RPG Book Size

[Umbran]

A gaming book typically needs to be built like a reference book. And small paperbacks are not good for referencing. Look at most of the textbooks you've used in school. They're typically use large pages for the same reasons that gaming books are large. They are easier to use that way.

You might think that it would be easier to flip through a smaller book, but this isn't actually true. Let's turn the PHB into a standard paperback - the pages are now much smaller, so there are a lot more of them. In order to cut down the page count, art is eliminated and layout is simplified.

What you now have is a book with more pages and fewer landmarks. This makes it harder to flip through to find any particular piece of information.

 

[Ranger REG]

My biggest gripe is that books are in the Letter format, which is used in the U.S. and nowhere else in the world, and not the international standard A4 format.

What is so appealing about the A4 format?

 

[Turjan]

What is so appealing about the A4 format?

I suppose it's just inconvenience. For printing pdf's and making copies, you have to reduce the original page size, as A4 paper is narrower than letter format. Btw, the other way round it's the same problem, as letter format paper is too short for A4 pages.

You can circumvent these problems, though. It's much worse when I fax some print proofs to a publisher in Europe and all my nice commentaries are truncated by the fax machine .

I don't want to start a discussion, though, why the U.S. aren't using any standard units . That's a bit futile, I suppose .

 

[Mercule]

A gaming book typically needs to be built like a reference book.

Or a textbook. My wife and I saved most of our old college tomes, and by a happy coincidence, both gaming books and a shelf full of university texts happen to be close at hand.

Using Eberron as a referrence (they're all the same size, anyway), it is exactly the dimensions (excluding pagecount) as a psych book, a couple of history books, and several biology/zoology/ecology books. It's also slightly larger than the econ, calculus, physics, and chemestry books.

Regardless, I suspect the origin of the size of gaming books probably lies in the size of college (or other) textbooks. A gaming book is, after all, a manual. It makes sense to have it sized as one.

 

[Sammael]

What is so appealing about the A4 format?

It's not so much about appeal as it is about using standards. However, there is a matter of extreme inconvenience when in comes to printing PDFs that end up being narrower and having a lot of blank space at the bottom as a result of rescaling.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

In Japan they print RPG books in manga format (i.e. A6, or quarter the size of standard books). I have a copy of the Japanese GURPS Basic set, as well as two unique worldbooks for GURPS...

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

In Japan they print RPG books in manga format (i.e. A6, or quarter the size of standard books). I have a copy of the Japanese GURPS Basic set, as well as two unique worldbooks for GURPS...

Does anyone know of other manga-format or A6 roleplaying game books? Behemoth3 has been invited to attend a game development conference in Korea, where (I gather) traditional roleplaying games are virtually unknown but everyone knows what manga are, so having some RPGs I could show off in that format would be great.

Oh, and Jürgen - how did you get your copies?

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

What is so appealing about the A4 format?

A0 is a sheet 1 square metre in area, with sides in the ratio 1:√2. Used, mainly, for engineering drawings. Cut a sheet of A0 in half on the longest side and you get two sheets of A1, keep doing this and you’ll end up with A4 paper. The long edge/short edge ratio means that photo enlargements, or reductions will always fit. So A4 is practical (like the metric system).

As to why RPG books are US letter size, as others have said, they always have been.

I know that Issaries Inc. produced the original Hero Wars & its Glorantha-based supplements as trade paperbacks, approximately half the size of US letter, they have now changed to US letter for HeroQuest & subsequent publications.

Perhaps the smaller books didn’t sell, perhaps they simply didn’t sit well on the store shelf next to larger publications. I don’t know.

GOM

 

[XO]

One Size...

One size to bring them all,
And in the printer's shop bind them

 

[diaglo]

i have a few pocket size d02 books.

and pamphlet style adventures.

i also have mini versions of the 1edADnD hardbacks.