Quote from: weirdguy564 on April 10, 2025, 07:48:07 AMWould you buy an RPG with no art?

No.

I would buy for sure a game book without visual art.

Yes, I've bought older games like Classic Traveller with basically no art. No art beats bad art.

Nobilis 1ed had no art as I recall, and 2ed had less than 10 (maybe 5 total?) full page spreads across 300+ pages.  While the game itself is kind of "meh", the layout was minimalistically clean and the margins were full of entertaining little bits of "nano fiction". 

I've also seen books that use things like border art and fonts and the like to set apart sections and help break up the flow.  I think the Sins RPG does this well, replacing lots of art with different colored fonts and boxed paragraphs and the like to help break up giant walls of text.  (Looking back, there is art in Sins, but I honestly remembered the layout presentation more.)

I think I could only buy an rpg book with no art, if it was cheap. And by cheap, I mean under 15 or 20 dollars. I'd probably only buy something like this to get a "budget version" of a game.

Quote from: Kiero on April 10, 2025, 01:45:20 PMBetter one with no art, than one with bad art.

My thoughts exactly. No art is better than bad art.

Also, I don't know if this is true of anyone else, but I have a much higher tolerance for bad line-art, especially if it's hand-drawn, than I do for full color art. A lot of the pen-and-ink art in the AD&D books is lousy, for example, but I vastly prefer it to the modern stuff that looks like it was made in Photoshop or colored with Crayola markers.

It's easy to say you'd buy an established setting that had no art back in the day.

But consider the proposition today as a CREATOR.

I *do* agree no art is better than bad art. Can testify, I've turned my back from games based purely on shit art. And I'm a whale. If I like a game - I go *all* in (with the caveat that I'll buy into line providing I know I'll use it.) If you put it in bad art that completely kills the vibe I'm assuming from the text. I'm OUT.

But as a creator - today, how niche are games with relatively no art, and how much sell-through are you attempting to achieve? If it's for hobby-purposes, fine. If you want to make a business out of it... well that's /rimshot dicey. It can definitely happen, but as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. The question is whether or not your choice of art (or lack thereof) is worth more words for the quality of art.

Personally I think no art vs. some art is a easy choice. Some art is always better with the provision that it's not *bad art*. No art? Man... Even Chainmail and the those old Palladium fantasy pamphlet books had art...

As a consumer - there is far less risk involved. It's the extrapolation of the purchasing habits of your base your aiming your game at that matters. If I produced a game for OSR players, I'd probably have a much better chance with less/no art than if it were some game that was wholly original and non-OSR.

The question of the OP I'm assuming relates to profit viability.

I certainly would get a game without art.
This makes me wonder about A-B-C testing though.
Like.. take the same game, good editing/formatting/etc.
One version without art, one version with stock art, one version with art that is similar to AD&D1e, and one version with good art that is like... frank frazetta or other similar style art.
I wonder which versions would do better compared to each-other, but its also hard to test this, like.. optimally you'd need similar populations that only have one version available and see if they purchase it.   Though of course you could just have all four versions available to the same general population and see which does better.