones and there is no four-colour or anything else requiring precise registration in the books. JTAS didn't get process colour on the covers until issue #13, which had a print run of about 11,000.
Most are still laid out for printing, and that means 4-pages for each sheet. For small runs, it's likely to be done on the correct size, then folded, then assembled.
For larger ones, print on larger paper (two, three, or 4 physical 4-page final sheets on one larger printed page, folded, then stitched/stapled, then the assembled book trimmed to free the pages. Anywhere from 3 to 12 sheets (12-48 pages) can be bound in a gathering, which is then sewn - either to itself (for one form of perfect bind), or to a backing strip (hardcover, or a few forms of softcover), or simply trimmed, knurled and glued (nature of the glue and knurling determines if it's "glued softcover" or "perfect bound".
saddle-stapled books in 5x8 run to a maximum of about 80 pages - typically no more than 64 - because that's as much as you can get a staple through, and past 64, it the thickness at spine gets pretty problematic. Sufficient that one needs to counter-stack to fit them into a box nicely. I have bound at home 5x8's up to 50 sheets. Took a drill and some construction staples.
Saddle stitched in 5x8 can go a bit more - I have seen 128 pp. I've seen up to 200 pp in 8.5x11; slightly larger, typical composition journals are 50 to 100 sheets, for 200 to 400 pages. Most now are 200 pages (50 sheets).
Square-bindings come in several types - side stiched (be it string, wire, or staples; still common on writing pads), bindery posts (like some older field manuals and computer manuals), glue-bind (stack, rough the edge, apply hot glue; Used mostly for lab books and notepads), original perfect bind (gathers self-sewn, then pressed together, then glued into a spine), modern perfect bind (gathers trimmed instead of sewn, then saws {and sometimes drill gangs} used to make a slot or a keyhole shape, and glue forced through those, and then taped or pressed into a cover.
I've been consulting with press and post-press manufacturing firms like Goss, Heidelberg, PCMC since the 90s. I've been consulting with the customers who buy their presses and post-press equipment too. While technology has changed the industry almost out of recognition, Adam Smith's pin making example still holds. Long runs with less post-press handling are cheaper on a per unit basis than short runs with more post-press handling. Technology has closed the gap, but it has not and will never eliminate it. The people I deal with still factor run and setup times into their pricing estimates. It may be pennies but pennies add up.
As whartung correctly points out, before single page printing options became economical page counts increased in discrete steps because of the limitations inherent in the machinery. Printing sheets which were then folded or slit into pages meant that producing books of 48 or 64 pages was easy. If you wanted books with 50 or 65 pages instead, you were looking at very hefty premiums. The physical nature of the press and post-press equipment meant that certain page counts were strongly preferred.
Similarly, if composition involved physically pasting together the pages in question, you are going to look keeping page counts low not only to make you job easier but to also lessen the chances of mistakes being made in composition. Again, certain page counts - low page counts - would be strongly preferred.
When pressure for low page counts was being applied by various means, you were going to write concise rules and then edit with a heavy hand. When composition became easy, the some of that pressure diminished. When word processors became the norm, they were used to write more rather than edit more. When different printing options became available, the range of page counts widened. Options were increased, restraints were lifted, and page counts exploded.
Add that to the customers' "expectation bloat" and the result is the 300+ page tomes being sold today.
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HiI guess it also encourages the plethora of pretty pictures too. I never get why an RPG product is all to often reviewed and judged on its pictures. This is not an art gallery, people!
Ymmv, but although its nice to have occasional art breaking up the the words, if the rules don't inspire you enough then you shouldn't be playing the game.
Ymmv, but although its nice to have occasional art breaking up the the words, if the rules don't inspire you enough then you shouldn't be playing the game.
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So how much has the move to pdf-ing everything changed? Do you think that more game books are written for pdf format instead of a printed book, or is it all pretty much no change with how things have been done since the late 70s?
eBooks? They've shattered the publishing industry and, to a lesser extent, the printing industry. For example, hundreds of local newspapers across the US shut down in the last decade because people get their news online. The others have shifted formats; weekly instead of daily, trying to survive online behind paywalls, merging, and so forth. One of my clients, Goss, eventually had to transition from a large manufacturer of printing and post-press equipment to a small maintenance/repair outfit for the same reasons.
Word processing lowered the "physical" hurdle for writing so the amount of writing exploded. (It lowered it for editing too but a "mental" hurdle remains so editing didn't increase in proportion.) Like word processing did for writing, formats like pdf, epub, and mobi removed the physical hurdle to being "published".
Several years ago a professional writers' association in the US surveyed it's members and calculated that they earned on average ~5000 USD per year. Those were people who worked as copywriters, sold articles to magazines, sold fiction pieces, and so forth. Thanks to eBooks and sites like Amazon, there are now people who easily earn more than that tossing off books like those for what used to be called the "airport trade".
Very much so. Look at any game book's Kickstarter. The stretch goals and pledge amounts are always variations on a physically printed book. If enough money comes in, certain upgrades will happen and, if you pledge enough, you'll get them.
In the physical printing industry things have changed out of recognition and just not because of computers and software. Environmental issues with inks began forcing a lot of changes around 1990, for example. Computers, software, and the 'net have removed nearly all hurdles when it comes to publishing. Publishing is no longer about equipment time, paper, and ink. Publishing is no longer physical. You no longer need to convince someone else that your manuscript is "good" enough to print. You don't even anyone buy it anymore. All you need to do is type and upload.
