Decay of Paper (and similar things)

[The Colonel]

Bear in mind that parchment, despite rumours to the contrary, isn't paper but leather and has a correspondingly longer lifespan, particularly since inks from the parchment era tended to be corrosive and prone to burning the script into the page.

[BMR]

In the rules I propse, handwaving is certainly acceptable. I often just have some generic suggestions and leave the GM to decide it in speech rather than numbers (these secret documents have been left in a moldy trailer home in the hills outside Seattle? They are illegible! Take them to a print specialist to analyze the pen tip impressions that might be left in the page).

I would like some basic rules and rates per conditions for those who need it. If they don't already exist in the books or in somebody's house rules, I could put some together myself.

[panton41]

Newsprint on the side of the road in a temperate climate, probably until the next rain. Newer books in a modern library with some maintenance by librarians, 50-75 years before they stop circulating and maybe 100+ before they go into an limited access archive. (Many municipal libraries sell outdated books long before then, sooner for science/tech books, longer for fiction and I bet circulation records come into play at some point.) Parchment in a desert cave hidden in clay jars well away from the entrance, thousands of years.

Assuming a library, books tend to be repaired if they're damaged if it's worth the time, effort and money. For example an expensive book that's difficult if not impossible to replace might be lovingly and expensively repaired, while a mass market novel might simply be sold/thrown away/replaced. For that matter many libraries repair mass market paperbacks (sometimes proactively by doing it before they even begin circulation) by replacing the flimsy paper covers with hard covers and sometimes damaged hard covers get a generic plain cover with the title imprinted on the spine.

[Fish]

I would be hard pressed to invent a single set of consistent rules to encompass all those materials we call "paper," in all the environments where paper can be found. I wonder if it is worth the effort.

A book might survive for centuries, but the pages are pressed against one another; only the edges are exposed. A set of scrolls of equal content made of the same "paper" material has correspondingly more surface area and may degrade faster in the same conditions. But paper doesn't always mean wood pulp; it might mean some other material, such as papyrus, hemp, cotton, silk, or light leather.

And then again, there's a difference between how long the material can physically survive, and how probable it is that those conditions are maintained over centuries. There's rats, fire, theft, war, vandalism, and the editing pens of revisionist conquerors, just to name a few.

The ancients knew this, though. Important documents were duplicated and transcribed. Must these paper props in your game be the originals?

[capnq]

Originally Posted by Fish

A book might survive for centuries, but the pages are pressed against one another; only the edges are exposed. A set of scrolls of equal content made of the same "paper" material has correspondingly more surface area and may degrade faster in the same conditions.

Wouldn't that depend on how tightly the scroll was rolled? ISTM only the outermost and innermost layers would be affected, and if the scroll is wrapped around a core, the innermost wouldn't be exposed, either.

[Fish]

Sure, if the OP wants to try to design special rules for care and storage of scrolls. I'm not sure that I see the point of it, because there are simply so many variables as to make any such model a crap shoot.