Quote from: RPGPundit;1032234How much pagecount do you want an RPG to have? Is there a lower limit? An upper limit?

No lower limit for me:).
I prefer books that are 200 pages or less, which is a soft upper limit. That is, you can have a book that's potentially much longer, but after 400 pages, you'll have to really persuade me that it's worth even giving it a try;).
Mind you, I'm talking about rules, not setting, and setting is often the make or break element for me.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;1032264Ideal size for a complete game: 128 p. letter format

That's very specific! It's also the size of Lion & Dragon. Coincidence?

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1032289About the size of Raiders of R'lyeh, which you did some consulting for.

Which one? The black & white gothic edition is 250 page, while the complete rules plus gamemaster expansion is like, close to 500.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1033097That's very specific! It's also the size of Lion & Dragon. Coincidence?

Something tells me that you took some effort to have it clock in at exactly 2^8 pages (and other books at exactly 2^7). Is there a financial/legal/technical/published standard benefit for doing so?

It depends on what you mean by "main rulebook".

If we're talking all the rules to play the game with minimum setting/GM info then I've come to prefer 100-150 pages for standard 8.5" x 11". That gets boosted when you shrink the format though. Like LotFP I think is ~180 pages and I'm ok with it getting up to 200 if it's that sort of small format.  I'm assuming a bunch of those pages, whatever the size, will probably be eaten up with lists of some sort (spells, equipment, monsters, etc) as well as some art.

If it's also going to act as a setting guide and/or GM guide I'm not against it getting up to 200-300 pages.  Again, that high end is more because smaller formats would tend to run a bit longer.  That gives room for examples, advice, plenty of charts, setting descriptions, NPC examples, adversaries and maybe a sample "adventure".

I think my lower limit on anything is around 30-50 pages for all the rules + GM guide.  I've recently been enjoying a few games that hit that mark. Tiny Dungeon 2e, for example, takes about 50 pages for all the rules (~20 for rules, 20 for chargen and 10 for GMing), but then adds another ~120  of microsetting examples.  The few games I've bought that are less than that were interesting reads, but had too little G for an RPG for my group's tastes.

Like a woman's skirt - long enough to cover the subject, and short enough to be interesting.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1033105Something tells me that you took some effort to have it clock in at exactly 2^8 pages (and other books at exactly 2^7). Is there a financial/legal/technical/published standard benefit for doing so?

Books are made of folded sheets of paper. The usual fold has one large sheet being folded into four smaller ones, but other folds exist. The net result is that book pages usually have to be a multiple of 2, 4, or 16. If you don't fill it up exactly, they have to either trim pages or just leave blank ones in the back.

For myself, I think the 128-page 8.5 x 11 format of Basic+Expert D&D is just about ideal for a physical book. Short enough to be easy on bindings and simple to handle, with pages large enough that the layout guy isn't going to hurt himself trying to make clean spreads. The main disadvantage in the present day is that it doesn't play nicely with tablet-read PDFs, however, so I could see going with a 6 x 9 format instead, which would take roughly twice as many pages to produce the same content and be more painful to do layout on.

The funny thing is that after just a bit of working with 6x9 layouts I find them much easier to layout than 8.5x11 (for one thing you only have to worry about one column) and to actually be good for my writing as the smaller page size forces me to be more concise with my rules/descriptions so they don't run longer than either a single page or two facing pages at worst.

It also really blunts the temptation to fill in the rest of a page with unnecessary content because a line or three of white space on a 6x9 just doesn't feel as glaring as a third of a column just being blank because you reached a logical stopping point for that topic but don't have the room to cover another one in the space left.

Quote from: SineNomine;1033142For myself, I think the 128-page 8.5 x 11 format of Basic+Expert D&D is just about ideal for a physical book. Short enough to be easy on bindings and simple to handle, with pages large enough that the layout guy isn't going to hurt himself trying to make clean spreads. The main disadvantage in the present day is that it doesn't play nicely with tablet-read PDFs, however, so I could see going with a 6 x 9 format instead, which would take roughly twice as many pages to produce the same content and be more painful to do layout on.

