Quote from: Sacrosanct;690603You guys are conflating "professional" with "good", and "unprofessional" with "bad."

Not on my part. Professional products can be bad, and non-professional creations can be good. It's neither here nor there, as far as I'm concerned.

Professional (Merriam-Webster)

: relating to a job that requires special education, training, or skill
: done or given by a person who works in a particular profession
: paid to participate in a sport or activity

Professional (Dictionary.com)

pro·fes·sion·al  [pruh-fesh-uh-nl]  Show IPA
adjective
1. following an occupation as a means of livelihood or for gain: a professional builder.
2. of, pertaining to, or connected with a profession: professional studies.
3. appropriate to a profession: professional objectivity.
4. engaged in one of the learned professions: A lawyer is a professional person.
5. following as a business an occupation ordinarily engaged in as a pastime: a professional golfer.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;690603Hand drawn maps and whatnot can be a perfectly good product, but it's not professional.  A glossy map and layout can be a bad product, but still be professional.

I disagree. Whether a product is professional has nothing to do with whether the maps are hand drawn, glossy, or not.

Assuming you'd have unlimited funds and all possible tools of production at your disposal, you might still want to include hand-drawn maps in your product for reasons that have to do with its design, what it tries to actually achieve as a product. Not to mention, drawing maps by hand can be done with particular skill and a command of those skills, i.e. professionally. Ergo, whether a map is hand-drawn does not necessarily mean a product is not professional. Conversely, a computer generated, glossy map does not necessarily make a product professional.

Ditto counters, color layout, and so on.

D&D is basically crap.  Yet professionals are paid to work on it.  If another RPG comes along and it is better than D&D, and the designers didn't get paid, then they are not pros.

Quote from: robiswrong;690599"Production values are great.  Adding pretty stuff is great.  But they should lead to more playability, and be in service to it.  If you'd consider a glossy, unplayable game professional, while a perfectly crafted game in black and white typewriter text to be crappy, then you're putting the cart before the horse."

But nobody has claimed that. It was a strawman when Benoist said it, and it's a strawman when you say it.

Quote from: Benoist;690601What you construe as a "professionally designed and laid out book" is not a general objective rule. What matters is what the game is trying to achieve, and the way the form and layout and so on help to achieve this game play intent. In that sense, DCC RPG has a LOT going for it in terms of professional design and specific lay out aiding it to achieve its goal in terms of game play...


... and that is exactly what you are intimating here. The layout actually incorporates all these illustrations, the black and white style is clearly intentional, and so on. After, whether you personally don't like black and white books and such is neither here nor there. If you have a massive problem with it, maybe you aren't the target customer of the design? It seems to please a damn lot of people besides you, myself included.

This is why you come across as such a dick; reading into things that people don't actually say.  I said nothing about liking or disliking black and white illustrations. I happen to think they work quite well in the DCC (and even better in FantasyCraft). The comment about the DCC books being unprofessionally laid out is about running the text across the whole page with a single column, instead of break it into two columns. How headers are used. White space. FantasyCraft does all of this much better than DCC, even though they both have roughly the same production values in terms of B&W, paper, binding, etc.

Readability is not entirely subjective. If you're a professional layout designer, you can't hand whatever the hell you please into your client and say 'hey, works for me.' There are techniques which are empirically proven to be more effective than others, and enhance ease or reading and retention. People actually study this stuff, with eye tracking scanners, blinking, retention tests, etc. A few RPG publishers get this stuff (or rather they employ people who are trained in it). Some don't. It matters to me, because RPG books are a product like any other, and usability matters.

Quote from: Haffrung;690628But nobody has claimed that. It was a strawman when Benoist said it, and it's a strawman when you say it.

Well then what did you mean when you went on a rant about how only FFG and Paizo produce real professional products and games like DCC RPG, Labyrinth Lord and others are these God awful amateurish pieces of crap, and people who like those things are retrograde and don't know what's good for the hobby, should go away and so on?

Because that's actually a drum you've been beating for a while, unless I've completely misunderstood your ranting about the professionalism of RPG publishers, these grognard neckbeards who should just go away, those Shatner moments you are wishing for, and you actually mean something else, in which case, I'm all ears, and would love to know what you actually meant when you ranted about all this over years of postings.

Quote from: Haffrung;690629The comment about the DCC books being unprofessionally laid out is about running the text across the whole page with a single column, instead of break it into two columns. How headers are used. White space.

I disagree with you. I do not see how running the text in a single column or two actually makes the game objectively worse, or badly laid out.

Since we are at the point where we tell each other why we think we're dicks, my problem with you is that you are constantly confusing your own perspectives and tastes with objective truth, and/or generalize them, along with your own particular experiences, to such an extent that if someone says something that doesn't remotely pan out with your point of view, then they must be dishonest, liars, revionists and/or dicks.

Like when we were talking about how the OD&D game was played in a wide variety of ways in the 70s, that basically it is just as revisionist to say the game was played entirely hack n slash by most people or entirely thespian or whatnot by these same "most people," and that you had this knee-jerk reaction because that did not pan out with how you experienced the game from your own corner of the hobby past 1980 and started ranting about how modules are all hack and slash and bad, that the games never explained that back-and-forth to-and-from the dungeon stuff, avoiding encounters, players deciding on their own objectives, etc, which was proven wrong (AD&D PH page 107-109 FYI), which then prompted more shifting of goalposts...

