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As the title mentioned, when it comes to the actual RPG book--what are your preferences and dislikes. Is there a font type you love (or hate)? Does size matter  when it comes to the book? Which ones , in your opinion, hit a home run? Give me some of your opinions please.

I don't really have a type or font face or particular look that I'll go for instead of others. I would *generally* go for clear, clean layouts with text that is easy to search and easy to read, but then again, I'm a fan of Gygax's prose too, and I like Pathfinder's uber-charged layout in terms of feel.

I think that these elements mostly need to be in sync with the vibe of the RPG you are going for. The art, the layout, the color scheme if any work for or against the mood of the game. The kind of everything-goes-black-and-white layout of DCC RPG works big time in the favor of its Swords and Sorcery old school theme. The cleanliness, short sentences, precision of the ACKS book likewise brings a clarity that works in favor of its various sub-systems. Each layout works differently to add something to its own game feel, so to speak.

First, you should have an Index.  That's one of the best features in all my favorite gaming books - if you expect the book to be a reference, an index is really handy.  

Secondly, if the book is going to be a frequent reference, it has to be tough (assuming it's printed).  If you pack too many pages in, the spine will break if you have to open it to different areas.  I prefer to have frequently referenced sections in a separate document - ie, spells belong in a 'book of spells', not in the Player's Handbook.  

Assuming normal sized pages, columns are the best way to organize text - an unbroken line of text across the entire page is hard to read quickly.

I think it greatly depends on what you're trying to do. If you're:
a) Distributing some homebrew rules among your friends.
b) Looking to bridge into professionally layout design.
c) Have no life and lots of money and want to go as far with this as possible.

So far as a) goes I find it's pretty easy to whip up a folded legal sheets of paper and about 20 pages and come up with a very presentable ruleset in adobe indesign or scribus. If you want b) or c) then you need to rule on design sensibility.

Do you want high image (colour or b&w, either can be done well) with mid-page wrap arounds? Do you want capture borders - more of a zine quality or a formal quality? Are you trying to push the ruleset, or the 'culture' of the game and how interesting it would be get involved in such (which promotes over-glossy high colour art and easy reference tables over the rules content itself).

Essentially, what are your goals?

//Panjumanju

Quote from: Panjumanju;560894Essentially, what are your goals?

Not sure. I was wanting to hear from you (and others) on what you like and dislike. I know it was an odd size, but the hardcover Nobilis was a beautiful book. There are pics from the reprinted 1e AD&D books that look great as well.

Don't lay it out like GURPS 3rd edition stuff.

I admit that I like nostalgia to influence my books.  That's why I'm a big fan of the souvenir font and TW Cent font.

Quote from: vgunn;560856As the title mentioned, when it comes to the actual RPG book--what are your preferences and dislikes. Is there a font type you love (or hate)? Does size matter  when it comes to the book? Which ones , in your opinion, hit a home run? Give me some of your opinions please.

For size preference, I prefer 8½X11 or the half-that booklets of Classic Traveller and games like Dragons of the Underearth.  

As for overall design, I think of them in several classes, all of which can work if they match the genre and feel of the book.

Clean and Simple:
Good: Classic Traveller, The Traveller Book, 1e AD&D Books, Hero System 4e & 5e
(Most of the games that mess this up are small press games, though GURPS is a semi-fail here for me)

Bold:
Good: DCC RPG, Starblazer Adventures, Bounty Head Bebop
Semi-Fail: BASH (too cartoony)
Fail: Mongoose Traveller (it's just... off and doesn't look right to me)

Framed:
Good: Legends of Anglerre, Warrior, Rogue & Mage (http://www.stargazergames.eu/games/warrior-rogue-mage/)
Fail: Mongoose Conan (the topless women are tacky and the border is too busy)

Informational (emphasizes information types, icons, & diagrams):
Good: Dream Park, DungeonSlayers (http://www.dungeonslayers.com/?page_id=112)
Semi-Fails: Eclipse Phase, Fuzion (http://www.talsorian.com/software/fuzion.pdf) (and, specifically Champions: New Millennium)

Finally, there are games that try to be artistic with color, textures, artwork, and even fancy inks and, to be honest, I value readable text such that Airship Pirates (very simple) or maybe D&D 3.x is about as far as I want to go down that road.  Bottom line here -- don't make the text hard to read.

Artistic:
Good: Airship Pirates
Semi-Fail: D&D 3.x, Runeslayers (http://www.scribd.com/doc/22829733/RuneSlayers-Revised) (aka Runquest Slayers)
Fail: Tribe 8 (hard to read), The Secret of Zir'an (metallic inks, backprinted characters behind the text)

I found D&D 3e bloody awful to read. My overall impression of the game was 'Brown'. Couldn't tell you what it was like to play, but it was brown. No thanks.

I like Souvenir Lt BT font (it's my standard font in word) and two or 3 column layout, though with the top 'bar' across the page explaining what would be coming up in that section, Moldvay Basic style.

Art wise, black and white, all the way so that the PDF can be printed easily. Not too many 'solid' black pictures either, otherwise the paper will sag (and cost more in ink).

