[Ed4] Player's Guide Feedback
Posted: Tue Feb 24, 2015 5:47 am
Since the Player's Guide is now released and available in eBook form, I thought it would be appropriate to open a new thread with feedback to the final product.
First of all, congratulations to FASA for releasing their first of hopefully many new Earthdawn products under the Fourth Edition line and for successfully starting to roll out the advertized Kickstarter products. I hope that the book and the upcoming ones will sell well enough for you to carry on the line beyond the first couple of announced books (I am actually looking forward to the one that is the farthest off - the Questor's source book). Good luck to you on your subsequent releases.
In this first post, I don't have a lot to say, mainly some small feedback / question [after rereading what I typed, I realize that some of this might sound rather negative, but rest assured that it is definitely not meant to be, just think of everything not mentionede as being perfect ]:
1)
The PDF has the colored pages right at the beginning. Is this placement the same for the printed book or will they be in the middle as usually the case due to how the binding process works? If not, I'd rather have them at the end of the book together with the character sheet.
2)
This following is definitely a personal preference and I don't want to step on any artist's toes (after all any of them draws much better than I can ever hope to do), but some of the art looks really out of place from a style perspective in my opinion. Especially the art for the weaponsmith (and other images with the same styling) look strange, as if they were drafts waiting to be refined into the final piece of art.
3)
Layout. I realize that it is too late for the Player's Guide, but I really hope that you could revise some of your current layout deciscions. I think some of my issues could already be handled by a different DP system. To give you some context, I come from a TeX/LaTeX background where these issues are handled automatically, but I understand that this is likely not the best tool for creative writers. As for the smaller issues, they are uneven page endings and lots of one word lines. Sometimes the page is filled right to the bottom and sometimes there remains a fair amount of empty space. This is perfectly if a new section is statring, but otherwise there are techniques to slightly increase/decrease spacings between paragraphs even out the the page filling. The same goes for one word lines where the last word of a paragraph is moved to the next line, there are techniques to prevent this. This makes for a very interrupted reading experience due to the big first line indentions.
Another layout issue is with regards to spell descriptions. I would move success levels and extra threds up so that all of the defining data entries for each spell is in one place (and this also looks nicer as all of the indented entries would be on the top of the spell description - and you might want to consider retaining an extra indention for subsequent lines when e.g. the extra threads description requires more than one line). Moreover, why are spell names indented and in italics? Shouldn't they be in the same font and unindented just like talent and skill names?
First of all, congratulations to FASA for releasing their first of hopefully many new Earthdawn products under the Fourth Edition line and for successfully starting to roll out the advertized Kickstarter products. I hope that the book and the upcoming ones will sell well enough for you to carry on the line beyond the first couple of announced books (I am actually looking forward to the one that is the farthest off - the Questor's source book). Good luck to you on your subsequent releases.
In this first post, I don't have a lot to say, mainly some small feedback / question [after rereading what I typed, I realize that some of this might sound rather negative, but rest assured that it is definitely not meant to be, just think of everything not mentionede as being perfect ]:
1)
The PDF has the colored pages right at the beginning. Is this placement the same for the printed book or will they be in the middle as usually the case due to how the binding process works? If not, I'd rather have them at the end of the book together with the character sheet.
2)
This following is definitely a personal preference and I don't want to step on any artist's toes (after all any of them draws much better than I can ever hope to do), but some of the art looks really out of place from a style perspective in my opinion. Especially the art for the weaponsmith (and other images with the same styling) look strange, as if they were drafts waiting to be refined into the final piece of art.
3)
Layout. I realize that it is too late for the Player's Guide, but I really hope that you could revise some of your current layout deciscions. I think some of my issues could already be handled by a different DP system. To give you some context, I come from a TeX/LaTeX background where these issues are handled automatically, but I understand that this is likely not the best tool for creative writers. As for the smaller issues, they are uneven page endings and lots of one word lines. Sometimes the page is filled right to the bottom and sometimes there remains a fair amount of empty space. This is perfectly if a new section is statring, but otherwise there are techniques to slightly increase/decrease spacings between paragraphs even out the the page filling. The same goes for one word lines where the last word of a paragraph is moved to the next line, there are techniques to prevent this. This makes for a very interrupted reading experience due to the big first line indentions.
Another layout issue is with regards to spell descriptions. I would move success levels and extra threds up so that all of the defining data entries for each spell is in one place (and this also looks nicer as all of the indented entries would be on the top of the spell description - and you might want to consider retaining an extra indention for subsequent lines when e.g. the extra threads description requires more than one line). Moreover, why are spell names indented and in italics? Shouldn't they be in the same font and unindented just like talent and skill names?