The last ten to fifteen years of the RPG hobby have played host to a veritable explosion of content, from highly original new games to revivals of decades-old games and everything in between. A significant building block of this renaissance was digital publication. Instead of shelling out thousands of dollars for a print run and then having to find a distributor, a designer could create their game in PDF form and put it up for sale on a marketplace like DriveThruRPG, all for no upfront cost beyond whatever time it took them to design the game in the first place. This has made roleplaying games cheaper, more diverse, and more accessible than ever before.

The trouble with digital versions of RPGs does not lie in their economics; the real issue is that RPG PDFs are treated as ‘digital versions’, as facsimiles of a game whose platonic ideal is a bound paper book. I won’t mince words: Selling identically laid out books and PDFs is and will always be a usability failure. The way we use books and the way we use our digital reading devices, be those laptops, tablets, or e-readers, are completely different, and trying to use the same document these two ways usually leads to a suboptimal experience in both.

I do know why RPG PDFs and books look the same, and it’s simply that in the low-margin world of game design, actually laying out a game twice is an exorbitant luxury. I accept that, and I don’t necessarily think it’s any one designer’s fault for following this trend. That said, there are certainly better ways to do things, and there’s one simple one that we can do now with few needed changes: Stop making books.

Reading: Screens Versus Books

The potential opening up to RPGs in the digital realm is vast, and I may sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth if I’m discussing a move away from physical books entirely while also dismissing VTTs. That is, however, what I’m doing. VTTs, or virtual tabletops, are immensely useful tools for those who like playing online and doing their prep in a digital environment. That said, I will always believe that the platonic ideal of a roleplaying game is going to be at a table, in-person; the relationship of VTTs to RPGs is and should be like the relationship of Tabletop Simulator to board games. Therefore, a game reference which is usable for in-person as well as digital play is likely to be a text-based document first and a more robust software utility second.

Let’s then discuss reading. The typical RPG rulebook for a long time was letter (or A4) sized, usually hardcover for core books and large supplements. These books were typically laid out in two columns, though some had three. This was so because of how typesetting typically works; a single line of text should contain (depending on who you ask) between 35 and 80 characters, with 60 characters a frequently agreed-upon standard. If your font size was small enough and your pages large enough, you’d break the page into multiple columns to make the page easier to read. While two column layouts were typical, three-column layouts were popular with publishers who used a lot of smaller sections or many callouts; this would help break up the page and make things easier to follow, at least in theory. Three column layouts also helped small font sizes stay readable; this is at least one of the reasons that you only see them these days in very dense games like GURPS.

As more indie publishers started to put their games out into the world in both digital and physical forms, there was a shift towards ‘digest’ (roughly A5) books, so named for the magazines which were typically published in that size. Digest-sized books had two distinct advantages over larger books; in the physical realm, the smaller book was cheaper to publish (as long as you didn’t increase the page count too much), while in the digital realm the digest-sized books made for friendlier PDFs because they were typically laid out with one column. Reading a multi-column page in PDF can be annoying, though this is technically a limitation of the technology used for reading rather than the document itself.

Needless to say, book pages are intended to be read as books, as a physical document you hold in your hand. When reading a book you scan pages from top to bottom, potentially multiple times if the book is laid out with multiple columns. The simplest disruption created when reading on a digital device is disruption to this scanning process, and this happens simply because you can’t easily fit an entire letter-sized page onto a monitor. Assuming a US letter page (8.5 inches wide by 11 inches tall), the smallest monitor you can actually display a page onto at 100% scale is (assuming a widescreen aspect ratio of either 16:9 or 16:10, which is standard these days) around 21 inches. For us nerds sitting at home with desktops this may not seem like any big flex, but it means that the vast majority of laptops are poorly suited for reading RPG PDFs. Although tablets are more likely to allow for easy reading in portrait mode that isn’t much better; for a true 100% zoom you still need a 15” tablet, which puts you far beyond the 10-12 inch diagonal measurement of most devices. I’ll concede that with a tablet you can hold like a book you can often get away without a full 100% page zoom, especially considering how much more contrast a backlit tablet offers compared to a book. Even with this consideration, though, you’re both making compromises in your reading experience and still presupposing that your reader is willing to spend, say, $1000 for a 12.9 inch iPad Pro.

