Media for RPG material

Role-playing games
#4

Quite a few companies provide pdfs of rulebooks alongside dead tree copies, which I’m very fond of. I love having a physical book to leaf through, but for games that I’m playing digitally, having a pdf to pull up on a screen is very convenient, particularly since the copies of books might not be accessible.

I tend to have a collection of physical RPG books that includes systems that I know I’ll never get to the table, bought for the enjoyment of the production. I would never buy a digitally copy by itself unless I was actively playing that game system.

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#5

At the moment I tend to have the core system book in hardcopy, one screen for the videoconference, and another screen for any other reference material I need. (Sometimes on separate machines depending on where I’m doing it.) I printed a bunch of GURPS PDF supplements but generally don’t bother any more.

(I’ve also made a “stripped” version of the Genesys core book, with all the images removed, so that it’s faster to search and render. Very pretty layout style, but…)

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#6

I pretty much always prefer dead tree stuff. Even when the heaviness of having a load of books makes things inconvenient, I still have things like spell/monster cards, and I’ll print out other supplementary stuff (character sheets, stats for monsters I don’t have cards for, etc).

Hell, I’m using books more now that we’re playing online because I don’t have to carry them anywhere!

I do have copies of pretty much everything as PDFs, which I keep in Dropbox so I can easily access them if I don’t have the books for whatever reason. But I’ll always prefer books. Mainly I just find them easier to use. Plus I’ve killed enough hard drives to not trust that anything digital is forever.

#7

I almost never get to play RPGs so I will only buy a physical copy if I really love the game (or for a couple of very specific creators, their overall work). I don’t have space for everything I might want to read in the medium, plus somewhere in the last couple decades printed RPG books got fucking insanely expensive. $50 for one book? That’s a nope from me.

I do find print copies a bit easier to reference and share at the table, but even before the pandemic it was way easier to find games online than get my local friends to play anything I want to play and be reliably available. So I definitely need a PDF there.

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#8

I’m the same with regards to physical copies as the preferred choice but haven’t bought anything since a DnD sourcebook last year. I love the tactile natural of a large tome and they look great on a shelf and are a talking point for friends.

I use pdfs rarely if I’m playing online.

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#9

For reading the rules I want a dead-tree book, so my preferred option these days is games which bundle both physical copy and pdf together. Reading an entire rulebook on screen melts my eyeballs and turns my brain to mush.

Having pdf versions of character sheets and the like is wonderful. Well, it is wonderful if they are printer friendly.

Normally, when I’m running a game I have the physical book to hand, not the pdf. My phone is too old and too small to comfortably read rules or character sheets on it.

However, since everything is held online in these cursed days of covid, I’ve often got the pdf book open. All glory to the Ctrl F function, since RPG indexes still continue to be as much use as a chocolate teapot.

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#10

I still like my books. I can’t help it, the format just works for me and the pleasure factor can’t be ignored.

That said, I’m running a PbP game of Troika! at the moment and, while the asynchronous nature of the game is helping me get my footing (I haven’t run a game in decades), I’m increasingly curious about platforms.

I’m not sure I’ll ever want to ditch having physical books for my games, but getting a PDF with purchase is increasingly important to me. At the end of the day, pandemic notwithstanding, I think the realities of my lifestyle will increasingly point me online for game sessions and I’d be foolish to ignore the options available to facilitate that.

I’ll end with a question though: for anyone using some of the fancier options… have you found them explicitly necessary? Are your players increasingly demanding of these kind of platforms? I feel like I can do a whole lot with simple Discord/Forum software and some very basic imaging software.

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#11

The only things I’ve ever used are 1) dice rolling, 2) chat/posts, and 3) fillable character sheets. Until Discord came along I’d not encountered a great way to do 1 and 2 that wasn’t explicitly part of an existing community other than Roll20, and I really didn’t feel like it made sense to all pop up on some forum somewhere to play with each other and not, you know, the locals. I’m still not sure how you would do nice functional character sheets playing through Discord. At least not as nice as Roll20 has for a whole shedload of games. But that thing has so many functions that are mostly relevant to D&D and games like D&D that it does feel like overkill on the other hand.

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#12

Yeah that last bit in particular is what has kept me from doing more than surface research on available options. I just don’t need the wealth of options available (I play squarely in the OSR space) and worry it’ll be more of a burden than a help.

#13

The online groups I’m in just use, er, dice. (In some cases dice apps on people’s phones.)

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#14

Heh. We already fired one of our dice bots. If nothing else, having a formalized rolling format provides a kind of enforced honesty. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

#15

I look at it this way: It’s a game, that’s all, and if you can’t trust people to roll the dice honestly then why would you want to play with them?

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#16

I look at it that way too. But not all do, and in this case it’s flat out more convenient. [EDIT] Noting that I’m currently playing with 4 complete strangers.

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#17

Why would you ever fire a dice bot? They are all lovely.

#18

I have written many dice bots. Including subtly cheating ones, when I was called on to do it. It’s very easy when you realise that what a human perceives as “random enough” is quite disjoint from “actually random”.

(https://github.com/Firedrake/discourse-dice-roller is the one that’s running here.)

#19

I actually preferred the one we started with because of how easy it was to edit. Troika uses a D6 system, so you need to be able to roll things like D666 or 2D66. The one we changed to can make that happen, but it’s cumbersome to type out. The one we fired let you save whatever roll formulas you wanted for easy repetition…

…but it also barely ever worked when called upon.

#20

I think it’s still here @VictorViper

Do you mean the bot of disco?

#21

Yeah, sorry, was referring to the one we planted into our Discord game. I haven’t had a need to roll any dice over here yet. :flushed:

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#22

FYI if you want stuff like that added to the “other” bot here just give me a shout.

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#23

@RogerBW that’s very cool and hilarious! Did you by any chance have anything to do with the dice rolling in Blood Bowl? I think the dice are skewed at higher difficulty to balance the poor AI decisions. Still, love that game so much.

With RP, when we were playing in person, two of our group would use their laptops for DnD Beyond, as they preferred it. They’d still roll physical dice of course.
Must admit it keeps the space incredibly clean and makes travel a lot easier but you obviously can’t just pass over a laptop if someone wants to check a feat or whatever, though they can check things very quickly.
It works because we have a mix of books and the laptops.
Best of both worlds.

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