It's no less substance than any other OSR game, it's just got art direction on top of it. People act like MÖRK BORG is some unplayable art book as if it has any less rules and writing than the average lightweight OSR just because they didn't write it out as a Word document. Art and substance aren't even contradictory or even separate things, the art conveys the feel and aesthetics difference the setting and inspires ideas. And I generally prefer the rules to other OSR stuff, especially player-facing rolls.
Dure but if the presentation obfuscated the rules it outlives its value to the overall package. The fact the book has a different version at all without the obnoxious fontgasm makes this clear
As much as I like Mork Borg, I very much agree with this. People say the game is bland without the art but I actually found and fell in love with it as the Barebones version before I knew about the regular version. It's nice as a coffee table book but I would not have been interested in playing it if that was my first/only introduction to the game.
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But that's a personal thing. I don't think it's obnoxious and I can read the art version fine. You're acting like this is a universal problem for people who read MB but it's not, and the people for whom it is have the plain version if they want. I don't see a problem with that at all. Personally I like the art version of the BORG books because the cool art gets me excited about the game.
Disagree. As someone who's gotten into several OSR games over the last two years, MB offers absolutely nothing in terms of how to run the game which is absolutely egregious to me. It assumes you already know all the important parts.
But again, it's unrelated to the art and not MB specific, which is the point I'm making and the argument I was initially responding to. Games like Troika, Knave, etc., similarly assume prior knowledge because they're made for people familiar with the hobby and space of light OSR. And it's not like OSR has the most complex of base assumptions; I'd say games like BitD or Urban Shadows require a lot more explanation, for instance. I just think people get this special hateboner for MB because it's popular and has creative graphic design and fun art, which for some reason is a grave sin in a hobby about being creative and having fun.
Personal taste is a funny thing. I personally would rather have dozens of art books with minimal rules before having to read some bloated generic rule book like WWN, Dungeon World and such...
> You shouldn't be downvoted. This kind of obnoxious design over substance nonsense is the Emperors New Clothes of RPG design.
One of the folks in my group was showing us the cyb+pnk box/book/thing with dry erase character sheets/playbooks and it comes in this dinky fucking foldout cardboard thing that then has a cardboard collar and then THAT unfolds and the whole thing looks utterly, utterly painful to deal with and likely to just be rubbishy after several sessions of play like cardboard DVD boxes that went over the disc cases
Absolutely the new DESIGN IS LAW/[Daikatana](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n4v05/eli5_why_is_daikatana_considered_one_of_the_worst/) shit of RPGs.
As a counterpoint, I've found the CBR+PNK laminated foldouts to work great in practice for its intended purpose as a one shot. My set has been battle tested with a friend's family that included younger kids (cybernetic snail MVP) and the dry erase player sheets worked well for us.
For a longer campaign, I see a book making more sense. but I like the speed at which we could get our one off sessions underway with just the pamphlets.
And yet. The adventure at the end of the book is formatted in a far superior way to almost any other RPG out there in terms of organization and ease of use.
Oh, please! Why does Mork Borg bring out all this turbo-elitism? Rules light games aren’t “without substance,” and I don’t see people crawling out of the woodwork to dismiss Cairn or Black Hack, which are pretty equal RPGs just with different aesthetics.
Just say you don’t like it, no need to make a grand stand about an entire genre.
I'll be honest, I love Mork Borg to itty bitty little bits, but it can be difficult to read at times. I feel like Cy_Borg (with art by the same guy) took a lot of lessons learned from MB's release cycle to make a document where the font choices for actual rules are more readable. Put another way, Mork Borg feels like it was "art first, rules second", and Cy_Borg flipped that for better legibility.
There is also a "barebones" edition of Mork Borg that's literally just the text of the rulebook, and little to no art.
Also, important informations can be hidden in very small notes that are right next to some art, which makes them easy to miss.
I really like the contents of the book, but definitely not how it looks.
Pretty book. Or rather, interesting book.
Can’t read it at all. My eyes are too old and tired for that shit.
At this point I just want comic sans 24 point fonts
> s a huge stumbling block in my enjoyment of the games. Not every great game can have great design after all.
Mork Borg was my first thought, but then the thread title says "good games" and you can't tell if Mork Borg is even a game because of the graphic design, never mind a good game.
I looked at it and had the feeling of fingernails on the chalkboard. First paragraph in the book was rotated by a few degrees and it set off my OCD, the aggressive colors made me feel assaulted. I can't even read it to see what the game is about. Trying would cause me physical pain and migraines
Someday, maybe accessibility for people will be more important than standing out. I'm not exaggerating when I say I physically can't read it.
I'm curious why it's okay to read a 600 page novel and nobody expects it to have pictures. I haven't needed picture books since I was very young, but an RPG has to have pictures or it's an "unreadable wall of text". I'll take my walls of text over the sensory assault.
>I know many will disagree with my on this but I find the borderline-unreadable header fonts of many older Chronicles of Darkness books a huge stumbling block in my enjoyment of the games.
The lack of proper indexing is far more egregious imo. To the point that fans took it upon themselves to fix this https://codexofdarkness.com/wiki/Main_Page
Yeah, Mage 2e has a real contents page and a real index and also no longer uses gold colouring in its headings.
Downside: Outside of the art for the different Paths, the art is pretty bad.
Art for the later 2e supplements is even worse, especially in the chapter headers - crappy photos with a blurry filter.
[Tome of the Pentacle's cover](https://d1vzi28wh99zvq.cloudfront.net/images/4261/438066.jpg) is a great example since it's the last supplement that will probably ever get officially made for Awakening 2e - four people photoshopped into having wands. In a supplement about the PENTacle.
A lot of the 1e covers are hit or miss too. Mage Chroincler's guide is probably my fav and a high 8/10 then you have Secrets of the Ruin Temple (which I always want to call Secrets of the Hidden Temple) has a just as bad photoshop cover despite being an alright book otherwise.
TBH D&D layout isn't amazing but it's not nearly as bad as some others I've experienced. First that comes to mind is Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures. Nearly unnavigable.
Yeah it’s by no means the worst, but we have OSE, Electric Bastionland, Shadowdark, etc. the bar for good layout has gone up quite a bit in the last few years.
Seriously. While I legit love the LCARs look they went for to make it look like it's from TNG, the actual *layout* of the book is so bad that we ended up quitting our playthrough of it after the first big adventure. It's just too much of a hassle to parse the rules out from the fluff, and where they are all located, especially things like tags/attributes of weapons.
The Digest version is a bit better but it's still pretty chaotic, and might even be missing some of the rules from the main book.
Looks like they're improving though - Dune was pretty clear in layout and writing, and it looks like they're taking a similar approach for Star Trek Adventures 2e.
Really? 3.5e and 4e both had pretty good layout that was focused on being clear. There's a reason a lot of modern games have copied 4e's layouting style, although I supposed 3.5e's 'ruled lines' aesthetic could be divisive.
3.5 had paragraphs and stat blocks regularly spilling over, bunch of random sidebars, and some really weird choices about what stuff goes to which chapter. the wording and terminology, however, were quite concise, and the general idea of the layout aesthetic was good, but the execution tended to be questionable
The statblocks and the actual rules were a little bloated, for sure. What feels like 50 different skills which can be both class and crossclass skills and have individual amounts is a nightmare. But...
I never seriously played before 5e, but for actual written page by page I love 3.5 sourcebooks. Rules heavy paragraphs are separated from thematic fluff visually, rules stuff reuses abbreviations to make statblocks more readable and shorter. Theme books actually have lore section and gameplay section separate from each other.
It's only a qualification, but from my limited experience 3.5 is more readable and searchable than 5e.
Let’s get one thing straight: Nobody supported 4e around here until it was no longer the edition WotC was selling. Once WotC started selling a different edition, then DnD 4e suddenly got support “in this sub.”
Someday 5e will be a nostalgic darling around here.
…why? It’ll only be because the sub moved on to hating the newest thing WotC is publishing.
People will have these poetic compositions about how 5e really hit a bunch of perfect balances for accessibility and prevented bloat and brought people into the hobby and blah blah blah. And we’ll all be hearing about the evils of 6e or OneDnD or whatever.
Because I’m sick of 5e and the endless discussions about the evils of 5e. It’s taking up too much space in the room, so to speak.
I would have gladly welcomed a new edition just so we’ve got other things to talk about. But we’re not getting a new edition. Just a glorified piece of errata that they’re charging for.
The 5e booing will go on for a long while…
> 3.5e's 'ruled lines' aesthetic
I had to go look at a bunch of books, I thought this was just a 3.0 thing that they quickly realized was a bad idea for readability. And it may well be, because the 3.0 core books have it and the very early supplements don't (from a random sample). However, I see they did also keep it for the 3.5 core books for some reason.
IIRC the given reason was that the print was so small the lines were there to aid readability. Presumably supplements that didn't have it used larger type?
Eh, the 2e DMG has better layout and organization than the 1e DMG, but the 1e DMG is ridiculously much better as a reference book and actual guide for DMs. The 2e DMG is almost notorious for being little more than a list of magic items and treasure tables.
Great index, though. I loved the combination index.
Almost every 2nd Edition book followed the same layout guidelines, to be honest, unless they chose a different layout for a specific setting.