In the margins/border, some kind of index or note about the text, like a reminder for more information on page X, though 'too busy' or cluttered makes things untidy.

General index at the front, more comprehensive a-z at the back.

I like clean layouts. I'm not a huge fan of wrapping text around every illustration in the book or overlaying text onto a screened illustration. Both of these techniques can make reading an entry difficult.

As far as fonts go, I tend to like serif fonts for body text and sans-serif fonts for headers. Come up with a hierarchy of headers and stick to it consistently. It makes scanning for information within a chapter very easy.

Think about white space. I'm not saying that you leave half of every page blank, but do consider insetting the margins of the page by 2-3 picas. This will make the page look less crowded and the text will not look as if its just been crammed onto the page. Also don't tighten up leading and kerning to much. For example if you are setting you body copy at 10 points, go for at least 10.5 or 10.75 leading (ymmv depending fonts ascenders and descenders). If you squeeze leading too much you will wind up with a really cramped 'phone book' style presentation.

If you are going to have sidebars or example boxes, think about shading them a so that they pop out on the page a little. A 10 percent opacity setting on whatever color you choose should work fine. Don't used 'reverse text' though. Reverse text is when you overlay white text on a solid background color. It can be effective has a header for a section but an entire box of that text will make someone's eyes water.

Tables of Contents and Indexes should be a must for every game.

Edit: Oh and when choosing a paper stock to print on I would suggest sticking to plain white stock of the best quality you can afford. Interesting shades or textures in your printing stock (like sepia or parchment) might look neat in the catalog, but it can lead to surprises once your book is printed.

I was hanging out with Kibo in a game store once (Kibo, for those who don't know, did professional design.) He was very critical of some of the RPGs we looked at, like Nobilis, and imparted this bit of wisdom to me: there's a difference between "fun to look at" and "fun to read". A lot of the design in RPGs makes the text a pain in the ass to read.

The example that comes to my mind is some of the old White Wolf WoD books. Lots of hard to read text on black, dark gray, or other bad backgrounds, because that was "artsy". It's best to keep the background as unbusy as possible. A very simple, faded watermark, maybe... but keep the color distinct from the text color. You could do a pale blue or pale yellow watermark behind solid black text, for example.

Fonts should be simple and uniform. Do not use display fonts for your main text body. By "display font", I don't mean computer display, I mean decorative fonts, like blackletter, cursive, calligraphy, &c. Kibo actually told me it's stupid to use a handwriting font when you could just, you know, write it by hand. But I'm not as hardcore as he is. Anyways, basically pick just two fonts, three at most: a basic serif font or in some cases a sans serif like 20th Century Gothic for your main text and subheadings, a nice heavy sans serif for tables, and maybe a fancier font for chapter titles and main title/logo.

There's really only two valid book sizes: the full page format (8.5 x 11, which is A4 in Europe, if I remember correctly) and digest (5.5 x 8.5 or thereabouts, or A5.) Use two-column layout for print versions of the larger, one column for screen versions of the PDF. For digest, one column is fine. You can get away with one column in a full-size format if your column is narrower, for some reason. The key is: text lines need to be short, for printed material, but columns are bad, for screen PDFs.

It's best if you don't go more than 3 or 4 pages of solid text in a row. Break up the text with illustrations, tables, sidebar/pull quote boxes, stuff like that. And don't put these things in the exact same location, but vary it. This is to create visual landmarks, so that after a person reads through the book, they can find stuff by remembering what the page looked like.

That doesn't mean you should do away with the index, though.

I also have a fondness for bullet points, but I can't really get as stern and unyielding about them as the "don't make your text unreadable" guideline.

I prefer size 10 or even 12 fonts. Something clear and easily readable. NO grey stuff or art behind text, either.

I'm a partisan of 10-point Garamond on 8.5 x 11, two columns. No more than two different typefaces per page, one for the body text and the other for the headers. I like alternate shadings on the rows of page-sized tables in order to make it easier to read straight across and I have a fondness for small caps on section headers.

For paragraphs, I like no-indent paras with spacing between each, since I like the extra whitespace in order to avoid big wall-of-text letter-sized pages. If you indent your paragraphs, I don't want to see you putting space between them, too. And please, even if you're doing things at a purely amateur level, try to avoid widows, orphans, and infernal beheaded headers. The latter look genuinely terrible even on a casual read.

For interior art, I'm a take-it-or-leave-it sort. I like a little flavor, but art direction is Hard and not a lot of people do it well. I certainly struggle with it. Too often you get books with Insert Random Illustration Here art direction that really hasn't got any tie-in to the specific style of the game. One of the things that Exalted did really well was this sense of purposeful composition. Whether or not you liked the style, it gave you a very good idea of the general tenor of the game and the look of its inhabitants. Too many other games just give you Generic Fighter Placeholder #4 because that's where they're talking about fighters, and this particular one has nothing special to do with the game or its unique flavor.

Quote from: talysman;560943The key is: text lines need to be short, for printed material, but columns are bad, for screen PDFs.

