I’ve been working on drawing a monster a day. I’ve been writing my entries into the monster manual. I’ve put them up on my house rule draft wiki, and they looked OK. So I decided to put them in my “Referee Guide” to be. Using LaTeX and the Tufte class, after having established that I no longer really liked the B/X lookalikes. But, somehow, this doesn’t seem to be working like I want it to.
The monster section starts on page 9 of the Referee Guide.
What am I doing wrong? Are the pictures in the margin a bad idea? Less bold? Whitespace to separate paragraphs? No indented first lines for reference manuals? More text in the margins? Is it just a question of page breaks? Stuff like whitespace to the left of the giant bee doesn’t really work when using the illustration in the margin. Now the bee just looks smaller. Gaaah!
Perhaps I just have to power through these periods of doubt. Use the Dark Side of the Force to push through!
#Halberds and Helmets #Writing #Typography
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Yeah, less bold, maybe. The heaviness of the illustrations throws off the balance of the page. But it’s not terrible. Power through, and revisit the issue later.
– Paul Gorman 2016-10-15
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I like bold to highlight stuff, but perhaps I’m just used to writing for the web. On paper, it looks weird. When I wrote the Caverns of Slime, I also used a lot of bold and my editor stripped it all.
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-15
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The classic typography person in me always tries to make do with italics first. Except on handouts for students...
– Peter Fröhlich 2016-10-15
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I feel that in books made for scanning, bold works much better than italics. Italics are good for emphasis when reading a linear text. I guess I’m still influenced by stuff I read in the early days about text being easy to *scan*. Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web. Is this not good advice for writing RPG books? I feel like I want to say yes, but then I feel like it doesn’t look good when printed and I’m conflicted.
Concise, SCANNABLE, and Objective: How to Write for the Web
Looking at later articles, it seems that the Nielsen Group still writes with a lot of bold (on the web) and I like it. The Roots of Minimalism in Web Design The question is: is writing a RPG book similar to writing for the web: written to be scanned? I want to say yes...
The Roots of Minimalism in Web Design
– Alex Schroeder 2016-10-15
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Interesting. Well, if you take B/X as your example, **bold** is popular there... But then so is ALL CAPS on occasion! 🙂
– Peter Fröhlich 2016-10-16