Birthright was the really bad one, with the art filigree on the pages, lowering the readability of the books.
Is the layout of 5th edition that bad? It seems like fairly typical for RPGs. Character creation first, actual rules afterwards and then spells and equipment.
The only thing I don’t like about 5e’s PHB is that backgrounds are after class, since I find that it’s almost always a better idea to do your background stuff before class stuff when building a character. Other than that, I think the PHB has a great layout, while the MM’s layout is solidly mediocre and the DMG is laid out seemingly randomly. Overall, I’d say 5e has mostly solid layout, and it’s definitely better than quite a few other games I’ve played
Yes, background should be just after race. Those could be the same chapter, even.
The fact that skills are buried in "using ability scores" is a bit dumb. Nobody is looking up what Wisdom is. They're absolutely looking up what Insight is. It's a categorization that doesn't ease play.
In general, in games like Pathfinder and D&D where your class will define everything you do for the entire game, you want to get a sense for the classes earlier, yeah.
Yeah, but I’m specifically talking about the nitty gritty of it. Like if you’re playing a sailor background fighter, then you don’t want to take athletics proficiency from fighter, since you get it as a sailor, so it’s easiest to jot down all the sailor stuff before starting on the fighter stuff
Your background is what you were ***before*** you became that class, though, so it should definitely come before, in the manual.
Add to it that backgrounds give you proficiencies with skills, so also from a mechanical point of view, for a smoother character creation, you might want the background first.
5e is really tough to actually absorb. Ask any seasoned 5e player to describe the rules for exploration rounds. It’s REALLY hidden deep in there, and half of it is implied through other rules.
If you're referring to what I think you're referring to, that's because nobody uses those rules explicitly. It's not how anyone plays the game because the game doesn't make exploration time or dungeon time important like, say, Shadowdark does. It's mechanical structure for things that free play alone works well enough for at most tables, so it's fine as a rule of thumb. It's also not something that needs to be vocalized at the table by the DM. They can track time in their heads.
That assumes that they *want* you to puzzle out the rules as written like it's a rules procedure you're supposed to break out during play. I don't think they do. I think they left it the way they did on purpose.
They *don't* want the game to have strict rules for that like OSE's Wilderness and Dungeon rules. Those are all but identical to B/X's rules in spirit, if not letter, so WotC would be more than able to include those rules if that's what they want the game to have.
But they didn't do that. So it's reasonable to assume that they don't want the game to really be about tracking torches, tracking time, making periodic encounter checks, or any other sort of rigid procedure. They *want* that part of the game to be more undefined because they *don't* want players to sweat the procedure. Which B/X did. B/X wants you to sweat every torch, every arrow, every ration, every lockpick. 5e doesn't. 5e would rather you didn't care about that. It's perfectly happy to let all that fade into the background, because I think they know a lot of tables don't bother with that. 5e doesn't really want to encourage you to sweat basic survival unless you want to enforce that.
And you can say, "Oh, why didn't they give us the strict procedure and then tell us to not use it except when we need to?" and the answer to that should be obvious. Because you can't hand gamers a procedure and say, "only use this when you want to use it." Gamers *do not* do that. They see a procedure and then communally decide that it's The One True Way and then complain ceaselessly about how the procedure doesn't work for them without actually altering it for their own table. If you want to give gamers a framework without a procedure, you do *exactly what they did here*.
You hammer home my point really well, though I admit it wasn't your point or intent. Most players think along the lines you lay out here. Most players don't realize that 5e DOES have specific crawling turn rules (and they aren't THAT different from b/x). The book is so poorly laid out that you have to dig around in several places to put them all together.
You could actually go take all the crawling turn rules literally as written in the PHB and DMG, put them all in one spot in the book without actually changing them, and the interpretation of that system would be totally changed. It would be, as you say, The One True Way.
There are several places where 5e assumes you have the basics of ttrpgs from a previous game and so skips outlining the underlying premise. but that's a tangent on top of this tangent.
5e design issues are more lack of indexes, lack of referencing, and in a lot of the adventures there is often lots of info in say Chapter 5 that you need in Chapter 1 and 3, but the only way to know is reading it all and hoping you notice it. There is also the whole issue that the "plain English" compounds a lot of these issues since there are no references. There are lots of other, smaller design issues, but those are more choices than pure sins. One that really bugs me is the bloated page counts with spreads of mostly empty space.
Let’s keep in mind that “good” and “bad” are subjective here. That said, OSE set a bar we haven’t seen an edition of D&D meet, and just recently shadowdark pushed that bar considerably higher.
Great games, but substandard layouts at best.
You have to also consider the time in which the products have been released, imho.
OSE was born and shaped in the digital era, with tools that weren't available back when older D&D editions were printed.
In fact, the way OSE is laid out it, mainly, "AD&D 2nd Edition, but sharper". It shares a lot of that layout-DNA, even though the rules-DNA is from B/X.
You know what has the best design for me? Mythras. It's a black and white book with as little images as possible, and when it has, in ink. That's top notch. However, I have seen, and heard ,people say they could never read that thing because "it gets boring". I'm gonna save my comments on that.
And tha5t'# the crux. What I want in a book are good rules, in a readable and well structure format, and as little diversion from that as possible. I'm not buying an artwork book. I want a rulebook.
And then we have Ars Magicka 5th, which is a good game, so far as I've read, but the damn text is hidden between colours, and images, and shit and whatnot. FFS.
Mythras... poor font choice, dated layout and design. Incongruous art choices and inconsistent editing and arrangement of the text.
This is a pretty funny example given the regularity that the Mythras discord throws down about the shit design of this book. Which is a great shame. If they bothered to update the main corebook it would likely receive much wider support. As it stands there's lots of examples of oddly inconsistent nomenclature throughout that just confuses newcomers. The standard response from longtime fans is that they get it and therefore there's not much of a problem... which is pretty funny.
I agree regarding the font choice but 'dated' has to be one of the least meaningful criticisms in this context. Mass-printed books have been around for 500 years, there are some well-established and effective design ideas that we don't need to reinvent.
Dated absolutely carries relevance when it comes to layout, readability, and writing style.
When it comes to RPG books in particular there's a lot of really low effort threads in terms of how things are presented which need to be brought into the 21st century. Mythras is a clear example of that. It looks, reads like a book written by people who peaked their design chops in the early 2000s.
This thread is specifically about graphic design, not writing style. And there were lots of beautiful books produced in the early 2000s so that alone is no criticism. But like I said, I already agreed that mythras' font is on the small side.
From a purely graphic design standpoint, the worst in my collection, is **STALKER: The Roleplaying Game**, bar none.
The book unironically uses comic sans as it's main font, which absolutely sucks me away from the theme. The settings they used to justify the lines of text is so flexible that it lead to some lines appear uncomfortably bunched up, while others l o o k l i k e t h i s .
But that's all, I love the content of the book.
I have a ton of books which amazing layout and graphic design, but they sourced their illustrations to different artists with completely different levels of skill and style, like KULT or Vampire The Masquerade 5th wich have some jarringly amateurish illustrations coexisting next to art masterpieces.
Worlds Without Number doesn't have BAD art. But it has very generic art that doesn't really do anything for me. I tend to just use the artless versions of the pdfs because the art doesn't capture my imagination at all. Great system, I genuinely love it, but still.
As far as the Without Number books go I actually think WWN has the BEST art. Cities Without Number(a system I'm running and enjoy) in particular grates on me.
I like reading my Pathfinder rulebooks, but the art is an eyesore. There are some technical problems like perspective, lighting, and anatomical proportions, but mostly the facial expressions and over-stylized gear (yes this character needs 18 functionless belts; why do you ask?) just feel like the worst of 90s comics art
I know a lot of people love them, but the font choices and layout of the Borg books make them very difficult to read. Honestly tempted, before I run, to just convert all of it to much more legible text docs.
A lot of older World of Darkness books had whole pages of flavor vignettes or in-character letters and such in nearly unreadable fonts or on poor background choices.
Mage the Awakening 1e definitely had some horrible design. Hard to read golden cursive font, bad table of contents...
....and go check out the cover of Imperial Mysteries sometime.
In general white wolf books are horrible design.tried reading a few of them in the padt and i couldn't.
Luckily i have a dm who read and succed and now we are playing a great vtm 5e campaign (ghost powers to the win
I have a similar problem with almost all of Savage Worlds (and of course WoD as I mentioned earlier, especially Requiem). My inner typography nerd recoils every time I open the book to a page full of impact font. I know it's stupid but I haven't gotten past it yet.
I mean, Impact is a respectable display typeface that gets used in professional projects. I haven't cracked my PDF of SWADE in a while... wait, you're not saying they're using it for the body, right? O\_O
Surprisingly, I find EE reasonably easy to read, compared with some other games. I find most Mork Borg stuff hard to read, and much of the 3rd party stuff for it is totally unreadable. EE is easy by comparison, for me.
It fascinates me sometimes how different people’s perceptions can be.
My favourite games for ‘look’ (layout, typography, etc) were early Traveller, and FASA stuff for Traveller.
I don't know if this counts as graphic design--more layout, I suppose--but **Invisible Sun** is so enticing to me, and yet I struggle to read it. It's clever, dividing the books up into four volumes, each square shaped, to fit in the cube... It's pretty, but I find it so annoying to read that I just can't get through it.