No offense, but that sounds a good bit out of touch with reality.
Most games make their money on dead tree (according to the staffers of Cubicle 7, and of FFG), even when the PDF is free with purchase of dead tree. (which, excepting the ones owned by disney) pretty much all of both company's products are. WotC can't convince HasBro to let them make the D&D PDFs free with purchase of dead tree...
HasBro and Disney don't understand the games market, and it's still a print-driven market. If PDF could carry the gaming industry, there wouldn't be a book left in dead tree... and gaming PDFs have been around for 20 years now. If they were the end of the publishing industry, they would have already.
E-readers are still expensive, and still slow to render. They haven't hit critical saturation yet, and despite swearing by them for 15+ years now (my preference is sony's - but I'm currently a kindle owner - until I can spare $700 for a 13" sony...)
And general tablets are mediocre for extended reading. As are laptops. Most don't bother to even try on desktops. Even my kids prefer to read dead tree to screens - not enough to not read on phones, but enough to go for dead tree for both game rules and character sheets. (yes, I had to print out the D&D Basic Rules for one of them to run D&D at school at lunch...)
I hang out at a game store. I see kids using dead tree, even for games that have PDF. Sure, when searching for a rule, they'll break out the PDF, then open the physical book to the correct page.
The printing industry has changed - no more "disposable" printings... but durables? Most still prefer dead tree durables - even as they download the PDF for the dead tree.
Likewise, laser printers are cheap now - what once would have been a $1500 laser printer (Networked monochrome postscript capable) is now a $120 printer, and wireless network at that. (Plus a wired port for luddites or those in excess density of wireless areas and/or the paranoid.) (Toner still hasn't come down as much - from $120 to $75 - still, 3000 sheets.)
I wrote about publishing in general, Wil, and not RPG publishing. There's far more to the printing and publishing industries than the latest Warhammer splat or Magic cards and neckbeards in game stores are not indicative of consumers as a whole.
Apart from dead tree RPG publishers who are going to print dead tree versions, Kickstarters routinely step their project's physical production and pledge rewards along a pdf to softcover to hardcover track. If a Kickstarter fails to raise enough money, the project is still finished but no deadtree version printed.
Ex-lease corporate laser printers go for the same price as cheap consumer models on Ebay. You can pick up something like a HP4350dtn with a duplexer for about $100.1 It will probably still be in good condition. Toner cartridges on these last 10-20k pages and don't have any DRM. Expect running costs in the region of 1-2c per page. The main item of maintenance for these is roller kits. The rubber on the rollers can perish and stop picking up paper correctly. Expect to pay $20-50 for a roller kit off Ebay if it starts jamming. If the fuser assembly dies it's probably just cheaper to get another printer.
As an aside, if you want to buy any I.T., ex-lease kit on Ebay is worth checking out. Ex-lease X and T series Thinkpads, for example, come up on the secondary market by the truckload and go for a few hundred dollars. If you shop around you can buy a usable desktop and screen for less than $100. Generally I recommend anyone buying a laptop consider this sort of secondhand kit, as the build quality and serviceability on these machines is far better than the consumer grade kit you buy off the high street.
If you stick to mainstream kit then there tends to be a secondary market in parts and servicing. Most parts in a Thinkpad are amenable to replacement at the level of finding a Youtube video, and can be purchased somewhere off the interwebs. The replacement cost of this kit is so cheap that it might just be easier to buy another one and shift the disk across.
1 - in fact you might be surprised how cheap big printer/copier units collaters go for on Ebay (if you've got space to put one).
Traveller (at least in the early days) was not printed in large numbers. I don't have the specifics of CT print volumes to hand but I do have stats for the JTAS. JTAS 1-10 were printed in runs of 2180 to 10,114, which is in the sweet spot for a small run jobbing printer.
Most role playing game companies don't produce really large print runs - and the folks putting stuff up on Kickstarter certainly aren't. I've only ever seen stuff from TSR/WOTC and White Wolf that looked (mostly smelled actually) like they came off a web fed press.
Your commentary about the cost of downtime and efficiencies of scale is technically correct but beside the point. A printer set up for shorter runs will produce a shorter run more cheaply because the downtime is cheaper on their equipment. If you went to somebody who had a £15 million web fed press and asked them for a print run of 2,000 copies they would look at you strangely. In the 1970's there were plenty of outfits who could make a run of 2,000 books profitably and cost-effectively. You could even have produced the LBB's on a Multilith with paper plates - for all I know that's what they did.
You don't see many printers with that sort of kit now - print-on-demand tech (essentially high volume laser printers) has largely rendered that obsolete. However, it is more expensive per-unit than an offset press, so there will be some print volume where the improved quality and costs makes it cost-effective to do a print run. Direct-to-plate image setting also cuts a substantial hole in the startup costs for a run compared to the state of the art in the 1970s.
Paste up is relatively time consuming, although not as much as given credit for. I had occasion to work with a very competent finished artist at one point, and it was quite amazing what she could do and how quickly she could do it. I saw her cut and transpose individual characters of 10-ish point type on more than one occasion and she could put together pieces of finished artwork in a few minutes.
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