Something that I've noticed in Candela Obscura & other recent games is the decision to NOT include character sheets in the book, and instead just link you to the web-site.
THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA.
I have games that are over 30yrs old in my bookshelf. Do you really think your web site is going to still be around in that much time? Many of my books link to sites that no longer exist, or downloads that no longer exist.
@masukomi I agree. Every book should include it. When I see this I print a copy and leave it inside the book just in case. Never know what will happen in some years.
Additionally, Every game reference the character sheet in the writing. You know what sucks? Having someone reference something that is important and also NOT in the book you're reading. I need to go download the character sheets a) while I still can b) just to know wtf they're talking about.
Yes, people are no-longer copying character sheets out of books. That's not the ONLY reason they used to be included.
To be explicit "I uploaded it to itch.io or drivethru.rpg" or any equivalent is NOT sufficient. Companies go out of business all the time. Changing URL structure is pretty common too.
There is NO valid alternative to including it in the book. There are valid supplemental things you can do, like putting it on your site & itch and drive through and anything else... But including it IN the same book/pdf as the rules is the ONLY thing that guarantees people with your game have them.
@masukomi One of the considerations with games that use playbooks is they add a lot of pages to the book. BitD playbooks plus crew sheets are 13 pages. i haven't read Candela Obscura yet (just got it today) but being a FitD spinoff is similar both in number of sheets and not being 8 1/2x11. Now this is surmountable—a blank playbook and crew sheet could be included.
But those sheets aren't going away online. The URL in the book might go away, but they'll always be available somewhere.
@rivetgeek@masukomi I think I'd still want something like the Monster of the Week answer. The version in the book isn't ideally formatted for play, but it's present, and adds info as you learn the game.
@squishymage42@rivetgeek Yeah, I'm 100% fine with the book including what's essentially just a conceptual representation so long as there's at least one version in it that has ALL the elements of a character sheet in one place visually representing how you tick off some resource or whatever.
The actual look / layout isn't nearly as important as the reference info, & tools & interactions that the game assumes folks will be having when using it.
@squishymage42@masukomi Yeah this is the ideal solution tbh. And now I need to go back to our game and make sure I've put the reference to the stress boxes into the actual text 🤣
@rivetgeek i have multiple books that can disprove your hypothesis. Of the top of my head, i believe many of the Genesys System resources are unavailable after FFG got bought and their TTPRG stuff sold off to a co that’s doing nothing with it.
@masukomi So there aren't people who have those resources saved to cloud storage? I have every player kit for every FitD game I own on my Google drive. I'm one of thousands, it not more. They'll never not be available.
@rivetgeek sure, but how does that help the random person 10-30 years from now who hears about great game X buys a used copy of it? What if X was an indie game that only 1000 people have copies of? What are the odds that you are going to find somewhere to ask where One will see it? How many of them kept good backups and kept transferring copies from computer to computer?
Even if you can find a Rando with a copy, there’s still time when you’re reading the book, but are missing a critical part
@james@masukomi I'm not disagreeing, it would be nice if there was at least a blank playbook and crew sheet in say BitD. Logistically, though, it's not realistic to put each individual play and crew book in a 326 page digest format book (It would add 26 pages total and they'd be split between two pages).
@james@masukomi Yeah they weren't trying to be clever by not including the player kit. It would have added significant page count and likely cost. There comes a point where you have to make decisions what not to include. For our own FitD game we are going 8 1/2x11, so there's a good chance we'll include the playbooks in the book.
@rivetgeek@Tim_Eagon@james@NerdBurgerCraig There's no good excuse for not being able to afford the number of pages your game needs. If you can't get sufficient crowdfunding / pre-orders / whatever to pay for the physical printing there's not enough demand to bother with printing it in the first place. Games distributed electronically have ZERO excuse.
No-one should be gambling on printing games at this point in time without knowing if there's demand or being able to afford being wrong.
@masukomi@Tim_Eagon@james@NerdBurgerCraig Offset print publishing is a tricky beast. With the move toward crowdfunding and away from blindly paying for print runs in the thousands with no guarantee they'll sell just to get a lower print price, the difference between x pages and x+y pages can put the price of a book outside of what people are willing to pay. Plus most people already aren't willing to pay what a TTRPG book should cost.