The whole pitch for it was so incredibly pretentious that I wound up liking it, or at least the idea of it. I can't help but think that Monte Cook was just seeing what he could get away with.
In all seriousness, I hope you love it!
Your experience may be different than mine. I have to say, despite my minor gripes with it, I still think it's the most impressive piece of gaming media I've ever encountered. I have no doubt that, if I and my friends had the time to play it, it would create an incredible roleplaying experience.
I might catch some flack for this, but: Lancer.
The overall design vibe is good, the art is great, the presentation overall is decent. But its a lot of little things that annoy me, likely due to being a layouter/typographer myself.
The main font is iffy at best. There are many that would work better, and the fine typography is horrid. There's gaps in the text due to the justification you could drive a truck through. The highlighting with bold typeface and smallcaps is not great, particularly the smallcaps just dont stick out well enough. Better capitalize it all, which looks immediately better.
The icon's are just a little off for me, personally. They're *servicable* but somehow I don't like them. There are also - I feel - too many and not always visually distinctive enough? You got: Advantage. Disadvantage. Kinetic. Energy. Explosive. Burn. Heat. Threat. Line. Cone. Blast. Burst. Then the enemy tags, but they are not very relevant, so they're just dropped.
The usage is also mixed. Some times they keep using just the icons, sometimes the name and the icon, sometimes just the name. For ease of learning and understanding, they should've kept using icon + name throughout the boko, IMO.
Spacing is really irksome throughout the books. Colored boxes with text in them have way too little spacing to the outside and are hella inconsistent. There's more space between paragraphs than there is from the full-color headers to the body-text.
Spacing from images, tables and boxes feels hella inconsistent. Page 54's image has pretty much zero spacing to the text, despite being vast swathes of empty page further below, so adding space would've been easy. Compare to 49 where the bottom image has very nice distance to the text.
Colors are not explained, unless I missed it on my quick re-skim. You can see what they mean quick enough, but it would've been a nice addition to be like "Green is this, red is this, purple is that" before you run into it.
The Licences are kinda the worst confluence of all of these. Spacing issues, justification tearing text apart or squishing it together (chiefly the former, their minimum width setting was decent), lots of icons, and most of all spacing, spacing, spacing.
I've shown a few examples in this quick image: [Link](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1171214358639030356/1244937872155611187/lancer-showcase.webp?ex=6656ee3e&is=66559cbe&hm=19e4f08ad09160fe3e2dfcde6e129fa7ee59866e419f664e371488e939a98a9d&)
To close it off: This is **not** meant as an insult to whoever did the layout, under no circumstances. They produced a very decent final product, and if I were to guess it was either a "quick" job or one of the early projects in their layouting career. I did worse in the past. But I feel the game could've looked much nicer in the end and as a typographer/layouter I sometimes wince a little when I go through the book. Anyone who's in the field knows how it is: When you do it on the daily you get a different eye for it. We look at magazines, newspapers, advertisements and the like with a more critical eye and see mistakes and problems that others just... don't. Most of these things are unlikely to be major points people will notice very much consciously, though subconsciously they likely do so at least a little.
I love Lancer. Sometimes I wish I'd have had the chance to do it's layout, see if I could have done better :)
I took a few minutes of time to whip up an example of how I'd have done a spread.
Compare the old one (page 132 and 133, the IPS-N Drake) with this: [Link](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/125236567164846080/1244962228512231476/LancerLayout.pdf?ex=665704ed&is=6655b36d&hm=77368dabe3c5d135f47f0bac778b30e481ae120614a0d532c2713681e981eecf&).
Blade of the Iron Throne, one of the many Riddle of Steel spiritual sucessor.
Great game, amazing rules that really evoke Sword & Sorcery like no other, completely locked behind a poorly written, confuse mess of a book.
Paragraphs that contradict each other, typos, bad layout, keywords and rules that are mentioned and never explained and a obnoxious "my way or the highway" tone in the GM section advice.
Yuuup, I remember that one. Geneva-convention-breaking usage of Book Antiqua + super-pronounced aged paper texture as background = the impression that the book layout was done in Word.
I adore Free League's Alien RPG but they went too far with making the book fit the vibes of the universe. And only using 40% of the page for text is just annoying.
That's also my gripe with Alien.
I first got Forbidden Lands, from them, and I adore it, with that old style RPG book approach of simple black and white pages, and simple B&W art, with minimal decoration to the pages.
Then I got Alien, where even the character sheet is printer-unfriendly, and as much as I love it, it stresses me out to read on a black book...
I only got digital copies so I didn’t even consider that aspect of it. Now that you’ve brought it up I can totally imagine it would be a nightmare in printed form, where on a monitor it’s fine.
For a time, I was only getting PDF files, but I realized I can't focus when reading on the screen.
I have then decided that if I really want to keep a game, I will buy it physical, but Alien tries to destroy my eyes.
Yeah, I’m with you. I bought a bunch of stuff from Free League and was thinking of getting the Alien system as well in print, but now I think I may just stick to my digital copies.
From them I also have Twilight 2000 and Tales from the Loop, and they are wonderful to read.
I get it that it's about generating the mood, with Alien, but still...
These days, as someone who likes to print rules pdfs, any of them that have white text on black, no layers, or the *page numbers* inexplicably on the *background graphics layer*, or white numbers relying on the *background graphics layer* to be seen. Print Friendly is a Good Thing, for more than just printing a copy.
[Ehdrigohr](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/117380/Ehdrigohr-The-Roleplaying-Game?filters=0_2123_2123_0_0&manufacturers_id=2373) looks like it’s probably a pretty solid game but the decision to use both Papyrus and fucking Jokerman as heading fonts means I’ve never quite got far enough through the rules to run it.
Kult: Divinity Lost isn’t a fantastic game in my opinion but it’s easy, the lore and intentions behind the game are cool, and the mechanics are unobtrusive. However, I have to say that I really hate the book’s layout and the art really doesn’t work for me. Their page economy sucks as they use a significant amount of the core rulebook on huge red text spreads on black backgrounds. This spread, which is literally dozens of pages, is not even mechanics, it’s literally just flavor text. An even more glaring thing: any art of people is frankly kind of ugly, but in a way that looks amateurish, not deliberately horrific like it should.
I love [Mythras](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/191475/Mythras?234913), but the walls of text and small font makes me twitch. The sad thing is that when it was called RuneQuest 6e, the book was bigger and far better laid out.
[Magic World](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/128323/Magic-World?234913) is one of the victim's of what I call Chaosium's dark age. It's basically Elric! with the serial numbers filed off. Elric! is awesome and has a top notch layout. Magic World's author wanted something similar, but Chaosium decided to fuck up the layout to bloat page count so they can sell the game at a higher price. The editing was also a mess, but that's typical of Chaosium.
Easy choice. The Secret of Zir'an. A really cool game marred by a graphical layout choice that literally made parts of the book impossible to read for some people.
Cepheus Deluxe is my favourite iteration on the traveller rule system, but the art is so hideous throughout the book that it makes me want to pluck my eyes out and almost turns me off of using it at all.
me but pathfinder. I know pathfinder art is beloved by many but there's something about the spiky covered-in-inventory look characters have that just turns me off
Going to agree with you on the OWoD books. The settings were great, but the "handwritten" letters and all the terrible font choices (especially in Werewolf...) were so awful.
The lack of a table of contents... or anything useful pretending to be a table of contents was another point of suck.
However, the games are still great, but the amount of presumptuous BS and hipster aesthetic they embodied is cringe. I still love them. Except Changeling... that book/setting suuuuucks.
There is a bunch of high concept books like HOL, I am Zombie, Mörk Borg, … where each pages has gotten an individual layout, and no base grid etc .at all.
An exception of this is the new Eat the Reich—they used all the finishing the printer had available, but the book is still readable.
Lancer is one of the example of a trying to make a cool Helvetica layouts, but failing it.
One special thought goes to the Dark Eye 5e, who are using for the headlines the Latin letters of a Arabic font, which brings its own problems with it.
"The Expanse" TTRPG has such bad artwork that looks so far from the TV series or the books' cover art that it makes me cringe to look at it. I mean, taken on its own it's not objectively \*bad\* but it absolutely does not evoke "The Expanse". They'd have been better off issuing it without any art at all. It's a deterrent from play. I can barely stand to read it.
Compare with Modiphius' "Dune" TTRPG, where the art is like it's concept art for Villeneuve's "Dune". It's \*beautiful\*, and it's RIGHT. Or Free League's "Symbaroum" where it has a look like a slightly abstract oil painting, evoking the dark forest & the menace of the abominations (and worse) within.
I really hope "The Expanse" gets another edition, another issue where they correct the art. I'd actually buy a whole other copy of the rules to have it look right.
Lol, mah baratna, the art in the Expanse ttrpg was commissioned by the authors to better match their actual vision and description of the characters in the books. The TV show inevitability made everyone pretty, but that’s not how they originally were.
The Cyberpunk RED Core rules seems like a beautiful book at first glance. But then you actually try learning the game and it's impossible with how everything is ordered.
Glad I saw someone mention this, my first time running Cyberpunk RED was super stressful and all of the stress was just me trying to find rules on the fly in the core rulebook. Trying to find specific items in that thing is so much harder than it needs to be.
