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.