Or you could make the digital edition separate, with a layout that would fit a tablet etc. better. An alternate layout is not that hard to set up in InDesign, for example. Although I really don't understand why there is no format yet that is as portable as a pdf, but with a responsive layout so that it would scale with whatever screen you're using. The 'pdf as a facsimile of a printed page' is a very clumsy compromise, IMO.

Quote from: Dr. Ink'n'stain;1033231Or you could make the digital edition separate, with a layout that would fit a tablet etc. better. An alternate layout is not that hard to set up in InDesign, for example. Although I really don't understand why there is no format yet that is as portable as a pdf, but with a responsive layout so that it would scale with whatever screen you're using. The 'pdf as a facsimile of a printed page' is a very clumsy compromise, IMO.

It is excruciatingly hard to create a reflowable layout that automatically adjusts to look good in 8.5x11 and 6x9. To create two separate automatic layouts for print and digital at different page sizes would mean one of them is going to look horrible, because none of the art will be proportioned correctly for it, none of the spreads will be designed to fit cleanly to it, and many of the large page items in the 8.5x11 would have to be recut into multiple chunks to fit 6x9.

Any page text more meaningful than ipsum lorem is not fungible. It's broken up into individual passages and topics that need to be held together. You can't allow single lines to bleed onto the next column, you can't let it get broken over pages at all if you can help it, and you certainly can't let it run from the front of one page to the back of the next unless you have absolutely no choice. You have to design it so that the full topic appears on a single two-page spread when you open the book. Assuming you do all this for a 8.5x11 two-column two-page spread, there is absolutely no way to easily convert that to a 6x9 single-column, one-page tablet screen. Every table or art piece you have that doesn't neatly fit into a single-column 9-inch box is going to look like trash when your reflowing layout auto-converts it to 6x9.

RPG books are ridiculously complex, demanding subjects for book design. They require the designer to produce an art book, a reference manual, and an instructional textbook all in the same book. Relying on algorithmic conversions to turn a painstakingly-built example of Format A into Format B only guarantees that you're going to get trash, and there just isn't enough money in the average product to justify paying the kind of high-end design talent you need to do two separate layouts with two partly-separate pools of art to buy.

Quote from: SineNomine;1033272RPG books are ridiculously complex, demanding subjects for book design. They require the designer to produce an art book, a reference manual, and an instructional textbook all in the same book. Relying on algorithmic conversions to turn a painstakingly-built example of Format A into Format B only guarantees that you're going to get trash, and there just isn't enough money in the average product to justify paying the kind of high-end design talent you need to do two separate layouts with two partly-separate pools of art to buy.

The only way you could ALMOST make it work, and it'd be ridiculously expensive due to its non-standard layout, would be to set up the 8.5x11" layout as a Landscape (i.e. bound along the 8.5" side instead of the 11" side) with two columns and a very tight margin between them and less than typical on your top and bottom margins. Before I started proofing my project using a tablet, I set up a separate document in that format I could just cut and paste my 6x9 columns into and it'd line up perfectly (the result being that each 8.5 page would have a two-page spread from the 6x9 document on it).

But again... probably not practical on most people's publishing budgets. I looked into it briefly before I switched to 6x9 format because one of the things every group I've ever played with has complained about over the years was table space and a landscape orientation means the book laying on the table only extends about 75% as deep onto the surface as a portrait layout. Then I looked at pricing and it was always at least 50% greater than a typical 8.5x11 layout so that was the end of that. From my pricing, 6x9 is by far the best bang for your buck as its a very traditional publishing size so there's more competitive pricing between printers and its ideal for pdf viewing on laptops and tablets (and even phones if you're willing to squint a bit).

6x9, 256 pages.  As long as that 256 pages includes a decent amount of examples and GM advice.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;1033105Something tells me that you took some effort to have it clock in at exactly 2^8 pages (and other books at exactly 2^7). Is there a financial/legal/technical/published standard benefit for doing so?

I just write the damn things in word files.

You'd have to ask the publisher.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1033470I just write the damn things in word files.

You'd have to ask the publisher.

I think SineNomine answered my question--a physical constraint making it cost-effective to come out at an exact paper-count.

AS&SH is a monster book at almost 700 pages, but I have no problem carrying it around or taking it to where I DM.