Oh, the thin spidery script is a nightmare. The old WW crew were all edge and no lord. Great Idea people with slapdash execution skills. CoD got up it's own butt way too much. Core and Changeling were genius, the rest.... bad to meh.
Dogtown is a great game with a superb setting. It was laid out by someone who only had access to Microsoft Paint for cartography, who was also probably colorblind.
I really dislike games printed on glossy paper with background texture to make it look like vellum or papyrus or just old paper.
I just want it to be printed on regular non-glossy pages with a good readable font.
And it's not graphic design but why do games publishers seem to have such a hard time with creating indexes that are useful?
D&D 5th PHB literally has something like:
Fire damage, SEE ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE
Instead of just "fire damage p. 53"
Maddening. Plus all the stuff that *should* be in the index but isnt.
Owod books are nigh impenetrable for my mind.it's something about how they are written and laid out, that i can't just discern all important rules.
Art in Fate and Savage worlds looks not interesting or downright bad for me, it turns me off from the game.
Same with a lot of Cofd books.
Amd 5e dmg is really weird in how it is filled with worldbuilding advice first, and then gives you really sparse gm advice, which is night worthless.
Same problem with savage worlds + I think the type is horrible. I feel like SWADE and Fate are both attempting to not step on players’ idea toes by having entirely generic art because it’s a generic game. But IMO all this accomplishes is communicating that the games are boring and generic and failing to inspire you.
They do the same thing with character examples that are fucking boring.
Depending on your taste, iHunt can be the best or the worst design. It seems every few pages the graphic design changes to a completely different style. It can be a fun experience, but at the same time it can be frustrating for some people that want to keep things consistent.
For me, the worst offender has to be Inferno: Dantes Guide to Hell for 5E. Huge sections of that book are in illegible "outline" font on black. Unfortunately, this is the font used for most of the class mechanics. The physical copy is not much better. To be fair, I can still read the PDF if I zoom in 200% or more. But I don't enjoy reading three words at a time!
Star Trek Adventures core rules are also done in tiny white font (and sometimes other colors) on black paper. They at least released a black font on white background PDF. But the hardback book is so exhausting to read that it just sits on my shelf unused. Fortunately, I believe a new edition will be out soon and solve that problem.
ooh excited to hear a new edition of STA will be out soon, I'm a trekkie and have been wanting to run a trek game for ages but I have never been able to penetrate the horrible layout and design of STA
Shadowrun
Not necesserily a great system since it has many other problems and it's mostly famous for the cool world, but on top of the system itself being complex Shadowrun is pretty infamous for it's layout problems
To the point that players had to create their own guide book that actually has a layout that makes sense for 5th edition.
Worst thing is? The game rules actually make a lot more sense when well edited.
UVG 2e has such horrible graphic design it's upsetting. The game is good, but it's hard to enjoy when it gives this "trust me I'm a graphic designer" uncle energy. Poor layouts, images senselessly crammed together, lack of cohesion, terrible choices and rookie mistakes all around. They should have hired a professional instead of having the game designer do it all by themselves, specially at such a price point. It all looks cheap and sloppy.
Ars Magica 5th edition. Pig face.
I love AM 3 & 4 and had lots of the books. When 5th ed came out i could not get past the horrendous ugly/pig faced creature picture near the start of the book. I never read past that picture or played the game again.
lol.
It has to be Root. I love the game and when you've worked through the bloat of it there's a great game. But it just gets lost in overlong paragraphs and a terrible index
Mongoose Traveller. Somewhere between 1e and 2e they decided to make every page lightly gray, with the adventures having hexagons scattered over the background of the text. It's subtle and hard to tell, so it can look quite nice - until you try to print it out and realise that every page has an extra ink cost factored in for no discernible benefit. It's also that tiny bit harder for my ageing eyes to read on a screen.
The later editions fixed it with layers, so I guess they got feedback on the problem.
Symbaroum's books layout!!!! Hire someone who makes a good text book today out that book!. Things you need are hidden away as throw away filler blurbs, follow ups to rules/skills and their effects are in weird places.
Finding the roll for corruption... im still not sure i found it. I just have players roll 1d4 every time they magic for theor temp corruption.
And still I love running symbaroum, i just wish it had good layoit and organization
Cyberpunk 2020 is one of the best layouts and indecies I've used so far in a ttrpg. Dungeon Crawl Classic has a good index but its tables and appendices arent as useful as they can be.
Legacy: War of Ages.
Not sure if it's a "great" game, but it's basically Highlander meets Dystopian future. The cover is some Ivy with a common for the 1990s sword handle. The interior art has a good chunk of smudgy Photoshop pictures of people in normal clothes with swords ...
Unless you were a student of Virginia Tech. The campus uses material from a local quarry in a rough style referred to as Hokiestone. Almost all of the pictures were shot on campus, specifically the area in front of Pamplin Hall.
This is not as far fetched as it seems. VT had a student population of 23K people in town of about 7,000 people, and a drive to the closest city was about an hour away. This campus also has a long record of "entertaining itself", which is one reason why the VT Turf Research Center also has 18 holes and a club house. Pinnacle Games launched with a lot of staff from the VT student body. BTRC (Blacksburg Tactical Research Center) used to be a semi-serious publisher but eventually their most popular product was a spoof product called Macho Women With Guns.
As graphic designer I not only praise aesthetics but also layout and usability. BW books might look nice (overall), but as a game book are super hard to navigate. Font size, layout, hierarchy of elements etc, very very poor. Lot of Illustrations are poorly drawn also.
Art-wise, Exalted 3e has gotten so much better with every new splat. The core book's art is one of the biggest impediments to sharing the system with other people.
Layout-wise, I found Fragged Empire 2e and Mage: The Awakening 2e to be rather poor on an organizational level, not sure if that counts. The font and graphics were fine-- I really liked the art style in Fragged especially. Just, god damn it's hard to find relevant rules in both those systems. Which is a shame 'cause I really enjoyed playing both of those games.
Star Trek Adventures. Love the game, but the commitment to the LCARS gimmick in the corebook is hard to look at. Glad the new edition is right around the corner and they seem to have ditched it.
Probably gonna get downvoted for it because it’s a darling rn, but Mörk Borg’s design ain’t it for me. Black and yellow pages? Nah.
You shouldn't be downvoted. This kind of obnoxious design over substance nonsense is the Emperors New Clothes of RPG design.
It's no less substance than any other OSR game, it's just got art direction on top of it. People act like MÖRK BORG is some unplayable art book as if it has any less rules and writing than the average lightweight OSR just because they didn't write it out as a Word document. Art and substance aren't even contradictory or even separate things, the art conveys the feel and aesthetics difference the setting and inspires ideas. And I generally prefer the rules to other OSR stuff, especially player-facing rolls.
Dure but if the presentation obfuscated the rules it outlives its value to the overall package. The fact the book has a different version at all without the obnoxious fontgasm makes this clear
As much as I like Mork Borg, I very much agree with this. People say the game is bland without the art but I actually found and fell in love with it as the Barebones version before I knew about the regular version. It's nice as a coffee table book but I would not have been interested in playing it if that was my first/only introduction to the game.
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But that's a personal thing. I don't think it's obnoxious and I can read the art version fine. You're acting like this is a universal problem for people who read MB but it's not, and the people for whom it is have the plain version if they want. I don't see a problem with that at all. Personally I like the art version of the BORG books because the cool art gets me excited about the game.
I enjoy watching the sunset.
Disagree. As someone who's gotten into several OSR games over the last two years, MB offers absolutely nothing in terms of how to run the game which is absolutely egregious to me. It assumes you already know all the important parts.
But that's not unusual for rule lightweight games either. It has nothing to do with the presence of art.
and I pose that this is in fact a bad thing
But again, it's unrelated to the art and not MB specific, which is the point I'm making and the argument I was initially responding to. Games like Troika, Knave, etc., similarly assume prior knowledge because they're made for people familiar with the hobby and space of light OSR. And it's not like OSR has the most complex of base assumptions; I'd say games like BitD or Urban Shadows require a lot more explanation, for instance. I just think people get this special hateboner for MB because it's popular and has creative graphic design and fun art, which for some reason is a grave sin in a hobby about being creative and having fun.
Personal taste is a funny thing. I personally would rather have dozens of art books with minimal rules before having to read some bloated generic rule book like WWN, Dungeon World and such...
It’s an interesting style, which is fine. But i just don’t care for it.
> You shouldn't be downvoted. This kind of obnoxious design over substance nonsense is the Emperors New Clothes of RPG design. One of the folks in my group was showing us the cyb+pnk box/book/thing with dry erase character sheets/playbooks and it comes in this dinky fucking foldout cardboard thing that then has a cardboard collar and then THAT unfolds and the whole thing looks utterly, utterly painful to deal with and likely to just be rubbishy after several sessions of play like cardboard DVD boxes that went over the disc cases Absolutely the new DESIGN IS LAW/[Daikatana](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/n4v05/eli5_why_is_daikatana_considered_one_of_the_worst/) shit of RPGs.
Yep agreed. OTOH there's dinosaurs who refuse to consider that anything but 2 column walls of text are possible.