The most frustrating part about this is that most game designers are making digital games anyway; not every indie designer will even translate their PDF into print and yet the ability to do so is seen as primary. If we are treating these games as digital products to be consumed through digital equipment, there’s so much more we can do to make them as usable and accessible as possible.

The Usability Potential of Digital

It is a constant frustration of disability advocates in the RPG space that so few RPGs are available in epub format. Epub is a file format commonly used for ebooks which also has fantastic support for screen readers and other accessibility tools. The text of an RPG should in theory be an easy target for epub conversion, but other layout elements like sidebars, tables, and art make this much more difficult. It is fair to note that epub is designed primarily for text-only media like novels, but much of a typical game should be able to be distilled into a text-only experience.

The divide between text-only experience and rich document, rich layout experience is one that perfectly illustrates the potential of pushing RPGs further into the digital realm. There’s no doubt that layout can enhance a game, but pushing beyond layout into user experience (UX) is something that few games have done. The move to digital tools has been happening in fits and starts over the last two decades, but honestly does more to highlight the lack of commitment behind the moves that have been made so far than anything else. For one example, consider Lancer. Lancer is a game which follows in the footsteps of D&D Fourth Edition in terms of having highly delineated, map-driven combat. It’s a highly complex game, certainly to the point of intimidation for many gamers. Recognizing this, the game’s publisher developed COMP/CON, a set of web-based utilities for playing and running Lancer. COMP/CON is great; it’s slick, easy to navigate, and offers a ton of features, to the point that some players say they’d never run without it. Yet, COMP/CON is essentially a standalone utility that sits next to Lancer. Why wouldn’t it be possible to put more of the game in a similar interface, and make the entire experience as accessible as that utility?

Some of the answers to this question are kind of dumb but very true all the same, and they have to do with selling the game. It’s a tough sell to make a game that’s entirely accessible online and gated behind a paywall; this means significant development resources and the potential need for a subscription model to ensure that there continues to be enough revenue to maintain the site and keep it online. Such a model also causes player reluctance; no matter how good the game is, we all know what orphan services look like. With all that said, why not sell a game as a static library? Instead of a PDF, sell an HTML stack or some other rich format but allow the buyer to have a copy indefinitely, just like they can with a PDF now. Make everything more dynamic, less bound to the ‘book’ medium, and generally more accessible. You can lay out text-heavy sections similar to how you would in a book, but yet add so much more additional functionality. Can you imagine buying a game with a step-by-step character creator built in? Or built-in GMing utilities? How about dynamic indexing; depending on what you’re doing you can call up a list of every character ability, or every random table in the document, or every piece of in-universe fiction, if that’s what you wanted. This sort of scripting is no harder than learning InDesign.

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Moving away from the assumption that “RPG = Book” is happening in fits and starts. Powered by the Apocalypse made separate reference documents the gold standard, something that had happened surprisingly inconsistently before. Quest successfully laid out their game book differently for hardcopy and PDF, which made a significant difference in how readable the PDF version was. Lancer deserves credit for COMP/CON, but it’s merely the most recent in a long line of games which attempted to provide integrated utilities; back in the early 2000s you had the GURPS character creator which you could buy on CD-ROM (remember those?), but also the EABA PDFs which had dice rollers and character references coded directly into the PDF itself. There has been innovation for a very long time, but significant reticence to actually change. Hell, a recent and significant celebration of indie game publishing is ZineQuest, and the zine is both a way to make a physical publication easily and cheaply and an artifact of the 1960s and 70s. We’re stuck within a box.

What frustrates me most about the state of digital RPG publishing is that we’ve already proven that we can innovate. Examples like Lancer and Quest, the Phone PDF experiment pioneered by DriveThruRPG, and SRDs for many major publications all show what more advanced digital RPGs can look like. We do have companies like Wizards of the Coast who, now that they know how to make money with it, are advancing digital marketplaces like D&D Beyond as both a VTT and the only authorized digital version of their game. The changes are coming, but we don’t need to settle for making versions of game IP for Foundry or Roll20. The digital future of the RPG can still lie with standalone games, but those games have to be more than print proofs made into PDFs. Designers, embrace digital distribution. The RPG book of the past cannot be scanned and uploaded into the digital game of the future.

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