Quote from: J ArcaneIf you're going to make a game available in a digital format, make it available in a screen reading friendly fashion.  PDFs suck dong for screen reads, though they can at least be tolerable if you stick to single columns.  Better to use a compressed HTML archive of some kind.  Most fanmade games have understood this for as long as the bloody internet has been available, so I remain baffled as to why it remains so difficult for commercial producers.

Because you're also producing for POD and possibly commercial print. Multiple layouts are a lot of work for minimal (if any) extra return.

Quote from: PseudoephedrineI'd like less game fiction. WW has gotten worse on this over the years, now opening supplements with ten page short stories I'm not particularly interested in. Even D&D has started adding more of the stuff to its supplements. A page or a paragraph here and there doesn't bother me, but it's not what I'm paying for when I buy a book for a game.

  It's like artwork and hardback covers though, it's padding used to up the page count and therefore increase the impression of value and therefore justify a much higher price for the same material.

  You're unlikely to see the back of it unless there's a fundamental change in the hobby's economics such as gamers actually growing some kind of taste or critical instinct... but while we're doing that we might as well say a little prayer  for world peace.

  People REALLY like the shitty characters that Exalted's full of.  I remember seeing TBP threads devoted to them.  Despite the fact that, if the first edition rulebook is anything to go by, they're completely misrepresentative of the character of the game.  The first piece of fiction's all about this exalted character leaping out and taking down a load of imperial soldiers with his or her kewl powerz.  Its all very free flowing and quick, the characters don't stand around going "Wait... what does that power do again?  I need the rulebook" and then spending half an hour rolling dice.

Actually, game fiction annoys me so much that I want to do to people that like game fiction what happens HERE at the 40 second mark

Proofreading. Here's the deal -- plenty of qualified fans will do it for free in exchange for a credit. While they may not be English majors, they'll certainly do a better job than most computerized spell-check software (most of which simply doesn't work at all).

I recently reviewed a game that weighed in at about 97 pages and was very obviously not proofread by anybody -- the sheer number of word substitution errors was a dead giveaway (e.g., "there" for "their") that a rather crippled spell-check program had been used. The game is otherwise great.

There's no excuse for that, really. If I can get a guy to render a professional full-color cover for free, other small-press publishers can get a professional (or nearly professional) proofreader to look over their game prior to publication.

There have been a lot of good ideas here, most of which I agree with (except the 3 ring binder thing; I had the 2e AD&D Monstrous Compendiums that were in 3 ring binders, and they sucked cock (in a bad way) - pages tore out easily, they were bulky, and they weren't easy to reference (and try making a usable index for one).

One thing I wish I'd see more of is electronic/online statblock sources for monsters and NPCs, which could be cut & pasted so one could print out what one needs at the table for a particular session. Along with that, I agree wholeheartedly with the call for pregens that can be printed out.

ACtually, I've thought of another thing, though this may not necessarily fall into the "easy" category, but one I'd like to see:

More goddamn official software.

Every game company out there with an even moderately complex system needs to take a look at e-Tools, and then ape it like there's no tomorrow.

It's an awesome program, and pretty much beats the pants off anything else I've seen, commercial or fan-made.  

It also makes the game a hell of a lot more managable in some ways.

I'd also point again to d20srd.org as another example of "tools I can't stand being without when I play other games".  It's just so unspeakably useful and well organized.  I use it more than print books, especially when referencing stuff in play.

It's also part of why I'm so down on PDF producers who basically just make a print book, slap it into a PDF, and call it good.  There's potential for digital documents to be so much more useful than that.