Report To The Stakeholders

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Works for me. I have a 22" main monitor in landscape mode and a 19" secondary in portrait (which is perfect for PDF viewing!). They're gaming-quality hardware backed by a gaming-quality graphics card, so the image is bright, flicker-free, and not prone to annoying aliasing or artifacting. I have 48-year-old eyes with really terrible vision even with eyeglasses (sorry to briefly digress into the forbidden topic!), yet I can work on PDFs all day without difficulty. I don't especially buy "low ease-of-use" arguments here.

I have read a popular engineering article discussing how the best electronic displays have about half or a quarter the pixel density of the cheapest kinds of printing, and that programmers who work on rendering fonts and pictures apply a lot of ingenuity to pretend otherwise. Until we start seeing screens with resolutions like 3072 x 2148, I have no trouble understanding why people would rather read long documents or ones with lots of illustrations on paper. So as long as SJ Games publishes books and booklets which are meant to look pretty on the paper which they are increasingly unlikely to ever touch, this will be an issue for some readers. But gamers clearly like pretty books, and are reluctant to pay as much as books with similar size and paper quality and art density normally cost.

Edit: Its also worth saying that its not reasonable to expect roleplayers to buy an expensive display and graphics card, and that those displays are unlikely to have significantly more pixels than a typical one. Again, programmers are ingenious at pretending that computer displays have enough resolution to read and view photos off, but right now the underlying technologies have serious problems.

[Kuroshima]

Discussion moved to its own thread (Print vs screen resolutuion, and why you can't directly compare them [POD]), as per Phil Reed's request.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by philreed

NOTE: Discussion of eyesight and age should be taken elsewhere. Please help us keep the discussion focused on the report.

Again, discussion goes elsewhere. From this post on I will ask our moderators to delete posts about eyesight and age. This includes monitor resolutions. Please take this discussion somewhere else.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by Magic_Octopus

The quality of GURPS writing and editing is the best in industry that I have encountered. I remember sometime ago reading that Steve was very dedicated to quality. I think this attitude is reflected in the quality of the releases and the health of the company.

By the way, I think that we should be very cautious about leaning on this old boast. Not that the quality of GURPS writing and editing has in any way diminished in recent years (and I remain proud of my work on the line, when it finally gets out the door), but I'm not sure that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up.

It may well be that GURPS has made me instinctively selective about my purchases, and I don't actually buy that much RPG material these days, but what I have bought recently from other companies has been more than competently written and edited, and where relevant researched, to a level comparable with the GURPS standard (and frankly, usually prettier than most current GURPS production). And it's not like GURPS is the home of densely researched historical supplements these days; we still get a few, but, for example, Ars Magica may well have generated many more words of fetishistically researched historically-based RPG material in recent years than GURPS.

In other words, leading with the "GURPS for text quality" line may be in danger of looking out of date as well as a little bit smug in 2015.

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

In other words, leading with the "GURPS for text quality" line may be in danger of looking out of date as well as a little bit smug in 2015.

Agreed. There are several great publishers out there producing wonderful products. It's no longer the eighties or nineties, and things have changed dramatically in the last four decades of RPGs.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

In other words, leading with the "GURPS for text quality" line may be in danger of looking out of date as well as a little bit smug in 2015.

In a world where Robin Laws and Ken Hite don't always write for SJ Games I'm going to go out on a limb and say it is 100% untrue for someone to write that: 'The quality of GURPS writing and editing is the best in industry that I have encountered' unless they don't read Ken Hite or Robin Laws in which case I point out to them that they are amongst the many very good authors out there who you are just ignoring.

Case in point DD and FS2 are in the same high quality band as anything SJ Games ever produces.

(Plus they are hardback, colour full of art, huge etc)

There is a lot of hyperbole from fans in this thread.

[pestigor]

Gurps is a very precise system and judging by the 100+ people on the Gurps forum i see on every single day the precision is part and parcel of what most Gurps fan want.

That level of rules precision requires a lot of labor. In games that have a lot looser structure the GM can adjust things on the fly and as narrative systems seem to be so free form with their rules this isn't much of a problem. In a system like Gurps a GM adjustment needs to be carefully done if the game is being run with the usual precision of a Gurps game (obviously one can run a free form version of Gurps but most of the fans on these forums seem to favor a precise rule set).

In other words making Gurps "GO" is expensive. Maybe Sean and PK are wringing their hands and belaboring a lot of stuff but as far as I'm concerned this is how I like my Gurps, as precise an well engineered as possible and if that means I have to get it in a "non-ideal" format, so be it as their are so few games with the level of detail that allows me to run a Dune game, Blakes7 game or a Thomas Covenant game with the crunch that I like. YMMV

Sorry but this is on an iPad. And I'm not trying to put the stink on anyone here. If I did, I'm sorry

[pestigor]

To be clear, by precision I mean: as precise as possible while still being playable and fun.

[apoc527]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

By the way, I think that we should be very cautious about leaning on this old boast. Not that the quality of GURPS writing and editing has in any way diminished in recent years (and I remain proud of my work on the line, when it finally gets out the door), but I'm not sure that the rest of the industry hasn't caught up.

It may well be that GURPS has made me instinctively selective about my purchases, and I don't actually buy that much RPG material these days, but what I have bought recently from other companies has been more than competently written and edited, and where relevant researched, to a level comparable with the GURPS standard (and frankly, usually prettier than most current GURPS production). And it's not like GURPS is the home of densely researched historical supplements these days; we still get a few, but, for example, Ars Magica may well have generated many more words of fetishistically researched historically-based RPG material in recent years than GURPS.

In other words, leading with the "GURPS for text quality" line may be in danger of looking out of date as well as a little bit smug in 2015.

I don't know, I find GURPS products to continue to be heads and shoulders above basically every other RPG publisher. Something said earlier by Kromm also hits home: how many games are mechanically sound, let alone well-edited and well-researched? I don't care if you have a gorgeous, full-color hardback with glossy pages and beautiful artwork if the *game* within those pages is a broken piece of junk. I don't care if you produce 100 new printed supplements per year if those supplements are full of typos, incomprehensible tables, inconsistent rules and missing critical information.

I literally bought into GURPS 4th Edition because a rival publisher failed to include the weight of equipment *in the equipment book!*

And Kickstarter is no guarantee of success or a panacea for the gaming industry. For one, almost every RPG Kickstarter I've bought into has been months and months late. Though I feel confident that my books will arrive, they will be almost 18 months late. It's an odd industry where that's still deemed a "success."

So, while I feel your frustration as an author whose book has yet to hit the streets, I think SJ Games's attention to detail and quality-control are still top-of-the-line and an industry-best.

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by apoc527

how many games are mechanically sound, let alone well-edited and well-researched?

Most of them, so far as I can see.