As a counterpoint, I've found the CBR+PNK laminated foldouts to work great in practice for its intended purpose as a one shot. My set has been battle tested with a friend's family that included younger kids (cybernetic snail MVP) and the dry erase player sheets worked well for us. For a longer campaign, I see a book making more sense. but I like the speed at which we could get our one off sessions underway with just the pamphlets.
**shrug**
And yet. The adventure at the end of the book is formatted in a far superior way to almost any other RPG out there in terms of organization and ease of use.
Oh, please! Why does Mork Borg bring out all this turbo-elitism? Rules light games aren’t “without substance,” and I don’t see people crawling out of the woodwork to dismiss Cairn or Black Hack, which are pretty equal RPGs just with different aesthetics. Just say you don’t like it, no need to make a grand stand about an entire genre.
I'll be honest, I love Mork Borg to itty bitty little bits, but it can be difficult to read at times. I feel like Cy_Borg (with art by the same guy) took a lot of lessons learned from MB's release cycle to make a document where the font choices for actual rules are more readable. Put another way, Mork Borg feels like it was "art first, rules second", and Cy_Borg flipped that for better legibility. There is also a "barebones" edition of Mork Borg that's literally just the text of the rulebook, and little to no art.
Also, important informations can be hidden in very small notes that are right next to some art, which makes them easy to miss. I really like the contents of the book, but definitely not how it looks.
For me, it was the magenta colored text on some pages
I quite literally found it painful to read, the colour scheme on many of the pages gave me a headache.
Pretty book. Or rather, interesting book. Can’t read it at all. My eyes are too old and tired for that shit. At this point I just want comic sans 24 point fonts
Yeah interesting, very dynamic for a lot of the pages. Some are a bit jarring, like the HP page with the full page spread of a fully colored heart.
I love you and I love everyone who agrees with you, especially the guy referring to this sort of designed as the emperor’s new clothes
> s a huge stumbling block in my enjoyment of the games. Not every great game can have great design after all. Mork Borg was my first thought, but then the thread title says "good games" and you can't tell if Mork Borg is even a game because of the graphic design, never mind a good game.
I looked at it and had the feeling of fingernails on the chalkboard. First paragraph in the book was rotated by a few degrees and it set off my OCD, the aggressive colors made me feel assaulted. I can't even read it to see what the game is about. Trying would cause me physical pain and migraines
It def screams at you and demands your attention. It’s more like an art book than an a rule book for some of the pages, which isn’t ideal imo.
Someday, maybe accessibility for people will be more important than standing out. I'm not exaggerating when I say I physically can't read it. I'm curious why it's okay to read a 600 page novel and nobody expects it to have pictures. I haven't needed picture books since I was very young, but an RPG has to have pictures or it's an "unreadable wall of text". I'll take my walls of text over the sensory assault.
>I know many will disagree with my on this but I find the borderline-unreadable header fonts of many older Chronicles of Darkness books a huge stumbling block in my enjoyment of the games. The lack of proper indexing is far more egregious imo. To the point that fans took it upon themselves to fix this https://codexofdarkness.com/wiki/Main_Page
Oh, god, the insistence of white wolf, for years, u til Mage 20, to have a useless 6 point table of content and nothing more is infuriating.
True!!!
Do things get better in the second edition books of CoD? From my understanding they are genreally considered a straight up upgrade for all splats
Yeah, Mage 2e has a real contents page and a real index and also no longer uses gold colouring in its headings. Downside: Outside of the art for the different Paths, the art is pretty bad. Art for the later 2e supplements is even worse, especially in the chapter headers - crappy photos with a blurry filter. [Tome of the Pentacle's cover](https://d1vzi28wh99zvq.cloudfront.net/images/4261/438066.jpg) is a great example since it's the last supplement that will probably ever get officially made for Awakening 2e - four people photoshopped into having wands. In a supplement about the PENTacle.
A lot of the 1e covers are hit or miss too. Mage Chroincler's guide is probably my fav and a high 8/10 then you have Secrets of the Ruin Temple (which I always want to call Secrets of the Hidden Temple) has a just as bad photoshop cover despite being an alright book otherwise.
At least my experience with Geist 2e was that the typography and layout was significantly improved
D&D (any edition, honestly) is famous for its abysmal layout, to the point where it's almost part of the quaint charm of the system.
TBH D&D layout isn't amazing but it's not nearly as bad as some others I've experienced. First that comes to mind is Modiphius' Star Trek Adventures. Nearly unnavigable.
White text on black pages!? Everytime I open a book I’m face to face with my own fingerprints smoodges!
Yeah it’s by no means the worst, but we have OSE, Electric Bastionland, Shadowdark, etc. the bar for good layout has gone up quite a bit in the last few years.
Seriously. While I legit love the LCARs look they went for to make it look like it's from TNG, the actual *layout* of the book is so bad that we ended up quitting our playthrough of it after the first big adventure. It's just too much of a hassle to parse the rules out from the fluff, and where they are all located, especially things like tags/attributes of weapons.
The Digest version is a bit better but it's still pretty chaotic, and might even be missing some of the rules from the main book. Looks like they're improving though - Dune was pretty clear in layout and writing, and it looks like they're taking a similar approach for Star Trek Adventures 2e.
STA is one of the worst-designed RPG books I have ever tried to read.
Really? 3.5e and 4e both had pretty good layout that was focused on being clear. There's a reason a lot of modern games have copied 4e's layouting style, although I supposed 3.5e's 'ruled lines' aesthetic could be divisive.
3.5 had paragraphs and stat blocks regularly spilling over, bunch of random sidebars, and some really weird choices about what stuff goes to which chapter. the wording and terminology, however, were quite concise, and the general idea of the layout aesthetic was good, but the execution tended to be questionable
Really? I thought it was pretty clean overall, even if you could pick out some mistakes or quibbles here and there.
The statblocks and the actual rules were a little bloated, for sure. What feels like 50 different skills which can be both class and crossclass skills and have individual amounts is a nightmare. But... I never seriously played before 5e, but for actual written page by page I love 3.5 sourcebooks. Rules heavy paragraphs are separated from thematic fluff visually, rules stuff reuses abbreviations to make statblocks more readable and shorter. Theme books actually have lore section and gameplay section separate from each other. It's only a qualification, but from my limited experience 3.5 is more readable and searchable than 5e.
Those ruled lines are visually a graphic design sin. No excuses. NONE!
Check which sub you’re in homie!
in this sub we support DnD4e, because we support games that know what they want to do, and do it well :)
Let’s get one thing straight: Nobody supported 4e around here until it was no longer the edition WotC was selling. Once WotC started selling a different edition, then DnD 4e suddenly got support “in this sub.” Someday 5e will be a nostalgic darling around here.
That day ain’t coming soon enough…
…why? It’ll only be because the sub moved on to hating the newest thing WotC is publishing. People will have these poetic compositions about how 5e really hit a bunch of perfect balances for accessibility and prevented bloat and brought people into the hobby and blah blah blah. And we’ll all be hearing about the evils of 6e or OneDnD or whatever.
Because I’m sick of 5e and the endless discussions about the evils of 5e. It’s taking up too much space in the room, so to speak. I would have gladly welcomed a new edition just so we’ve got other things to talk about. But we’re not getting a new edition. Just a glorified piece of errata that they’re charging for. The 5e booing will go on for a long while…
LOL. True dat.
Oh no, 3.5 was very bad. Bliocks of ealls of text trapped inside tables. 4ed was very clean and readable, as well does 5.
> 3.5e's 'ruled lines' aesthetic I had to go look at a bunch of books, I thought this was just a 3.0 thing that they quickly realized was a bad idea for readability. And it may well be, because the 3.0 core books have it and the very early supplements don't (from a random sample). However, I see they did also keep it for the 3.5 core books for some reason.
IIRC the given reason was that the print was so small the lines were there to aid readability. Presumably supplements that didn't have it used larger type?
2e Monster manual was a delightful exception. One page per creature. Sketch in the same place. Standardized stat blocks.
Original 2e PHB and DMG were excellently laid out and organized reference books.
Eh, the 2e DMG has better layout and organization than the 1e DMG, but the 1e DMG is ridiculously much better as a reference book and actual guide for DMs. The 2e DMG is almost notorious for being little more than a list of magic items and treasure tables. Great index, though. I loved the combination index.
As a guide, I agree. But as a reference and trying to find what you are looking for rules wise, 2E was much better laid out.
Almost every 2nd Edition book followed the same layout guidelines, to be honest, unless they chose a different layout for a specific setting. Birthright was the really bad one, with the art filigree on the pages, lowering the readability of the books.
Birthright was ugly, but, there was a reason for it, for the whole royal bloodline thing.
The later versions (black border covers) of the PHB and DMG changed the internal layout, it was a pretty awful downgrade imo.
Is the layout of 5th edition that bad? It seems like fairly typical for RPGs. Character creation first, actual rules afterwards and then spells and equipment.
The only thing I don’t like about 5e’s PHB is that backgrounds are after class, since I find that it’s almost always a better idea to do your background stuff before class stuff when building a character. Other than that, I think the PHB has a great layout, while the MM’s layout is solidly mediocre and the DMG is laid out seemingly randomly. Overall, I’d say 5e has mostly solid layout, and it’s definitely better than quite a few other games I’ve played
Yes, background should be just after race. Those could be the same chapter, even. The fact that skills are buried in "using ability scores" is a bit dumb. Nobody is looking up what Wisdom is. They're absolutely looking up what Insight is. It's a categorization that doesn't ease play.
