Format Doormat

This post serves two purposes. 1) To demonstrate how my broken mind works and doesn't work. 2) To talk about a little passion project eating my broken brain. Read this post only if you want to be subjected to me meandering and ranting about mostly nothing important.

Formats. Sizes to print your book. They vex me. Always have.

See, I come from the 80s-90s small press scene. In 1987 I partnered with pals to make our first comic zine Fast Lane and we did it on my friend's dad's work Xerox machine on a Saturday when nobody was there. We understood that 8.5x11 was the standard paper size, so we made our book fit 8.5x11.

It was easy. I even drew the pages of my comics on 8.5x11 typing paper, so when we made copies it was as easy as laying the original in the machine and pushing the print button. We fiddled around until we got the front and backs correct, ran off 50 copies of each, then laid them all out on the floor to collate. Then we put a couple of staples in them and BAM. Comic book magic.

Next issue we decided to go with that sexy "digest" look. All that means is we did it half the size as before and arranged the pages side by side to fit on a sheet of paper. Same process, just a little bit fiddlier. Since 4 pages were connected by a single sheet of paper, you had to be careful to get the order correct. But we did it and it was fun.

On into the 90s I generally worked alone. I made my first mini-comics, as I understood the term. If our first book was full size and our second was half size, then these minis were quarter size. You can make an 8 page mini on a single sheet of paper. There are tons and tons of tutorials about this online.

4.25 x 5 inch book

This is the fiddliest of the standard versions of the zine sizes because each sheet of paper is 8 pages of your book, so the arrangement is crucial. You can't just go 1-2-3-4, you gotta make sure 1 flips over to be 2 and so forth. Easy to get fucking confused unless you're a right genius at spacial thinking, which I am not.

Anyway... there's also the classic comic book format. In the USA, currently, that means 6.625 x 10.25 inches. If weird numbers bother you like they do me, you can just call it 7x11 or 6.5x10 and be done with it. The slight difference won't mean shit.

The reason this format matters to me is because it's what comic books look like. And I want to make comic books. I have made proper comic books... and I want to keep making them. So I fixate on this. I worry that any comic I draw that doesn't fit that format can't fit into a comic book at some nebulous point in the future.

For example, I did some comics for The Merry Mushmen and Tuesday Knight Games and none of those are US format. If I reprint them on my own at some point, they won't look quite right on a floppy page.

It's a trivial thing to be bothered by. After all, Europe and Japan have entirely different comic book formats and I'm not worried about them am I? But hey, it's my nostalgia we're talking about here.

Anyway... I'm thinking of this RPG series in mini format. My idea was to do this series of books at 4.25x5.5 and roughly 16 or 24 pages each (minis have to be in increments of 8 pages*). I can do this, but it's a pain in the ass to format so someone can print it from a PDF. I'm not aware of a good way to do it so that you can read the PDF like a proper book and also print it like a mini. I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying I don't know that secret sauce and it sounds like a lot of work, man.

Which leads me to the good ole workhorse of small press publishing: the digest. A sheet of paper folded in half. PDF brochure printing handles this automatically like a champ. It's a super common format, a nice pocket size, and is easy to set up. So I should probably go that route. It just makes the most sense.

But those sexy little minis... they call to me. That fiddly work you put into them can be fun. It's a bit novel to have a RPG book series that's tiny. (See how I talk myself into spirals?)

Yeah, so... that's where my brain is today. Oh, what's the game? It's just a simple micro game system for funsies. Something I can fit in 16 mini pages. Then crank out some adventures and shit for it. Just a silly idea I have. I have a lot of them.

*Well they don't HAVE to be. You can make a 4 page flat repeated twice on sheet so that you're at 4 page increments... but it means you gotta make 2 copies of the book each time. You can't just print 1 copy.

RPGs in Comic Format

I'm working on an RPG that will be published in comic book format. Probably put the PDF on DriveThru and the physical book on Lulu (they print comics too). I've seen other RPG books in this format, such as the wonderful awesome Mortzengersturm. What others are out there?

I like this format for this particular game idea because it encourages more art, in color, and it also encourages using and abusing the physical book at the table. Bend it, write on it, even tear pages out if you want. Because the price point is at least somewhat lower than other forms of printing.

Of course I could push that envelope more by making it black and white. You can print BW comics pretty damn cheap. But I kinda want this to be colorful as fuck.

What's Up With All the Digests?

Every time I turn around I hear someone say that digest or A5 books are superior for gaming. In this mini-rant I am going to disagree. But the caveat is that I don't dislike digest. I'm not arguing that digest is a bad format for a game. I'm just arguing that it is not inherently superior. And, naturally, the force of this argument is going to depend on how you use your game books at the table.

I am a pretty traditional Judge. I use a screen. I keep my shit out of sight. It is my abode. So I like to have my primary game book lying open on the table before me, usually with various sheets of paper and dice on it. I can't do that with a digest. I have to hold a digest in one hand if I want to reference something. And that sucks because when I run meatspace games I stand up and use a lot of body language. So what I end up doing is just making copies of the relevant pages and lying them on the table instead.

I am not young. I will turn 50 in 8 months (kill me now please). My eyes are not great. I do not enjoy reading tiny font. Now, since many people who are into OSR-type games are also not totally young, most designers tend to make their font sizes reasonable even in digests. But sometimes you get those examples of a game that was clearly formatted for full size but printed at half size. Cue the strained eyes.

Fuck... I'm guilty of this too. Some Black Pudding pages were made for full size. Did you look at A Trolling We Will Go in the new issue? I apologize if I hurt your eyes. I drew that on a big canvas.

So for these reasons I don't believe smaller sizes are automatically better. I am fine with them, so this isn't as much of an angry rant as I was worried it would be. It just irks me when I hear people smack talk full size RPG books. "They're so heavy!" "I can't lug all that around!" etc. The vast majority of RPG books have always been full size. Did you spend your entire gaming career being pissed off because you had large books to deal with? I doubt it.

Anyway... make your books whatever size you wish. It's all good. Do weird formats too. Those are neat. But don't feed me that bullshit about digests being better than full size because that is some bogus nonsense, bucko.

(Now to work on my next 6x9 game book!)