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Thesaurasaurus
Feb 15, 2010

"Send in Boxbot!"

Editing RPG books is really an exercise in technical writing and, to quote one particularly memorable phrasing from an old Exalted thread, "most professionals aren't willing to accept payment in cartoon moths flying out of a wallet." So there's that barrier, coupled with the difficulty in understanding the readers' needs you mention. I wonder - how difficult would it be to put together a template for gamebooks? Ideally, something ready-to-use with PDF creation software. You could incorporate basic stylistic guidelines and best practices into the template itself - page numbers on lower-left corner, flags that make sure headers and at least a significant amount of text body are always on the same page, a button for quickly flagging text to go into an auto-compiled index, word-wrap that plays nice with art, etc.

It might sound like I'm unfairly ragging on White Wolf/Onyx Path here, but these are honestly problems I've seen in Dungeons and Dragons up until Fourth Edition, so I'm hazarding a guess that a lot of it is just cargo-cult design. Which is exactly my point - hasn't tabletop gaming been around for long enough to start having general rules and standards?

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