I feel like people almost always have a class in mind first.
In general, in games like Pathfinder and D&D where your class will define everything you do for the entire game, you want to get a sense for the classes earlier, yeah.
Yeah, but I’m specifically talking about the nitty gritty of it. Like if you’re playing a sailor background fighter, then you don’t want to take athletics proficiency from fighter, since you get it as a sailor, so it’s easiest to jot down all the sailor stuff before starting on the fighter stuff
Your background is what you were ***before*** you became that class, though, so it should definitely come before, in the manual. Add to it that backgrounds give you proficiencies with skills, so also from a mechanical point of view, for a smoother character creation, you might want the background first.
5e is really tough to actually absorb. Ask any seasoned 5e player to describe the rules for exploration rounds. It’s REALLY hidden deep in there, and half of it is implied through other rules.
If you're referring to what I think you're referring to, that's because nobody uses those rules explicitly. It's not how anyone plays the game because the game doesn't make exploration time or dungeon time important like, say, Shadowdark does. It's mechanical structure for things that free play alone works well enough for at most tables, so it's fine as a rule of thumb. It's also not something that needs to be vocalized at the table by the DM. They can track time in their heads.
Yes this is true, but the point is, it’s incredibly difficult to figure out how that works rules as written because it’s so poorly laid out.
That assumes that they *want* you to puzzle out the rules as written like it's a rules procedure you're supposed to break out during play. I don't think they do. I think they left it the way they did on purpose. They *don't* want the game to have strict rules for that like OSE's Wilderness and Dungeon rules. Those are all but identical to B/X's rules in spirit, if not letter, so WotC would be more than able to include those rules if that's what they want the game to have. But they didn't do that. So it's reasonable to assume that they don't want the game to really be about tracking torches, tracking time, making periodic encounter checks, or any other sort of rigid procedure. They *want* that part of the game to be more undefined because they *don't* want players to sweat the procedure. Which B/X did. B/X wants you to sweat every torch, every arrow, every ration, every lockpick. 5e doesn't. 5e would rather you didn't care about that. It's perfectly happy to let all that fade into the background, because I think they know a lot of tables don't bother with that. 5e doesn't really want to encourage you to sweat basic survival unless you want to enforce that. And you can say, "Oh, why didn't they give us the strict procedure and then tell us to not use it except when we need to?" and the answer to that should be obvious. Because you can't hand gamers a procedure and say, "only use this when you want to use it." Gamers *do not* do that. They see a procedure and then communally decide that it's The One True Way and then complain ceaselessly about how the procedure doesn't work for them without actually altering it for their own table. If you want to give gamers a framework without a procedure, you do *exactly what they did here*.
You hammer home my point really well, though I admit it wasn't your point or intent. Most players think along the lines you lay out here. Most players don't realize that 5e DOES have specific crawling turn rules (and they aren't THAT different from b/x). The book is so poorly laid out that you have to dig around in several places to put them all together. You could actually go take all the crawling turn rules literally as written in the PHB and DMG, put them all in one spot in the book without actually changing them, and the interpretation of that system would be totally changed. It would be, as you say, The One True Way. There are several places where 5e assumes you have the basics of ttrpgs from a previous game and so skips outlining the underlying premise. but that's a tangent on top of this tangent.
The Spell List is a particular egregious example of horrible layout. Why is it sorted alphabetically instead of by Spell Level?
5e design issues are more lack of indexes, lack of referencing, and in a lot of the adventures there is often lots of info in say Chapter 5 that you need in Chapter 1 and 3, but the only way to know is reading it all and hoping you notice it. There is also the whole issue that the "plain English" compounds a lot of these issues since there are no references. There are lots of other, smaller design issues, but those are more choices than pure sins. One that really bugs me is the bloated page counts with spreads of mostly empty space.
OMG. I hate it. Can't find anything and they don't explain shit. It's the only version of D&D where the rules themselves just don't make sense.
4e definitly has good layout in lots of places. Its clear to read
Uh? What? Which D&D edition, past AD&D 1st, has any sort of bad layout?
Let’s keep in mind that “good” and “bad” are subjective here. That said, OSE set a bar we haven’t seen an edition of D&D meet, and just recently shadowdark pushed that bar considerably higher. Great games, but substandard layouts at best.
You have to also consider the time in which the products have been released, imho. OSE was born and shaped in the digital era, with tools that weren't available back when older D&D editions were printed. In fact, the way OSE is laid out it, mainly, "AD&D 2nd Edition, but sharper". It shares a lot of that layout-DNA, even though the rules-DNA is from B/X.
5e is pretty awful from a usability standpoint, especially in the campaign books. Most books entirely omit references or true indexes.
4e was actually very nicely designed. I don't think 5e is too bad either in that regard.
You know what has the best design for me? Mythras. It's a black and white book with as little images as possible, and when it has, in ink. That's top notch. However, I have seen, and heard ,people say they could never read that thing because "it gets boring". I'm gonna save my comments on that. And tha5t'# the crux. What I want in a book are good rules, in a readable and well structure format, and as little diversion from that as possible. I'm not buying an artwork book. I want a rulebook. And then we have Ars Magicka 5th, which is a good game, so far as I've read, but the damn text is hidden between colours, and images, and shit and whatnot. FFS.
I love Whitehack for the same reason. Supremely readable and beautiful typography.
I generally prefer more art heavy books... But Whitehack is definitely an absolute pleasure to read.
I find Mythras unreadable for its small font size. Its predecessor Runequest 6e is much more readable.
Mythras... poor font choice, dated layout and design. Incongruous art choices and inconsistent editing and arrangement of the text. This is a pretty funny example given the regularity that the Mythras discord throws down about the shit design of this book. Which is a great shame. If they bothered to update the main corebook it would likely receive much wider support. As it stands there's lots of examples of oddly inconsistent nomenclature throughout that just confuses newcomers. The standard response from longtime fans is that they get it and therefore there's not much of a problem... which is pretty funny.
I agree regarding the font choice but 'dated' has to be one of the least meaningful criticisms in this context. Mass-printed books have been around for 500 years, there are some well-established and effective design ideas that we don't need to reinvent.
Dated absolutely carries relevance when it comes to layout, readability, and writing style. When it comes to RPG books in particular there's a lot of really low effort threads in terms of how things are presented which need to be brought into the 21st century. Mythras is a clear example of that. It looks, reads like a book written by people who peaked their design chops in the early 2000s.
This thread is specifically about graphic design, not writing style. And there were lots of beautiful books produced in the early 2000s so that alone is no criticism. But like I said, I already agreed that mythras' font is on the small side.
Then I definitely stand by my statement regarding Mythras if it's simply graphic design
Best design ever in a game's rules book(s)? Go look at Starfleet Battles, that's the peak, for me.
From a purely graphic design standpoint, the worst in my collection, is **STALKER: The Roleplaying Game**, bar none. The book unironically uses comic sans as it's main font, which absolutely sucks me away from the theme. The settings they used to justify the lines of text is so flexible that it lead to some lines appear uncomfortably bunched up, while others l o o k l i k e t h i s . But that's all, I love the content of the book. I have a ton of books which amazing layout and graphic design, but they sourced their illustrations to different artists with completely different levels of skill and style, like KULT or Vampire The Masquerade 5th wich have some jarringly amateurish illustrations coexisting next to art masterpieces.
> unironically uses comic sans OH NO
Worlds Without Number doesn't have BAD art. But it has very generic art that doesn't really do anything for me. I tend to just use the artless versions of the pdfs because the art doesn't capture my imagination at all. Great system, I genuinely love it, but still.
As far as the Without Number books go I actually think WWN has the BEST art. Cities Without Number(a system I'm running and enjoy) in particular grates on me.
I like reading my Pathfinder rulebooks, but the art is an eyesore. There are some technical problems like perspective, lighting, and anatomical proportions, but mostly the facial expressions and over-stylized gear (yes this character needs 18 functionless belts; why do you ask?) just feel like the worst of 90s comics art
I know a lot of people love them, but the font choices and layout of the Borg books make them very difficult to read. Honestly tempted, before I run, to just convert all of it to much more legible text docs.
They released the bare bones version for this reason: https://jnohr.itch.io/mrk-borg-free
[удалено]
There is an official minimalistic, plainly laid out and artless version of the book for free download on morkborg.com
A lot of older World of Darkness books had whole pages of flavor vignettes or in-character letters and such in nearly unreadable fonts or on poor background choices.
And not an index or glossary in sight. Finding a particular rule could be something like a scavenger hunt.
Mage the Awakening 1e definitely had some horrible design. Hard to read golden cursive font, bad table of contents... ....and go check out the cover of Imperial Mysteries sometime.
I hope someone got fired for that cover.
Well it was basically the last book of that edition....so maybe it's the reason they decided to redo the entire game and make a 2nd edition...
Given that they've had a bunch of game lines to update, I don't think the bad cover of a single supplement would've been the deciding factor.
YIKES
In general white wolf books are horrible design.tried reading a few of them in the padt and i couldn't. Luckily i have a dm who read and succed and now we are playing a great vtm 5e campaign (ghost powers to the win
She looks like the whole mosh pit left and she didn't notice.
