Monastery Outreach Projects

First disclaimer: These are my opinions. This is my blog. I am not looking for an argument here -- had I wanted an argument, I would have posted this in the forum. Please do not post a reply here telling me why you think I am wrong -- I am not interested. If you want to try to start an argument, your best bet is to refer to this blog post in a forum post of your own, but don't expect me to join in.

Second disclaimer: I am not in the publishing business. I have not performed any cost/benefit analysis nor exhaustive market studies on art and/or bindings with regard to the RPG book market. See the first disclaimer.

Third disclaimer: I have nothing against art. I am not advocating its complete removal from any book.

Now that I have that out of the way, let the rant begin!

There has been a trend in recent years to "beautify" (i guess) RPG books. To be more specific, there are a lot more RPG books coming out lately that are being released in hardback only, with lots of full-color art inside. Customers seem to be demanding it, because more and more publishers are doing it, even HERO (with 6ed). I don't get it.

One thing I don't get is, in a type of game that is based on imagination, in which most or all of the action takes place in one's head, when playing in genres that have more than sufficient visual examples, why do people seem to demand lots of art in the rule books? If you don't already have several images in your own mind what the subject matter of the game is about, the illustrations in the rulebook are not going to help much.

At its best, high quality, full-color illustrations can help exemplify complicated rules, or display options in ways that might be more difficult to do in text. But those are more often diagrams and charts, rather than art. True art has no real purpose, other than to beautify the page. But such art also takes up space that could be filled with game rules, reducing page counts and thus costs.

Some games use art in the margins and/or backgrounds of the pages, creating a "visual style" for the book without taking up space in the text itself. At the worst, these can distract from or even obscure the text of the book itself (I'm looking at you, White Wolf). At best such a visual style can lend a feel of the background material to the book. However, with a generic ruleset like HERO there is no one feel for the whole book. You could go with a sampling of genre "feels," but that just means more art and more layout issues which just adds up to more cost.

HERO has always been about the substance of the rules, not the style. Style is just special effects. If HERO starts putting more emphasis on special effects than substance, it starts to look like GURPS, and nobody wants that. Okay, that may have been overly provocative, but my new acronym for GURPS is Genre-Unique Rules Published Separately (you see, as a "generic" system, GURPS seems to have to publish a lot of new, unique rules in each genre book, since the core book does not design things so that you can apply the core rules to get the genre-specific effects, like HERO does).


Let's talk about book binding. It has been my experience that an often-used book will not last significantly longer as a hardbound than a well-made softcover. Maybe I am just too rough with my books, but I have seen expensive hardback books lose pages, get creases in the cover and other "battle damage" over the years just as much as softcover books. If you are concerned about how your book looks, I have to tell you that hardback books do not wear much of this kind of damage well.

The only things that hardbound books add, as far as I am concerned, is weight, bulk and cost. Cost to me.

I know that paper and printing costs have gone up a lot in recent years, and the art and binding may be seen as adding value to something that is not cheap anyway. I can also see them as equivalent to "curb appeal" in that a prettier book may be picked up in the store more often, which is an opportunity for it to be bought that it might not have if it were not so pretty. That does not work for me. I often know what books I want to buy before I ever go into a store, based on the subject matter, so the "added value" is lost on me, but the added cost may discourage me from buying.

If there is a desire for an "art book" of the game, or even a "collecter's edition" of the rules that uses all of the above things, then by all means, publish them separately from the core rulebook(s), but as for me, the best way to add value to the book is to keep it focused on the rules, and as low-cost as possible.

That ends up being the bottom line. Both excessive/color art and hardback binding add no value to me, and are perceived as adding to the cost of the book. I do not have the disposable income I once had. I have a family to support, and bills to pay, and my personal playtime money is very limited. I might get a little bit of the tax return to spend on myself, and I always take some of my year-end bonus for myself (neither of which are going to be going up in value this year), but other than that I cannot just drop $40-80 whenever I want. I wish I could. Maybe I have fallen out of the "target demographic" (whatever that means), because I do not have as much time to play as I used to, either. And get off my lawn!


There are only two bright spots I have seen in the market. One is the increase in "quickstart" or "test drive" rules being released for free (which HERO does not do, and I am not sure they could do). The other is Mongoose publishing "pocket rule books" that contain all of the rules and little or no art, in a journal-sized (8.5 x 5.5 in, or near that) format that costs about half as much as the full rulebooks. Unfortunately, I am still upset that Mongoose chose to corner the Traveller RPG market with an exclusive license agreement which killed all other useful interpretations (I said "useful" -- GURPS Traveller does not count).

O.K. Rant over. I can put the soapbox away and go back to lurking now.