How Quickly Do You Bounce Off a System?
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
That might be an interesting poll subject, although I bet the wording would influence things a lot. Pitching it as a simple download is going to result in a lot of No Big Deal responses. Pitching it as "The $35+ physical book you bought is incomplete without accessing further content online that would have occupied four pages in the book to duplicate" might see different results. Both are factually true, but one sounds a lot better than the other.
Wolfpack48
Adventurer
Are there companies doing online only portions of a book? I have only seen duplicates of the print version in pdf.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Very quickly sometimes. For 7th Sea 2e it took about 30 minutes.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
Not that I know of, this was in reference to leaving out characters sheets (or at least vital info from character sheets that you'd need to recreate one with paper and pencil like some caveman
) from a print book. I haven't seen the Scum & Villainy pdf, and don't know if it includes those character sheets or not. If not, you'd still need to go to their site and download the sheets separately.That said, there are a fair number of free downloads out there for "crippled" versions of a game as teasers - which is fine since they're essentially extensive previews. A good (make that great) example is is Lancer, where you can get the entire crunch side of the core game for free, then decide if you want to pay for the setting fluff to go with it. Which you should, it's pretty great.
Thomas Shey
Legend
But the opposite is "You have a character sheet in the book that you have to take somewhere to photocopy, as compared to downloading one that you can just print out", and I suspect I know which one would seem more attractive now.
(Now, PDF books complicate this, but then, most PDF games I've bought in the last few years had at least a basic character sheet bundled with the game PDF. Mind you, often third party produced character sheets existed that were better, but that's been true of a lot of official character sheets).
Thomas Shey
Legend
Online only or downloadable only? There's two different answers here.
Thomas Shey
Legend
That said, there are a fair number of free downloads out there for "crippled" versions of a game as teasers - which is fine since they're essentially extensive previews. A good (make that great) example is is Lancer, where you can get the entire crunch side of the core game for free, then decide if you want to pay for the setting fluff to go with it. Which you should, it's pretty great.
There's some relatively complete PDF-only versions in a few cases. Mythras Imperative comes to mind here.
Wofano Wotanto
Hero
Look, I have no objection to downloadable record sheets, especially when they're printer friendly. What I do object to is a print book that has some vital element of the rules that's only online. And that's the case with Scum & Villainy, which could have avoided the whole issue by just printing examples of the sheets (or at least the stress tracks) in the book somewhere. I don't need a photocopier to use that info, the sheets are middling complex but not beyond improv with a pen and paper.
The idea of being okay with an effectively incomplete print book is as alien to me as my complaint seems to be to you. Maybe it's a generational thing. I am a dinosaur, grew up making my own character sheets, and only resort to printers or photocopiers for really complex sheets, which really aren't in vogue so much these days. Just look at the people saying they'll bounce off a game with a sheet they don't like up thread. Simple elegance is in.
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