Kind of a filler question; hope you’re having an awesome weekend so far!
I didn’t love legal paper until Apocalypse World came out and then I learned to loooove legal paper. Just a smidge more information and you can print it yourself, yay. My Game Chef finalist entry from 2016 is a legal-sized thing.
I think it was Rob Brennan who pointed out that the indiegame legal paper fetishism is total bullshit if you’re not American, because they just don’t have an equivalent paper size? I guess? I thought they had something called A5? B5 maybe? I guess it’s not easy to get and isn’t really the same size, so you still end up printing your PDFs in some squished way. Anyway, I guess it’s a thing?
Heard that Apocalypse World 2E dropped the legal-sized playbooks, so just watch the rest of the #pbtamonoculture follow suit. I think if Vincent Baker had declared for 11×17″, we’d see an uptick in oversized printer sales and Kinko’s jobs. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
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It’s going to start September 1, but to get your creative juices flowing, here’s the official Indie Game Reading Club’s list of questions to ponder.
Obviously this is needed because the #RPGaDAY list is so freighted with assumptions about RPGs that mostly it’s incomprehensible if you’re not in that scene any more.
1. When were you last deprotagonized? What happened and how did you reassert your agency?
2. What game created your most elaborate relationship map? How much of it did you actually use?
3. What’s your favorite behavioral incentive?
4. What’s your favorite perverse behavioral incentive?
5. Would you say rolling dice to have sex is hot, dirty, deprotagonizing, or all the above?
6. How many PbtA games do you own, and which one best captures its most clichéd genre tropes?
7. When did you last spend more time setting up a situation and talking about the situation after than actually playing in that situation?
8. What was your most awesome fight online about what does and does not constitute a story-game?
9. When was the last time an indie game made you feel guilty about your race, gender, or sexual identity? Were you more or less woke after you played it?
10. When did you most recently refuse to play a trad game because the central facilitation role was granted too much creative authority?
11. Best unwanted fictional input generated by procedural uncertainty?
12. Best story about waiting for players in a GMless game to finally get to the point in a scene they’ve called for but obviously had no idea why they wanted it in the first place?
13. What’s the most you’ve spent on a Kickstarter game relative to the amount of play it received?
14. What’s the most play-disruptive discovery you’ve made when you insist on playing by the actual printed rules?
15. When was the last time you unironically used the word “diegetic?”
16. GMs: abusers, control freaks or both? Best story explaining why this is so.
17. Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?
18. What’s your best story about a precious snowflake character some trad player brought to the table because it was “clever?” How did you call them out?
19. What kind of shit-fit did you throw the last time someone tried to schedule your convention game in a ballroom like you’re playing fucking Pathfinder or something?
20. What’s your best story about falling all over yourself trying to rescue a bunch of awesome fiction that just got invalidated after making a fortune-at-the-end roll like some commoner?
21. What was the last OSR game you tried to play, but quit because you realized there’s literally no mechanical support for a storyline at all?
22. How many friendships have you terminated because they confessed they kind of like to play Fate games sometimes? It’s okay. Fate players have to hear the truth.
23. Tell your most scandalous story about getting X-carded.
24. What was the very saddest thing you wrote on an index card?
25. Do you like your scene framing hard, harder, or hardest? What’s the very hardest you’ve had your scene framed?
26. When you interrogate the nature of heroism in your game, do you prefer to directly or indirectly invoke Lacanianism?
27. What’s the very best playtest-stage game your friends probably haven’t heard of yet? How long ago did you play it and how much better was it than the current version?
28. What’s the most interesting period of obscure and unrelatable history you’d like to see a game set in? How would you do it?
29. What indie game tech do you most keenly miss when you play something more mainstream? And then do you denounce the game in person or do you save it for a social media rant?
30. What is your fondest memory of a game you thought was fun before you knew better?
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Dude! Do you know how much player info we could get onto 11×17″ O.O
Think of the AW threat map space I could be working with!
MadJay Brown now you’re talking!
If I had Vincent’s power and reach I would not be responsible with it.
11×17 is hard for me to find a laser printer for :/
I have trieds so hards.
I dont think I’ve been following the PAP (Playbooks As Printed). I never even knew they were not letter sized. They print just fine…
Aaron Griffin they also fold into thirds. Try it sometime! They’re marvelous.
But they’ll go extinct in a year or two so get on it while you can.
Lame question. Looking forward to tomorrow’s. Disappointed that yesterday’s got so little action.
Scott Dunphy agreed, super lame!
I actually do tabloid paper all the time. My office doesn’t understand where it all goes.
Metric paper sizes are brilliant and you should learn about them Paul Beakley
I guess I’m the pariah here, as I find the legal-size, tri-fold playbook thing kinda silly.
I don’t think I’ve ever printed a playbook.
Jason Morningstar I remember how weird it felt to sit and read, like, any of the Swedish language stuff Target sent me for visual reference. Or my copy of SLA Industries. Kind of…long-ish and/or narrow-ish. Something…unsavory.
Have you noticed there’s a little notch in the corner of AW playbooks? You can punch a hole in the corner and put the whole set on a ring!
Larry Lade I forgot about that!
ISO paper sizes are all based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of 2. A0 is one square meter and each smaller size is half that. If you fold an A4 sheet in half you have two A5 sheets. If you fold a letter-sized sheet in half you have nonsense garbage.
In a string of maddening errors a few months back, I printed up some AW2e playbooks for Gary Montgomery and discovered that I’d managed to do so on big ole 11×17″ sheets of paper.
My last bit of patience was spent upon that discovery. Later – less angry – I was able to admire how spiffy the large-scale playbooks looked. They have quite the presence, and I’d be all sorts of into having them hit the table.
Andi Carrison I printed tabloid sized character sheets for Burning Wheel waaaay back when and they were friggin’ awesome.