Pocket-sized Edition?

[Refplace]

My local FLGS has a mostly Third Edition but they have a small section for GURPS.
Like others I have gone mostly PDF, though I would like hard copy to pass around for certain materials.
Maybe a Character Maker series that was focused on building characters, very rules light but enough info to let a PC build a character type with GM help.

As for pocket books, The Fantasy Trip will have pocket editions. That might be a lead in to GURPS, at the least it will bump up SJG roleplaying visibility.

[voodoo54]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Even my massive (Source Comics and Games) FLGS has very little in the way of printed GURPS stuff. (And it's famous for being a big store.) The local little stores have either less or no GURPS. If nobody is carrying the big GURPS books, why would it carry a dinky one? Pathfinder is carried in Barnes & Noble, so it's a different deal.

I'm thinking maybe a lower price point. The Basic set Characters is $50 and Campaigns is $35 retail I believe. That might be too much for some people and retail stores, but a smaller paperback edition might work. And when I mean pocket book I mean the digest size similar to the pathfinder paperback like sjard mentioned earlier.

[voodoo54]

Originally Posted by Refplace

My local FLGS has a mostly Third Edition but they have a small section for GURPS.
Like others I have gone mostly PDF, though I would like hard copy to pass around for certain materials.
Maybe a Character Maker series that was focused on building characters, very rules light but enough info to let a PC build a character type with GM help.

As for pocket books, The Fantasy Trip will have pocket editions. That might be a lead in to GURPS, at the least it will bump up SJG roleplaying visibility.

Yeah I'm hoping TFT will bring more visibility onto SJ games and bring in more people to GURPS.

[tbone]

Pocket GURPS can and has been done! The Japanese 3e Basic Set by Kadokawa used the popular bunkobon pocket paperback size, about 15cm × 10.5cm (5.9" x 4.1", a lot smaller than pocket Pathfinder's 8.4" x 6.5").

I don't own a copy and don't know what tricks went into making that wee size possible, but sheer page size was part of the solution: 540 pages, or nearly double the 274 pages of the English 3e Basic Set.

That was back then, though. The Japanese 4e Characters and Campaigns use A4 size, with nearly identical page counts to the English. Too bad; it'd be fun to see those in super-thick pocket size, too.

[Apollonian]

Digest size would be good for more Powered By GURPS RPGs, like the old Hellboy RPG. I understand why SJG would be leery of more print projects at this time, though.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by voodoo54

I don’t mind PDFs, but I much rather have a hard copy in my hand to pass around the table and read without having to stare at a screen. Also seeing it in an actual store would grab my attention much more than maybe seeing it on social media. What are everyone else’s thoughts on this?

I would love to see more in print from SJG. I've been having great success using the DFRPG box set to bring new players into the fold, both young folks (middle schoolers) and faculty at my school. Oddly, even though it costs more, I've only seen people buy the physical box, never the digital version.

Once the boxes are unavailable, I'll try to pitch digital content harder, but PDFs can be tough for people who aren't already into gaming. They don't look appealing enough when printed and aren't easy to loan to people. My students mostly ask for games as gifts and their families want something they can buy at a store and wrap. (I know of four boxes sold to students at Christmas last year, three more for birthdays, and I'm hoping my local store can still get copies for the holidays this year.)

I get the market realities, though. So I'll just keep plugging away at trying to increase the customer base.

[Woodman]

The standard GURPS layout scales pretty well, if you have good eyesight, it can easily be scaled down to A5 (14x21cm). For years I used a self made A5 B/W combined hardcover of the 2 basic set books as a reference at the table.

[Apollonian]

Originally Posted by Woodman

The standard GURPS layout scales pretty well, if you have good eyesight, it can easily be scaled down to A5 (14x21cm). For years I used a self made A5 B/W combined hardcover of the 2 basic set books as a reference at the table.

That's a bit of an if, of course.

It would be nice to have a tablet-scaled (i.e., digest) layout e-version of all the GURPS books, but... the effort of redoing the layout would not be small, and I bet the return wouldn't be worth it.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Apollonian

It would be nice to have a tablet-scaled (i.e., digest) layout e-version of all the GURPS books, but... the effort of redoing the layout would not be small, and I bet the return wouldn't be worth it.

I'm not quite sure I understand the difficulty. My eyes have trouble with small type, even with glasses (I'm in my 69th year), but I have a lot of GURPS PDFs on an iPad, and I really don't have much trouble reading them. I take the Basic Set and the iPad to games I GM, and using the iPad isn't a problem. I don't quite know why the existing layout needs changing.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not quite sure I understand the difficulty. My eyes have trouble with small type, even with glasses (I'm in my 69th year), but I have a lot of GURPS PDFs on an iPad, and I really don't have much trouble reading them. I take the Basic Set and the iPad to games I GM, and using the iPad isn't a problem. I don't quite know why the existing layout needs changing.

It's nice to have it at a reasonable size of font and not have to pan around a lot. Unless I'm reading off my Surface Pro 3 (which isn't a real tablet but plays one on TV) I definitely have to zoom and pan.

I'm not farsighted, I'm nearsighted, along with astigmatism. My experience with bad vision is likely pretty different. Of course, based on genetics I will shortly be adding farsightedness to the mix and just basically have a new prescription every month:P