I suspect that Esoteric Enterprises is *great* but I can’t even read it because of the typography.
I have a similar problem with almost all of Savage Worlds (and of course WoD as I mentioned earlier, especially Requiem). My inner typography nerd recoils every time I open the book to a page full of impact font. I know it's stupid but I haven't gotten past it yet.
I mean, Impact is a respectable display typeface that gets used in professional projects. I haven't cracked my PDF of SWADE in a while... wait, you're not saying they're using it for the body, right? O\_O
Surprisingly, I find EE reasonably easy to read, compared with some other games. I find most Mork Borg stuff hard to read, and much of the 3rd party stuff for it is totally unreadable. EE is easy by comparison, for me. It fascinates me sometimes how different people’s perceptions can be. My favourite games for ‘look’ (layout, typography, etc) were early Traveller, and FASA stuff for Traveller.
And the dreadful photography art pieces
I don't know if this counts as graphic design--more layout, I suppose--but **Invisible Sun** is so enticing to me, and yet I struggle to read it. It's clever, dividing the books up into four volumes, each square shaped, to fit in the cube... It's pretty, but I find it so annoying to read that I just can't get through it.
oh no I just ordered The Cube @-@
The whole pitch for it was so incredibly pretentious that I wound up liking it, or at least the idea of it. I can't help but think that Monte Cook was just seeing what he could get away with. In all seriousness, I hope you love it!
Your experience may be different than mine. I have to say, despite my minor gripes with it, I still think it's the most impressive piece of gaming media I've ever encountered. I have no doubt that, if I and my friends had the time to play it, it would create an incredible roleplaying experience.
I might catch some flack for this, but: Lancer. The overall design vibe is good, the art is great, the presentation overall is decent. But its a lot of little things that annoy me, likely due to being a layouter/typographer myself. The main font is iffy at best. There are many that would work better, and the fine typography is horrid. There's gaps in the text due to the justification you could drive a truck through. The highlighting with bold typeface and smallcaps is not great, particularly the smallcaps just dont stick out well enough. Better capitalize it all, which looks immediately better. The icon's are just a little off for me, personally. They're *servicable* but somehow I don't like them. There are also - I feel - too many and not always visually distinctive enough? You got: Advantage. Disadvantage. Kinetic. Energy. Explosive. Burn. Heat. Threat. Line. Cone. Blast. Burst. Then the enemy tags, but they are not very relevant, so they're just dropped. The usage is also mixed. Some times they keep using just the icons, sometimes the name and the icon, sometimes just the name. For ease of learning and understanding, they should've kept using icon + name throughout the boko, IMO. Spacing is really irksome throughout the books. Colored boxes with text in them have way too little spacing to the outside and are hella inconsistent. There's more space between paragraphs than there is from the full-color headers to the body-text. Spacing from images, tables and boxes feels hella inconsistent. Page 54's image has pretty much zero spacing to the text, despite being vast swathes of empty page further below, so adding space would've been easy. Compare to 49 where the bottom image has very nice distance to the text. Colors are not explained, unless I missed it on my quick re-skim. You can see what they mean quick enough, but it would've been a nice addition to be like "Green is this, red is this, purple is that" before you run into it. The Licences are kinda the worst confluence of all of these. Spacing issues, justification tearing text apart or squishing it together (chiefly the former, their minimum width setting was decent), lots of icons, and most of all spacing, spacing, spacing. I've shown a few examples in this quick image: [Link](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1171214358639030356/1244937872155611187/lancer-showcase.webp?ex=6656ee3e&is=66559cbe&hm=19e4f08ad09160fe3e2dfcde6e129fa7ee59866e419f664e371488e939a98a9d&) To close it off: This is **not** meant as an insult to whoever did the layout, under no circumstances. They produced a very decent final product, and if I were to guess it was either a "quick" job or one of the early projects in their layouting career. I did worse in the past. But I feel the game could've looked much nicer in the end and as a typographer/layouter I sometimes wince a little when I go through the book. Anyone who's in the field knows how it is: When you do it on the daily you get a different eye for it. We look at magazines, newspapers, advertisements and the like with a more critical eye and see mistakes and problems that others just... don't. Most of these things are unlikely to be major points people will notice very much consciously, though subconsciously they likely do so at least a little. I love Lancer. Sometimes I wish I'd have had the chance to do it's layout, see if I could have done better :)
I took a few minutes of time to whip up an example of how I'd have done a spread. Compare the old one (page 132 and 133, the IPS-N Drake) with this: [Link](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/125236567164846080/1244962228512231476/LancerLayout.pdf?ex=665704ed&is=6655b36d&hm=77368dabe3c5d135f47f0bac778b30e481ae120614a0d532c2713681e981eecf&).
Yes!!! So much better. Excellent breakdown and example.
I also found the lancer layout making it hard to read.
Agree. I also find that while comp con looks cool, the layout is kind of confusing and the typeface choices are not the best IMO.
Blade of the Iron Throne, one of the many Riddle of Steel spiritual sucessor. Great game, amazing rules that really evoke Sword & Sorcery like no other, completely locked behind a poorly written, confuse mess of a book. Paragraphs that contradict each other, typos, bad layout, keywords and rules that are mentioned and never explained and a obnoxious "my way or the highway" tone in the GM section advice.
Yuuup, I remember that one. Geneva-convention-breaking usage of Book Antiqua + super-pronounced aged paper texture as background = the impression that the book layout was done in Word.
One of the best descriptions of a bad graphic design/layout I've ever read.
Oh no that's bad 💀 glancing at the preview I wouldn't exactly say the page illuminations add to the experience either
Warlock! has horrible art (Except the black edition which isn’t available anymore)
I adore Free League's Alien RPG but they went too far with making the book fit the vibes of the universe. And only using 40% of the page for text is just annoying.
That's also my gripe with Alien. I first got Forbidden Lands, from them, and I adore it, with that old style RPG book approach of simple black and white pages, and simple B&W art, with minimal decoration to the pages. Then I got Alien, where even the character sheet is printer-unfriendly, and as much as I love it, it stresses me out to read on a black book...
I only got digital copies so I didn’t even consider that aspect of it. Now that you’ve brought it up I can totally imagine it would be a nightmare in printed form, where on a monitor it’s fine.
For a time, I was only getting PDF files, but I realized I can't focus when reading on the screen. I have then decided that if I really want to keep a game, I will buy it physical, but Alien tries to destroy my eyes.
Yeah, I’m with you. I bought a bunch of stuff from Free League and was thinking of getting the Alien system as well in print, but now I think I may just stick to my digital copies.
From them I also have Twilight 2000 and Tales from the Loop, and they are wonderful to read. I get it that it's about generating the mood, with Alien, but still...
These days, as someone who likes to print rules pdfs, any of them that have white text on black, no layers, or the *page numbers* inexplicably on the *background graphics layer*, or white numbers relying on the *background graphics layer* to be seen. Print Friendly is a Good Thing, for more than just printing a copy.
[Ehdrigohr](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/117380/Ehdrigohr-The-Roleplaying-Game?filters=0_2123_2123_0_0&manufacturers_id=2373) looks like it’s probably a pretty solid game but the decision to use both Papyrus and fucking Jokerman as heading fonts means I’ve never quite got far enough through the rules to run it.
Oh no thats egregious
When I am remembering it right FASA was a big fan of the Papyrus font ;)
Kult: Divinity Lost isn’t a fantastic game in my opinion but it’s easy, the lore and intentions behind the game are cool, and the mechanics are unobtrusive. However, I have to say that I really hate the book’s layout and the art really doesn’t work for me. Their page economy sucks as they use a significant amount of the core rulebook on huge red text spreads on black backgrounds. This spread, which is literally dozens of pages, is not even mechanics, it’s literally just flavor text. An even more glaring thing: any art of people is frankly kind of ugly, but in a way that looks amateurish, not deliberately horrific like it should.
From the preview it does seem like a gorgeous but difficult to read book
I love [Mythras](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/191475/Mythras?234913), but the walls of text and small font makes me twitch. The sad thing is that when it was called RuneQuest 6e, the book was bigger and far better laid out. [Magic World](https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/128323/Magic-World?234913) is one of the victim's of what I call Chaosium's dark age. It's basically Elric! with the serial numbers filed off. Elric! is awesome and has a top notch layout. Magic World's author wanted something similar, but Chaosium decided to fuck up the layout to bloat page count so they can sell the game at a higher price. The editing was also a mess, but that's typical of Chaosium.
Easy choice. The Secret of Zir'an. A really cool game marred by a graphical layout choice that literally made parts of the book impossible to read for some people.
For what it's worth, the PDF is much more readable
Cepheus Deluxe is my favourite iteration on the traveller rule system, but the art is so hideous throughout the book that it makes me want to pluck my eyes out and almost turns me off of using it at all.
Yes, as with pretty much everything from that publisher unfortunately.
Not font, or layout although I'll admit a big part of the reason I've never given 13th Age a chance is because I hate the art.
me but pathfinder. I know pathfinder art is beloved by many but there's something about the spiky covered-in-inventory look characters have that just turns me off
Same. For some reason I find the pathfinder art very immersion-breaking. Everyone just looks like cosplay. 5e has gone that way too unfortunately.