That's the bullshit I have a problem with.

Quote from: Haffrung;690629Readability is not entirely subjective.

I agree. But readability depends on the user, and different products are aimed at different audiences, therefore the lay out and presentation of a product, including its art, whether the text is in two columns or one, what to do with blank spaces, how big they should be, where, etc, will vary depending on that which you are trying to create and market to that audience. So subjectivity, tastes, perceptions are ALSO part of the picture.

I didn't think what Benoist said was confusing. When collectible tchotchkes become the ends instead of the means, we'll have problems. Same issue with a lot of products; when the market skews towards collectibility over usability problems arise.

The collector's market is a very different market from the player's/user's market -- however tempting their money assumes otherwise. It's been the boon of speculators for ages, but the bane of many producers who lost sight of their product's original purpose.

Similarly insular theory crafting rides the same death spiral. You *can* try to improve a product nigh indefinitely. And you also can lose sight of the product in the pursuit of refinement. See: high end food art, Japanese infatuation with improving the toilet (they're great!... to a point. then just spooky), etc.

But soufflés, people, soufflés! You've been doing so well beating things into a peaking foam. Just remember to stop before broken peaks, the proteins can only take so much of a beating.

Quote from: Haffrung;690629There are techniques which are empirically proven to be more effective than others, and enhance ease or reading and retention. People actually study this stuff, with eye tracking scanners, blinking, retention tests, etc. A few RPG publishers get this stuff (or rather they employ people who are trained in it). Some don't. It matters to me, because RPG books are a product like any other, and usability matters.

As someone who's studied graphic design and knows a ton of graphic designers and designed a book that gets used an awful lot because it doesn't follow graphic design orthodoxy, I'm sick of seeing this idea being used as a cudgel.

Yeah: there is such a thing as professional-looking (i.e. expensive looking) graphic design. There are scientifically ways to make a thing easier to read. There are also scientifically proven ways to make songs more memorable--it doesn't mean those are the only sentences worth writing.

The moment you assume the industry standards are the only or best ways to engage a reader, or that trade-offs that graphic designers make are always worth it, you fall into a trap that your graphic design teacher will stright up tell you that you fell into.

Sometimes there's an overall effect a designer is trying to get, and to get it they need to do something that isn't the same Picture Left Text Right White Space Everywhere Thematic Border over and over.

There isn't actually any graphic design teacher worth their salt who will actually tell you "Don't try different things, and when you do try them, don't judge whether they worked by actually looking at how the audience for the thing responds to it".

And there aren't actually a lot of high-end groundbreaking graphic designers  who have actually looked at RPG game book design as a separate problem (the way they've looked at cook book design and album cover design as a separate problem) and really come up with solutions distinctive to the fairly unusual way RPG books are used compared to other books. So the field is actually wide open.

Sometimes a solution trades obvious ease of reading to a majority audience for something else. And sometimes the audience wants that something else.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;690614I've seen a lot of professionally written bad games and professionally drawn terrible maps.  Professional just means you got your money.

Some things are often done as well by amateurs as by professionals:

Writing music
Playing music
Designing games
Illustrating games

Some things are rarely done as well my amateurs as by professionals:

Mixing music
Laying out and editing game books

The difference is that the former activities are creative, fun, and rewarding in themselves, while the latter are much less obviously so. People will plunk away on a guitar, or scribble away on a game design as a kind of hobby. Few people mix and arrange music, or lay out and proof books, for fun. They usually expect to be paid. The difference in quality between an amateur product and professional product often comes down to those technical roles that the audience/customer is largely oblivious to, except in their absence.

I'll say it again, though, I don't necessarily want the guy who is good at laying out the book to design the mechanics or write the setting, etc.  Like most professional skills, it should be hired out to someone really really good at layout.

Someone that does something successfully as a living is a professional.  Anything else is just a tinkerer or hobbyist.

Quote from: mcbobbo;690650I'll say it again, though, I don't necessarily want the guy who is good at laying out the book to design the mechanics or write the setting, etc.  Like most professional skills, it should be hired out to someone really really good at layout.

I think that the graphic designer of an RPG book should be a GM (at least some kind of GM).

The reason shit is so hard to find in 90% of RPG books is the graphic designers are just random "professionals".

Quote from: Zak S;690663I think that the graphic designer of an RPG book should be a GM (at least some kind of GM).

The reason shit is so hard to find in 90% of RPG books is the graphic designers are just random "professionals".

Alternatively, layout should be reviewed by people who aren't graphic designers but are GMs.

Sort of like playtesting.

Quote from: Benoist;690276When your idea of a professional RPG is to have cardboard counters, glossy paper and color artwork throughout to wank on in your spare time, I think you might be missing something about what RPGs are actually supposed to be designed for. YMMV.

For a moderator here, you sure set a poor example for posters to follow.

Quote from: Archangel Fascist;690715For a moderator here, you sure set a poor example for posters to follow.

Luckily enough, the RPG Site is a place where you can say something like "RPGs are meant to be played, and not to primarily serve as coffee table reading material" without sounding too controvertial.