Is hardcopy required? PDF?

How important are hardcopy books?

Are PDFs the only digital format anybody would tolerate?

How would you react to an RPG book that's exclusively in mobile/tablet/web app form?

Some intro set for free, buy full game + expansions for money.

Everything integrated into a single well-organized source.

And maybe you can share your expansions with up to 7 other accounts at a time, but the sharing expires after 8 hours (so you can share your expansions with the group before you start playing until a little while after you go home).

Integrated character builder akin to offline 4e builder in features.

Paper character sheets and simple references are also available if wanted.

Would that be a no go? Would you consider it?

I like having books but as long as it's organized it really doesn't matter

So you're part of a marketing firm?
Trying to test the waters?
An indi developer seeing what headway they can take with this though?
Let me sum it up for you like this;
Hard-copy is important for ease of access. Nothing is easier than flipping through a book for information.
Nothing is more tangible in the game than the book itself. With all things imagined, that book is the anchor.
Dice are fluid. Just like character sheets. But being physical, again, it's a tangible anchor of ownership in your part of the story.
In this game you first pool our money. Player A buys suppliment A, and player B suppliment B.
Together they have more for the game than either alone. This goes with ideas and general contributions. Money plays a big part in this, through the proliferation of technology the software to make the most important part of the game just does not exist.
Self created material is more important to the psychology of play style than any pay wall or mechanic for revenue.
The moment we turn a game into a Free to Play MMORPG we lose that which is the fundamental element of the game.

They're not. PDFs work just as well.

You should support game companies so they can continue to put out content for the games you love though.

>why do you ask?
Long time rpg player and homebrewer wondering if anybody else finds books and pdfs irritating as a medium for game content, because they start to take up a lot of space, and because they're annoying to search because the multiple book model inherently makes things disorganized.

>sharing supplements with the group.
Already covered bro, check the op again.

>the software does not exist
Gonna need more information here, i don't follow.

>muh homebrew!
But right now there's no way to put your homebrew into the printed books or pdfs, either.

Let's say you could share or sell your homebrew within the webapp itself, including adding it into the character creator. Would that make a big difference?

>Hard-copy is important for ease of access. Nothing is easier than flipping through a book for information.
>Nothing is more tangible in the game than the book itself. With all things imagined, that book is the anchor.

Insert comments from autists here about PDF bookmarks, ease of use on a computer, printing pages and carry large amounts of books to games (they don'T actually take part in, but anyway).

I agree though. Hardcopy is a must. Fucking much better than a PDF. Always. Hardcopy with PoD of other stuff all that way.

Oh.

Im also a career software engineer, so I wouldn't be trying to hide some software company to make it for me (that never goes well).

Amazon sells a handful of games in their kindle format. It isn't that bad. As long as you have a computer, or decent tablet you should be alright.

I still like physical books. Companies that give you a free pdf version with the print version usually get my business.

>Hard-copy is important for ease of access. Nothing is easier than flipping through a book for information.

CTRL+F

>Gaming without ctrl+f
*shudder*.

Why would i go back to that?

You've clearly not met the control-f on most pdfs

It's not going to exactly be as fluid and precise as a web-browser control-f

You need a better harddrive or something.

Or more optimized keywording, searching for magic in the book is not going to end well 95% of the time.

The search on d20pfsrd/dndtools is pretty nice though.

Hardcopies are nice, especially if you're flipping back and forth between multiple pages, but there's nothing wrong with being pdf-only.

Depends on the PDF, the software, and the computer running it. It's trivial for a company to publish a fully-searchable PDF.

I've played tabletop RPGs for more than twelve years (alright, not that much, compared to some) and I never owned a single physical RPG book or a set of real dice. Same goes for most of my fellow players. We are perfectly satisfied with that.
There are around five thousand books in my house and I'd exchange 9/10 of them into digital without a second thought.

>be me
>live in potato gulag
>wait for the books forever
>never use them because "English? Haven't you got a russian translation?"

I usually download pdfs of new rules and books I'm not sure I'll play, but I like to have the books when my group is interested.

That being said, I also like the ctrl+f function, so I usually do the scan and OCR myself for the games that I really like or when a decent pdf is not available for torrenting.

Such is life. I began my tabletop "career" with Chi's translation of V:tM. That was one and only game I ever read in russian. But pretty much everyone I met in the hobby is bilingual, so it was never much of an obstacle. The only hassle we occasionally encountered was deciding on translated terminology.

>"no, because nobody translates rpg books to Russian because that's no money in it".

if Russian translators are anything like English translators, or software developers, they won't work on as little money as the rpg industry operates on.

As a result, rpg translations tend to be pretty rare.

And rpg software tools tend to be sloppy, half assed, amateur as fuck, etc.

That's When you can get them at all.

What ever allows you and your players to enjoy themselves is acceptable.
I have a player who has digital scans of the pages he needs and swipes them around on his tablet.
I myself use a laptop and PDFs for quicker access mid-game (though I have most of the physical books as well).

The object is to enjoy oneself. Barring that, whatever is easiest and works

I prefer phyiscal books, I think its easier to find shit in them quickly once you have a general idea where it is, and PDFs are NEVER bookmarked well enough.

PDFs or some other digital format arent bad though, d20srd was fucking great when I played 3.5DnD. DrivethruRPG is full of pdf-only/print on demand rpg books.

I've been playing and running games for sixteen years. I prefer hard copies, because I'm part of the generation that remembers when CD players were too expensive for regular people to afford.

There's also the fact that there's something pleasurable about reading a real book (and despite what some would like to say, no high DPI screen to date is as good as using your eyes to read ink printed on paper). I've been reading all my life, and my Kindle just isn't that fun to read (the touchscreen is... fiddly at best).

In addition, I've found that used books (so long as they aren't rare out of print titles) tend to be a lot cheaper than PDFs. I do have quite a few PDFs (some purchased as a bundle with print books, some purchased in lieu of print, and others pirated), but generally they're cumbersome to navigate because bookmarking varies from company to company, and most of the time you can't "flip" between two widely spaced pages.

Don't get me wrong, PDFs can be convenient, but when I'm working on making stuff for game, I prefer have the physical copies (many of which I bookmark myself).

Print books can be heavy to transport from one place to another, but it doesn't bother me that much. Mildly inconvenient to lift for a trip to and from the car. But, I could use the exercise in any case.

I will admit, I may just be old-fashioned, but some of it is frugality where money is concerned. For example, I buy a lot of used books (novels and games) and PDFs and Kindle books tend to be much more expensive (my dollar goes further with used goods, essentially). Even if I were fabulously wealthy, I'd still do this.

I usually buy the RPG books I like. I buy everything from Cubicle's One Ring line for example.

I like having a physical book because it's very difficult to throw a PDF at someone when they're being stupid.

if the search term is frequent, using the index is faster. i like hardcopies, if they are well done.

I prefer having a hard copy of the book.