@rivetgeek@james@masukomi
FitD is something of an exception, but I'd say the playsheets are a large part of the game, so if they're not included that's not the whole game. For BitD they're about 1/3rd of the whole game, and for some other streamlined stuff like cbrpnk they over 60% of the product. Cutting that's the equivalent of something like trimming spell lists from a d&d based game.
@Lauberfen@rivetgeek@james YES this. For example: Blades in the Dark. It's regularly held up as a game design example to follow. Managing your "Stress" is a core mechanical element of the game.
Using ONLY the core book. Tell me how much stress a character has to work with.
You can't. Not confidently. The number is ONLY mentioned once in a sentence that clarifies one of the Hound's abilities.
Without knowing how much stress a character can have the game is functionally broken.
@rivetgeek@Tim_Eagon 2nd game I grabbed of my shelf looking for a real world example. In 2020 Fantasy Flight Games announced "Keyforged: Secrets of the Crucible" a Genesys game setting. It, like the other ones, has specific character sheets with the default skills for that setting.
Try and download a character sheet for it. They do technically exist, BUT not in publisher or community hosted places. The only resource I found doesn't have "Keyforge" anywhere on the page because of licensing.
@rivetgeek@Tim_Eagon and that's a game from 2020. It's nice to think that community people will host these things, and sometimes it does happen. D6 Star Wars is a great - and very illegal - example of this, but it's the exception not the rule. MOST games don't have huge fan bases. Ex. How many people do you know who've even HEARD of TSR's "Dragon Lance Fifth Age" RPG game that only uses cards? I was working for > 1yr as a web developer when it was released. Internet promo was alive and well.
@rivetgeek@masukomi availability and accessibility are sadly two separate things
It's great that fans will probably preserve a lot of the supplemental online materials for older games (I've written an essay about it in the SWSE community!), it doesn't really solve the problem that those resources are largely kept to private gdrives and dropbox links, preventing those games being accessible to anyone outside of the pre-existing fan bubble. It's no replacement for proper preservation
@rivetgeek@masukomi people have said similar RE digital storage for the last 40 years and have been wrong almost universally. I wanted a character sheet for Bookhounds of London recently, and ended up finding nothing decent except printing it from the pdf of core rules. And that's only 12 years old, from a publisher still thriving, a significant expansion to a really substantial line.
@Lauberfen@rivetgeek@masukomi Link rot, bitrot, drive failures, services shuttering, people deciding to free space by deleting files they don't use, people choosing to just keep those files on the backup drive that they forget exists, putting them on storage media that has a much shorter shelf life than imagined, and so on.
The data is significantly more likely to not survive than to be protected by a field of benevolent strangers happily offering it to randos.
@Kassil@Lauberfen@rivetgeek and, as others have said, even if it DOES happen to survive in some rando's collection, that collection is unlikely to show up in search results (nevermind that it's illegal re-distribution in most cases) and trying to find the rando who happens to have a copy and is willing to share is a fool's errand.
@masukomi@Kassil@Lauberfen There are a lot of ways digital preservation efforts could be successful. But that's neither here nor there since I realized what I really wanted to get across: that this isn't a black and white issue. I've already mentioned a few valid reasons sheets don't get included. If a publisher has to make that choice, they have to make it. I just disagree tha digital resources are guaranteed to be lost to the sands of time.
@rivetgeek@masukomi@Lauberfen Nothing is guaranteed. The weight of probability is merely on the side of it being lost, since most things won't have a dedicated preservation effort.
However, you're very dedicated to your stance, so I'll go feed the cats now. You have a lovely holiday.
@Kassil@masukomi@Lauberfen My stance is mostly: yes, games should be self contained. Yes, there are reasons why a game with a large number of resources (like BitD) don't include them in the print version. On digital preservation my stance is it's not a foregone conclusion resources will become unavailable.
@SymbolicCity@rivetgeek@masukomi this would be better if authors already gave explicit irrevocable and permanent permission to store and distribute these items
@gherhartd@SymbolicCity@masukomi I've seen permission come up in this conversation a few times. Is there any reasonable chance someone is going to invoke copyright claim of I'm hosting a website providing downloads of sheets for some game from like 2012 that nobody remembers?
@rivetgeek@gherhartd@SymbolicCity@masukomi Depends who ends up with the rights, and what their interests are. I wouldn't be shocked if the future of IP trolling were just that sort of thing.