Your problem here is text lines need to be short for the screen too. That's why you get complaints about the wall o'text everywhere, and so many blogs and other publications use narrow single column. Of course do that in an RPG and you get accused of padding your pagecount.

My compromise, and I don't think this is a very common approach, is a two column layout, but it stops about halfway down the page so you'd read it in this order
1 2
3 4
with a graphic or something between 1 2 and 3 4.

Personally, my two favorite layouts are Pathfinder (which I don't actually enjoy playing, but the books are very pretty while retaining functionality), and Legend of the Five Rings Fourth Edition (which I do like both as a game and just for the really nice look of the books).

I'm pretty easy to please though. As long as its fairly readable I'm ok. When thing I hate is awkward page breaks though. Like try reading the class section of the Fantasy Craft main book. The constant splitting a class part of a column on one page, then the next page, then like, two sentences on the last page along with the level chart... its just insane.

People need to know how to utilize their art to move their text around into sane page breaks.

This question is hard to answer without context - genre of the game, target audience, distribution method (not only PDF vs. print, but rather mass market toy chain vs. FLGS vs. Amazon vs. Lulu vs. traditional book store, and sometimes even down to department: SF/fantasy, children books, computer games, manga...).

Size, layout and general presentation should match what is usual in the target market.

Ex:
Super Hero RPG: softcover, trade paperback format (like the Hellboy RPG); free quickstart intro as a 24-32 page regular comic book
(btw: I like the TPB format very much, even out of comic book context)

Definitely no more than two columns.  I love Dungeonslayers, but the 3.5 Edition pdf had three columns.  What a pain.  Thankfully 4E only has two, though I would prefer if it just had one, at least for the pdf.

When publishing, I prefer font size 10 on 8.5 x 11 with two columns, purely because it allows more layout options than digest size - which can seem cluttered if not kept simple.

I like the portability of digest hardbacks but at the gametable I find the larger page size easier to flip and glance through.

I think the Burning Wheel Gold Edition is a good example of something that works, well, if you egnore the knotted border art. Using Bodoni was a somewhat daring choice as a body face, and using cursive for examples is effective. The book was easy to read and reference. On that note, border art is almost always awful, best leave it out completely - it's a waste of good margin space.

I don't have a physical copy yet, but the RQ6 layout is also effective IMO. The side bar text is spot on. Some have disagreed with the use of ligatures (ct, st, etc.) but I got used to them in short time much to my surprise.

The typeface and layout should reflect the themes of the game. So some old-style Venetian face will be out of place in hard SF, and a geometric sans fails in Steampunk (EABA Verne). If your game uses made-up or foreign names and places, even the heading typeface cannot be too unusual because the reader won't be able to piece together the word on their own (Epic RPG). There are a lot of excellent typefaces out there and selecting two or more fonts that work together well and support the theme is part of the art of typography.

As per layout (margins, columns, leading, and so on), there are pretty standard guidelines in typography. Bringhurst's book spells it all out pretty nicely. Centuries of using these rather conservative guidelines has given us expectations for what constitutes comfortable reading. Margins which are too small feel wrong (AD&D), as do page numbers in different places on different pages (Mongoose RQII). Proper margins aren't wasted space, but the monster stat blocks from MRQII certainly are.

Like a lot of others have already said: clean, easy-to-read.  Avoid watermarks, ragged justification, "intense" fonts, etc.  Also not a big fan of glossy paper.

Index: yeah!

Size: 8.5x11 inches or digest-sized if there's not a ton of text.

Make sure the book can lie flat when open.

Quote from: KenHR;561058Make sure the book can lie flat when open.

Exactly, this (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=16954)!

Tying in to what some of us have said above, here's a link to a blog post by a pro:

If You Can Read This... (Mark Evanier's Blog) (http://www.newsfromme.com/2012/07/25/if-you-can-read-this-2/)

Mark Evanier worked professionally in the comics industry for years. He writes for  the Sergio Aragones comic Groo, The Wanderer, for example. And wrote a lot of the Hanna-Barbera comics in the '70s. And worked with Jack Kirby, and is his official biographer. So, his professional opinion means more than my amateur opinion, or the opinion of some other random dweeb on RPG forums. Worth a look.

Black text on white, decent font size and spacing. Necromancer Games were really good at a clean, robust, easy to grok presentation.

Edit: WoTC seem to be really good at layout & presentation failure. The 3e hardback style was too messy and cramped; while 4e's layout is much better but the super-dry 'business briefing' style makes my brain glaze over and renders some of the books (esp the players' books) effectively unreadable. The DMG and DMG2 presentation seem to work reasonably well, though - the content is another matter.

Paizo's usual style is also quite poor, over-stuffed and too close to 3e, but their Pathfinder Beginner Box is much better - it takes a hint from 4e but gets it right. Their Inner Sea World Guide worked for me though; it's the module/adventure style I don't like. Still a million times better than WoTC 4e module presentation of course - I find it's easier to take a 3e D&D module like Forge of Fury and convert it to 4e, than try to actually run a WotC 4e module.

I like any typeface that's chosen deliberately and is legible. Not too many words per line, not too fancy, but, whatever, on purpose. I like trying to figure out the purpose.