Format Wars

Most of the decisions I make about game design, I try to consult with as many people as possible, get feedback from trusted advisers, and do mini-focus groups.  But sometimes I just have to weigh the options and go with my gut, public opinion be damned.  For a while now I've been losing sleep over the best format for the new game, and I've finally settled on it.

Requirements
In considering the right format, the key is reader-friendliness.  That has four key components:

• Looks good on screen - More and more gamers are acquiring, sharing, and using their game texts on a computer.  I've GMed with a laptop instead of a stack of sourcebooks and loved it.
• Looks good in print - That being said, lots of gamers don't have access to a computer, or at least not one they can bring to the game table.  And even when they do, there are a lot of reasons people like a physical text.  It's a lot easier to share around the table, make notes and bookmarks, and less of a disaster if damaged.
• Familiar - People can be slow to accept change.  There are several visual cues that tell me I'm reading an RPG manual and not a textbook, cookbook, novel, or blog.  The more conventions I can adhere to without sacrificing functionality, the more comfortable it feels for the reader.
• Easy to navigate - Perhaps more than anything else, people want to get the right information quickly and easily so they can get on with the game instead of flipping through sourcebooks.  A lot of that is streamlining and organization of the actual content, but a lot of it is also choosing the right format.

The Story So Far
Almost every RPG manual and sourcebook I've ever seen was printed as a book first, two-column format in portrait orientation.  Even web-original publications tend to follow this trend, and most digital RPG materials are PDFs designed for printing.

HTML vs. PDF
I have long had a fondness for HTML.  The hyperlinking allows for a nonlinear textual experience, even when it's all one webpage.  I can even do awesome things with CSS to optimize the format for screen or print output.  For a long time I played around with TiddlyWiki, a nice little wikification tool that let me organize the game information like a mind map instead of a hierarchal outline.

The trouble with HTML is it doesn't do columns well.  By which I mean, more generally, it lends itself to huge, intimidating walls of text unless I modify my writing style to make little, tiny paragraphs.  It's designed for screen only, and all the CSS in the world doesn't give complete control over formatting, causes a lot of headaches accounting for all possible browsers and screen resolutions, and just doesn't look as good on paper.

PDF is dandy, it preserves formatting and seals all the fonts and graphics and everything up into one tight little package.  It's what most gamers expect and it always looks the same no matter where or how you're looking at it.  More recent versions allow hyperlinking, bookmarking, and other handy navigation features.

Every web design guide ever says PDFs are the spawn of Satan.  Of course, all of those guides were written in 1997 when nobody knew what PDFs were, and sure you wouldn't want to make a website entirely of PDFs.  And the traditional RPG manual PDF doesn't really look great on screen, since most screens are landscape (even more so now that wider screens are more common) while most books are landscape, either you zoom out to see the whole page and it's too small to read, or you zoom in to read and have to keep scrolling up to get to the next column.

The solution I reached is a PDF in landscape orientation, with slightly larger-than-average text to look nice on screen.  It will print nicely in exactly the same format, so the guy reading it on screen and the gal reading it on dead tree can literally be on the same page.

A4 vs. Letter
I've done enough work in Europe, South America, and Asia to know that A4 is the metric/ISO paper of choice.  Letter is the standard in North America, where, let's face it, most of the gaming market still is.  Since Letter has a shorter aspect ratio, it will fit on A4 paper, but an A4 format risks being cut off when printed on Letter, so I decided to err on the side of compatibility and do everything in Letter; anyone printing to A4 gets bonus margins.