@RogerBW@rivetgeek@gherhartd@SymbolicCity Agreed. If it's just 1 document you'd probably get a takedown notice. BUT If it's a site of useful RPG resource which are all copywritten (happens by default in the US). You're now someone who has put effort into organizing and distributing a large quantity of copyright infringing material. Now, you're "worth" harassing or suing. Remember Hasbro sent a group of Pinkertons to harass someone for a legally bought box. That prolly cost them thousands.
@RogerBW@rivetgeek@gherhartd@SymbolicCity also remember that teh music companies won multiple lawsuits claiming that one person sharing a torrent caused them to "loose" tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Not that their books ever showed sales of anything that matched. It's free money.
So, yes an obscure license where the author company disappeared & wasn't sold you're probably ok unless the author is strapped for $ & sees it as an opportunity.
@RogerBW@rivetgeek@gherhartd@SymbolicCity also, what you’re implying simply isn’t practical. Let’s say that you are comfortable with the risk level of putting 12-year-old files up. Are you going to organize all of your files by the most recent release date and every month upload the ones that have just passed the 12 year mark? Are you going to research which of those companies still exist, and if any of them have had their assets sold to a litigious company?
@RogerBW@rivetgeek@gherhartd@SymbolicCity practical example: fantasy flight games, released the aforementioned Keyforge setting in 2020. Since then they were bought by Asmodee and then sold to Edge.
BUT the “Keyforge” trademark belongs to Asmodee because it’s a card game and they kept the stuff that wasn’t RPGs. So, two parties, one large one small who could both come after you.
how long would it take to do even that superficial amount of research for every character sheet > 10 years old?
@masukomi@RogerBW@gherhartd@SymbolicCity Sure, it's not practical. But in the United States at least blank forms aren't protected under copyright. Logos and whatnot might be protected under copyright or possibly trademark, but TBH, I'd be very surprised if anybody would issue any kind of takedown notice for a character sheet. That doesn't mean that it's never happened but I've never heard of it.
@masukomi@RogerBW@gherhartd@SymbolicCity Either way, I feel this discourse has run its course. Regardless there's a practical reason why some games have not included sheets in their print books, and there are practical methods to keep those sheets accessible. Those methods may not be perfect or meet everyone's criteria for permanent, but they're what we got.
@masukomi I agree with the point about information for the user.
Recently I've been making trade size books with letter size character sheets separate. Maybe I should think more about how those go together.
@timgray101 Personally, I'd be fine with scaling the character sheet down and putting each side on one half of a spread, but that might introduce accessibility issues for low vision folks. Someone suggested that Monster of The Week introduces pieces of the sheet as they teach you the game. I haven't seen it, but that could be fine too. A printable sheet is nice, BUT more important is being able to reference what's being talked about, & be guaranteed to have ALL the info of the game.
@timgray101 I really like how Evil Hat handled this in Fate Core (6"x9" book i think). Admittedly, FATE has a VERY simple character sheet so, you can shrink it a lot and have it still be useful. Starforged did something very similar.
Fate Core also included the character sheets full-page at the end of the book.
Honestly, I don't think I've seen a better method (better to me) for incorporating the character sheet into the book than this approach.
@masukomi I just had to buy a new dishwasher and the assembly instructions where qrcoded links to a third party url shortener which resolves to another third party video site. What could possibly go wrong!? 🙄 Thank god dishwashers have a much shorter live expectancy than books 🤞
@masukomi one of the first things I do when checking out a new game is glance at the character sheet - it tells me so much about the game/system/setting. It really irks me when I don't have a way in a book itself to get a grasp on the system from the highlights of what's worth having/necessary to have on the character sheet. This lack of future proofing just makes it all the worse.
@jquestionmark Agreed. The character sheet is the single most informative thing about ANY RPG game system. JUST looking at that, an experienced player can intuit the vast majority of what the game does mechanically, and the visual styling can give you a hint regarding setting and type of content.
@pteryx@jquestionmark I assume that's just because it would be more expensive and logistically complicated to make 2 different copies. I don't like it, but I don't blame them.
Game companies make SO little profit on physical copies that every thing they can do to cut costs helps. I'd bet that for Modiphius, the cost of the plastic wrapping pays for itself within 1 or 2 replacements for damaged book pages.
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