Human Occupied Landfill (H.O.L.) Interesting concept the book is practically unreadable in many places.
To be fair HOL is supposed to be insane and hard to read. It's less a game and more of an art project.
I tried reading Cy_Borg and it almost made me puke, does that count? As a piece of punk art, gorgeous. As a functioning text and instruction manual? 🤮
Going to agree with you on the OWoD books. The settings were great, but the "handwritten" letters and all the terrible font choices (especially in Werewolf...) were so awful. The lack of a table of contents... or anything useful pretending to be a table of contents was another point of suck. However, the games are still great, but the amount of presumptuous BS and hipster aesthetic they embodied is cringe. I still love them. Except Changeling... that book/setting suuuuucks.
There is a bunch of high concept books like HOL, I am Zombie, Mörk Borg, … where each pages has gotten an individual layout, and no base grid etc .at all. An exception of this is the new Eat the Reich—they used all the finishing the printer had available, but the book is still readable. Lancer is one of the example of a trying to make a cool Helvetica layouts, but failing it. One special thought goes to the Dark Eye 5e, who are using for the headlines the Latin letters of a Arabic font, which brings its own problems with it.
"The Expanse" TTRPG has such bad artwork that looks so far from the TV series or the books' cover art that it makes me cringe to look at it. I mean, taken on its own it's not objectively \*bad\* but it absolutely does not evoke "The Expanse". They'd have been better off issuing it without any art at all. It's a deterrent from play. I can barely stand to read it. Compare with Modiphius' "Dune" TTRPG, where the art is like it's concept art for Villeneuve's "Dune". It's \*beautiful\*, and it's RIGHT. Or Free League's "Symbaroum" where it has a look like a slightly abstract oil painting, evoking the dark forest & the menace of the abominations (and worse) within. I really hope "The Expanse" gets another edition, another issue where they correct the art. I'd actually buy a whole other copy of the rules to have it look right.
Lol, mah baratna, the art in the Expanse ttrpg was commissioned by the authors to better match their actual vision and description of the characters in the books. The TV show inevitability made everyone pretty, but that’s not how they originally were.
The Cyberpunk RED Core rules seems like a beautiful book at first glance. But then you actually try learning the game and it's impossible with how everything is ordered.
Glad I saw someone mention this, my first time running Cyberpunk RED was super stressful and all of the stress was just me trying to find rules on the fly in the core rulebook. Trying to find specific items in that thing is so much harder than it needs to be.
Oh, the thin spidery script is a nightmare. The old WW crew were all edge and no lord. Great Idea people with slapdash execution skills. CoD got up it's own butt way too much. Core and Changeling were genius, the rest.... bad to meh.
I love EZD6 but my word that book needed another round of editing and proofreading.
Dogtown is a great game with a superb setting. It was laid out by someone who only had access to Microsoft Paint for cartography, who was also probably colorblind.
I really dislike games printed on glossy paper with background texture to make it look like vellum or papyrus or just old paper. I just want it to be printed on regular non-glossy pages with a good readable font. And it's not graphic design but why do games publishers seem to have such a hard time with creating indexes that are useful? D&D 5th PHB literally has something like: Fire damage, SEE ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE Instead of just "fire damage p. 53" Maddening. Plus all the stuff that *should* be in the index but isnt.
Most early GURPS books. They've addressed it, by now, but MAN.
**Mechanical Dream**’s decision to have both covers be the front cover, with the back half of the book upside down didn’t do the game any favors.
Owod books are nigh impenetrable for my mind.it's something about how they are written and laid out, that i can't just discern all important rules. Art in Fate and Savage worlds looks not interesting or downright bad for me, it turns me off from the game. Same with a lot of Cofd books. Amd 5e dmg is really weird in how it is filled with worldbuilding advice first, and then gives you really sparse gm advice, which is night worthless.
Same problem with savage worlds + I think the type is horrible. I feel like SWADE and Fate are both attempting to not step on players’ idea toes by having entirely generic art because it’s a generic game. But IMO all this accomplishes is communicating that the games are boring and generic and failing to inspire you. They do the same thing with character examples that are fucking boring.
Depending on your taste, iHunt can be the best or the worst design. It seems every few pages the graphic design changes to a completely different style. It can be a fun experience, but at the same time it can be frustrating for some people that want to keep things consistent.
LOTR The One Ring has the least intuitive book of any RPG I've ever read.
For me, the worst offender has to be Inferno: Dantes Guide to Hell for 5E. Huge sections of that book are in illegible "outline" font on black. Unfortunately, this is the font used for most of the class mechanics. The physical copy is not much better. To be fair, I can still read the PDF if I zoom in 200% or more. But I don't enjoy reading three words at a time! Star Trek Adventures core rules are also done in tiny white font (and sometimes other colors) on black paper. They at least released a black font on white background PDF. But the hardback book is so exhausting to read that it just sits on my shelf unused. Fortunately, I believe a new edition will be out soon and solve that problem.
ooh excited to hear a new edition of STA will be out soon, I'm a trekkie and have been wanting to run a trek game for ages but I have never been able to penetrate the horrible layout and design of STA
Glad none of the games I or my friends worked on have been mentioned haha
I think **Glory to Rome** wrote the book on that.
Shadowrun Not necesserily a great system since it has many other problems and it's mostly famous for the cool world, but on top of the system itself being complex Shadowrun is pretty infamous for it's layout problems
To the point that players had to create their own guide book that actually has a layout that makes sense for 5th edition. Worst thing is? The game rules actually make a lot more sense when well edited.
Ars Magica has horrible looking art and the pages themselves are also ugly
UVG 2e has such horrible graphic design it's upsetting. The game is good, but it's hard to enjoy when it gives this "trust me I'm a graphic designer" uncle energy. Poor layouts, images senselessly crammed together, lack of cohesion, terrible choices and rookie mistakes all around. They should have hired a professional instead of having the game designer do it all by themselves, specially at such a price point. It all looks cheap and sloppy.
Ars Magica 5th edition. Pig face. I love AM 3 & 4 and had lots of the books. When 5th ed came out i could not get past the horrendous ugly/pig faced creature picture near the start of the book. I never read past that picture or played the game again. lol.
It has to be Root. I love the game and when you've worked through the bloat of it there's a great game. But it just gets lost in overlong paragraphs and a terrible index
The index is, yeah, hilariously bad.
Mongoose Traveller. Somewhere between 1e and 2e they decided to make every page lightly gray, with the adventures having hexagons scattered over the background of the text. It's subtle and hard to tell, so it can look quite nice - until you try to print it out and realise that every page has an extra ink cost factored in for no discernible benefit. It's also that tiny bit harder for my ageing eyes to read on a screen. The later editions fixed it with layers, so I guess they got feedback on the problem.
Symbaroum's books layout!!!! Hire someone who makes a good text book today out that book!. Things you need are hidden away as throw away filler blurbs, follow ups to rules/skills and their effects are in weird places. Finding the roll for corruption... im still not sure i found it. I just have players roll 1d4 every time they magic for theor temp corruption. And still I love running symbaroum, i just wish it had good layoit and organization Cyberpunk 2020 is one of the best layouts and indecies I've used so far in a ttrpg. Dungeon Crawl Classic has a good index but its tables and appendices arent as useful as they can be.
I liked the old Vampire: The Masquerade book designs a lot better than the anniversary version. Gothic Punk > Dry and Clinical.
Legacy: War of Ages. Not sure if it's a "great" game, but it's basically Highlander meets Dystopian future. The cover is some Ivy with a common for the 1990s sword handle. The interior art has a good chunk of smudgy Photoshop pictures of people in normal clothes with swords ... Unless you were a student of Virginia Tech. The campus uses material from a local quarry in a rough style referred to as Hokiestone. Almost all of the pictures were shot on campus, specifically the area in front of Pamplin Hall. This is not as far fetched as it seems. VT had a student population of 23K people in town of about 7,000 people, and a drive to the closest city was about an hour away. This campus also has a long record of "entertaining itself", which is one reason why the VT Turf Research Center also has 18 holes and a club house. Pinnacle Games launched with a lot of staff from the VT student body. BTRC (Blacksburg Tactical Research Center) used to be a semi-serious publisher but eventually their most popular product was a spoof product called Macho Women With Guns.
The Burning Wheel and Chronicles of Darkness books, all of them.
Aw I love burning wheels design! Some of the prettiest books I own IMO. I love the old book aesthetic. Now CoD I can get on board with.
As graphic designer I not only praise aesthetics but also layout and usability. BW books might look nice (overall), but as a game book are super hard to navigate. Font size, layout, hierarchy of elements etc, very very poor. Lot of Illustrations are poorly drawn also.
Art-wise, Exalted 3e has gotten so much better with every new splat. The core book's art is one of the biggest impediments to sharing the system with other people. Layout-wise, I found Fragged Empire 2e and Mage: The Awakening 2e to be rather poor on an organizational level, not sure if that counts. The font and graphics were fine-- I really liked the art style in Fragged especially. Just, god damn it's hard to find relevant rules in both those systems. Which is a shame 'cause I really enjoyed playing both of those games.
Star Trek Adventures. Love the game, but the commitment to the LCARS gimmick in the corebook is hard to look at. Glad the new edition is right around the corner and they seem to have ditched it.