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ShortQuests -- Pocket Sized Adventures! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed for 1-2 game sessions.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9872725" data-attributes="member: 725">I do not agree.Physical books vs. digital is a preference. Preferences can impact people in small ways or in big ways. There all kinds of things that influence people that can impact how well they can read on a digital platform how their brains process the data, etc. A simple thing is that most people value digital books less then the same books in a physical format, that can unconsciously impact how they value the things they read, how they store it, how they learn from it. Many people are just heavily prejudiced... That's also why on average the results of digital are worse then vs paper, as these results include the results from the prejudiced people. This is also why when they did the same research a decade or two later, the effects were less, which isn't surprising. The act of reading digital documents has become more accepted, less prejudice against the digital format.As an old geezer that's been reading digitally for almost 30 years, there have been other hurdles to overcome as well. I started reading digital novels (*.txt files) on specialized software on PDAs, eventually that moved to smartphones. Before then I was already scanning D&D books via handscanner and using awefully slow and flawed OCR software. So I didn't have to lug around piles of heavy D&D books around. Txt files were small and efficient, but scanned PDFs were large, slow and didn't work well on PDAs and even the the larger smarthphones (5" screen on a HTC X7500). Tablets weren't a mainstream thing until Apple came with the iPad, and even then you were either stuck with pirated PDFs or the small indies that adopted technology faster then mainstream publishers. Still, you had to be careful how you made a PDF back on the iPad #1 back in 2010... Reading from a desktop screen or even a laptop screen just was and still is (imho) less comfortable then something handheld.Eventually the tablets became 'good enough', PDFs became much more common, but even today WotC doesn't publish their 5e books as PDFs which is still a slap in the face for digital readers (DDB just isn't the same, see below). Especially with the advent of more complicated VTTs and integrated rulebooks or rule references, people started to think outside of the traditional book format for RPG content (the digital equivalent of either a PDF or an Epub), content was chopped up into parts that could be easily linked, differently organized, etc. But it often still read like the improperly translated version into a digital VTT...I've been collecting physical RPG and wargame books for 35+ years, I'm also not someone that does away something easily, so I still have my first RPG books, and most of the ones I bought since. As you can imagine that's a pretty big collection after all those years, I moved 18 years ago and I already had a pretty big collection and that was already a pain! I moved again a year ago and my collection turned out to be pretty insane. What was even worse was that for the last 15 years or so I hadn't touched many paper books at all, even when completing collections I noticed I have books that I haven't opened since I bought them. And when you have a couple of tons of books, you don't actually use anymore... You start to wonder... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> So I'm at least going to cull my collection heavily or even getting rid of most of it.On the other side I'm also in IT for 25+ years, part of what I do involves writing documentation. Now I ask you if you think an IT colleague wants to read 400 pages of 'Windows Operating System Fundamentals' when troubleshooting an issue we have a fix for? No, you structure your documentation system in very specific ways, for a very specific audience. What's user facing is very different from what's IT colleague facing, we also write instructions very differently, keeping the amount of expected skill and knowledge the reader has. It's also not that strange to have links to the full documentation (like those 400 page books) with far more condensed info for a particular situation.Now going to pnp RPGs, there's often just one book for the whole audience. There's just one PHB written for both folks new to D&D and 35 year veterans, which is annoying. Another issue is writing style, for example the books for Games Workshop's Warhammer often took two paragraphs, where one line would suffice. Quite a few pnp RPGs suffer from the same issues. We also have issues with organization of rulebooks, Shadowrun is a good (bad!) example, even after 37 years, and six editions, rule organization is extremely painful. The only possible exception to only one type of rulebook is possibly the starter sets of some RPGs, but even then it's still often only a stripped down version with many missing rules.I suspect that very few people read a D&D PHB from front to back in one continuous go. Sections like lists of feats, equipment, spells, monsters, etc. Are often skipped or ignored completely. And another issue that most of us have that have been playing for a LONG time is itterative editions of the same system and many similar systems filling the same space that you are also familiar with. We played D&D3(.5)e for a LONG time, we skipped 4e, and when we started 5e many of the concepts from 3e were similar enough, but still different that we kept doing things wrong. We didn't just need to learn the new rules, but also unlearn the old rules, which is very important, and often neglegted and ignored. The transition from 5e 2014 to 5e 2024 was maybe even worse... It was far more recent, far more similar, but luckily we hadn't played it as much as 3e.So besides people, the source material, it's also the design that's very important, even the paper that was linked (The Screen Inferiority Effect: How Screens Affect Reading Comprehension) had a very important mention:When you just copy a book from physical paper to a digital format, depending on how you do it, often has few benefits. Sometimes even detractions. But when you start working with the content for a digital format, thinking outside the box, and writing for different target audiences, you could get a better experience for people that really are open to it.</blockquote>

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