Add your own of course.

Both Qin and Hollow Earth Expeditions have some great pregens in the book, fully statted, with brief but relevant backgrounds and nice pictures of the characters.

Neither has these for download on their sites, well, HEX has two or three of them but not the whole bunch.

And that would be really handy, because having them in the book is fine but I'd really like just to print them off and hand them to the players, so we can give the game a spin swiftly without going through chargen for the first session.

It wouldn't be hard to do, in both cases you'd still need the book for play, but it would make my life much easier as a GM.

So, what easy things would you like to see companies do?

I guess it may not be that easy considering how poorly some RPGs have done it, but I want an accurate and comprehensive index in my books. RPGs are a kind of technical manual and to not have any kind of organization outside of the Contents and the actual layout is a sin.

I'd like to see better development and editorial direction (Mongoose, I am looking at you!!) but I don't think that's easy at all on the money that they have (they recently advertised for an editor/developer for £16k - I am a fairly junior chap working as a proof/reader editor for an investment-based wotsit and make nearly three times that. Even in trade publishing the pay isn't that rank - £16k is entry level doofus who will fuck everything up for two years).

Er, sorry about that. Anyway... my list is mostly the usual suspects.

* Sample adventure in every game. And every game to be designed with the aim of getting you to play as quick as poss, not getting you to consider and mull over every fucking option - plus pre-gens, as you say Balbinus).

* Mechanical crib sheets - summary at the end of each chapter (Burning Wheel style) or appendix (HeroQuest style).

* Index, character sheet, decent sub-head organisation to assist navigation (M&M is fantastic in this regard).

* Cheap/free player's guide (like the HeroQuest Player's Book). Maybe a player's guide chapter with permission to photcopy.

Umm...

Ned

Quote from: Ned the Lonely DonkeyI'd like to see better development and editorial direction (Mongoose, I am looking at you!!) but I don't think that's easy at all on the money that they have (they recently advertised for an editor/developer for £16k - I am a fairly junior chap working as a proof/reader editor for an investment-based wotsit and make nearly three times that. Even in trade publishing the pay isn't that rank - £16k is entry level doofus who will fuck everything up for two years).
 
Er, sorry about that. Anyway... my list is mostly the usual suspects.
 
* Sample adventure in every game. And every game to be designed with the aim of getting you to play as quick as poss, not getting you to consider and mull over every fucking option - plus pre-gens, as you say Balbinus).
 
* Mechanical crib sheets - summary at the end of each chapter (Burning Wheel style) or appendix (HeroQuest style).
 
* Index, character sheet, decent sub-head organisation to assist navigation (M&M is fantastic in this regard).
 
* Cheap/free player's guide (like the HeroQuest Player's Book). Maybe a player's guide chapter with permission to photcopy.
 
Umm...
 
Ned

Good list.  And if not a player's guide, definitely quick-start rules (when applicable) available as a download.  (Troll Lord Games were handing out C&C quick-play guides at Gen Con a few years ago--I'd love to get my hands on some of the print copies for my new campaign, but evidently it will be going up on site in a few months anyways).

Concrete examples of play, with the numbers, just to show a newbie (or someone confused by unclear prose) how the rules work in practice. Runequest 1st and 2nd editions had "Rurik's Saga", IMO the best example of play ever. Tunnels and Trolls 5th edition also shone in this department.

Quote from: Zachary The FirstGood list.  And if not a player's guide, definitely quick-start rules (when applicable) available as a download.  (Troll Lord Games were handing out C&C quick-play guides at Gen Con a few years ago--I'd love to get my hands on some of the print copies for my new campaign, but evidently it will be going up on site in a few months anyways).

A lot of people DL the free StarCluster Light to use as player guides. I can tell because they DL the Light game after buying the full game pdf.

-clash

Cheap entry point games.  Though I'll give ICE cudos.  HARP Lite is 100 pages and free.  That's what I'm talking about.

Cheap entry point is a good one. At the very least one purchase (regardless of  price) should be enough for PLENTY of play (yes, I'm think of M*ng**s* again and their MRQ). If I buy a £30 hardback, I don't expect to buy another book for at least a half a dozen sessions (possibly ever), and I expect that other book to be condiment, not main course.

Unfortunately, that's not the business plan.

Ned

Quote from: Ned the Lonely DonkeyI am a fairly junior chap working as a proof/reader editor for an investment-based wotsit and make nearly three times that. Even in trade publishing the pay isn't that rank - £16k is entry level doofus who will fuck everything up for two years).

My GF is in publishing and gets that much but she's essentially a glorified data-entry clerk for a music directory.  £16k for someone with skills is just ridiculous.  £16k is what you'd pay a completely unskilled graduate.

Is it any wonder that RPG companies turn out shit?  and that's without touching on the pay for freelancers.  When professional dead tree publishers pay their freelancers less than free websites then there's a problem.

Back when I was freelance ('03) Mongoose were paying £1/page of typescript (approx 350 words) for copy editing (they called it proof reading, even though it was reading the manuscript not the fucking proof, but whatever).

To make that worth while, one had to manage AT LEAST ten pages an hour. £15 an hour would have been a decent freelance rate (outside of RPGs, I wouldn't accept anything less than £20/hour but I tended to be doing more complex stuff than proofing). That manuscript needed much more work than £1 a page was going to pay me. They were paying "fix the typos" money, when they should have been paying "re-write this gibberish" money.

I did one book before I was sucked back in by the investment industry, thank God. On the plus side, I used one of the character builds from that book in our next D&D game - ah, O'Grady!

Ned

EDIT: Actually, in their defence it'll be their margins that dictate the shitty pay. I'd say only WotC and WW have career publishers on staff, rather than enthusiasts. Still, Green Ronin also produce fantastic books - I was massively impressed with the whole Mutants & Masterminds line.

Id like to see consistent usage of gaming terms throughout the introduction, especially when introducing new ideas and concepts.

Rounds, Turns, Phases, Slices, Action Points etc.... I think you get the idea.
Stats, Attributes, Talents, make clear definitions of what you are trying to convey.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely Donkey* Sample adventure in every game. And every game to be designed with the aim of getting you to play as quick as poss, not getting you to consider and mull over every fucking option - plus pre-gens, as you say Balbinus).

Check.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely Donkey* Mechanical crib sheets - summary at the end of each chapter (Burning Wheel style) or appendix (HeroQuest style).

Check. Although we do it on our character sheets. Easy ref during play and in char gen.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely Donkey* Index, character sheet, decent sub-head organisation to assist navigation (M&M is fantastic in this regard).

Check. Although I need to work on the sub-heading in the index layout. It all kind of blurs right now.

Quote from: Ned the Lonely Donkey* Cheap/free player's guide (like the HeroQuest Player's Book). Maybe a player's guide chapter with permission to photcopy.

Check. Our ISCR is the core rules for free download all over the place.

My personal biggies are:

-Step by Step clear char gen. All too often you do not have an up front x step procedure for creating a character. I can read the setting information to get a clear idea of what will fit but give me the mechanics that allow me to step through and at the end have a character.

- Indexing as noted and with many of the same caveats.

- Cross Referencing. If you can't do it well, don't do it. If you can, then it is a big plus for me.

Just some of mine.

Bill

Way, way back in the day, games like Traveller and Runequest had supplements which consisted entirely of page after page of pregenerated NPC stats. Not particularly good value if you had to buy them separately, but if they came as part of a package (like Far Future's Traveller Supplements reprint, or the Runequest 2nd Edition boxed set) they're absolute gold. When I'm starting to GM a system, I'm going to be a little rusty until I've got used to it; as such, I love being able to grab some stats for typical bandits/space pirates/ducks/whatever and throwing them at the players, since while I could just write down a bunch of stats on the spur of the moment they might not be especially well thought through.

Furthermore, some game systems require a lot of work to create characters. Even if you just scribble down the attributes and stuff rather than rolling them, if you care at all about your NPCs being "legal", the process of checking might take a while. The higher the barrier to coming up with NPC stats on the spot is, the greater the temptation to railroad, because as a GM you'll end up trying to avoid situations where the PCs fight or interact with people you weren't expecting them to.

So, game companies, please consider printing a page or two of quick and dirty NPC stats in your core rulebooks, or perhaps to fill up space in a supplement (Contested Ground did this at the back of the Lostfinder's Guide to Mire End for the A|State game.) Or at the very least, give me an NPC generation system which lets me produce lots of NPCs in a short period of time. Say what you like about Dogs In the Vineyard, it does have an excellent system for cranking out dozens of NPCs at the back of the book.

Alternately, if there's a program on your website I can download to churn out NPC stats quickly and easily that's gold.

Honestly, I've always liked Afterwords -- something direct, heartfelt and perhaps even a little cheesy from the author, creative director, editor-in-chief or whomever who can wrap up the book, say something pithy and nudge you out the door to adventure.  I realize pages are money and recognize the need to cram every page with content, but they don't even have to be a full page, a couple of paragraphs will do.  I don't read RPG books from front cover to back cover but I do feel a very slight twinge of dissapointment when you get to the last page of material...and that's it.

The last RPG book I've read that had something like that was Allen Varney's Paranoia XP.  It wasn't the last page of the book, but it was still appreciated

The Hex guys saw my equivalent thread on rpg.net, and posted up all their pregens.

http://www.exilegames.com/downloads/hex_characters.pdf?bcsi_scan_4768CB94A8A496D0=0&bcsi_scan_filename=hex_characters.pdf

The Hex guys rock on toast.