Design Room: Star Frontiers

It was one of the best half-a-games of the early 1980's. I say half-a-games because this is a science-fiction roleplaying game that was released without starship rules. We ended up cribbing starships from Space Opera and Traveller for our games until the Knight Hawks rule set came out, and by that time the damage was done and we were left with a mess of a shared universe experience.

This was one of the great d00 TSR roleplaying games back in the day, and it overshadowed everything else in the TSR d00 library, like Top Secret, Gangbusters, and others. It was also one of the industry's first real conscious breaks from the Star Wars behemoth, with a believable and complete sci-fi world that had nothing to do with Star Wars at all. Star Frontiers is science-fiction gaming's Greyhawk, an original universe that let characters explore and have fun without having an Empire or Jedis breath down their necks at every turn.

It was refreshing in a way, as you spun up a cool space explorer, grabbed a laser pistol, and began blasting aliens. You got to play with computers, robots, and technology, so it was a break from +1 swords and magic wands for a while. What's not to love about good, simple fun? Let's break this game down and look at it's design today and see where it hit, missed, and stood out from other sci-fi games of the era.

The Game System

The d00 game system of Star Frontiers was clean, fast, and it worked. Characters were almost dirt simple, a collection of eight ability scores (rolled in pairs) and a couple starting skills, a race, and some gear - and that was it, you were ready to go. Compared to some of today's college-textbook level character design systems this was great, and part of me still wonders why roleplaying games in this day and age have to be so damn complicated when it comes to character design. Yes, you want to provide options to players to design the character they want to play, and that can be done simply. But when you build these towers of point-design babel where you are worrying if you should put one point into basket weaving, and how many points you want to put into underwater endurance just takes a point design way to darn far.

Sometimes I did wish for a little better character customization in this game. We ended up adding 80 or so skills to make up for that, as the base game only allowed characters to excel at ability scores or skills. If you were charismatic, you had a high personality score and that's it. Same thing for leadership, intuition, and any of the other scores - those were your design and customization choices.

The game, like many other d00 games, started to break down once you had scores that started moving towards 100 and higher (with a +10% per skill level up to skill level 6). There was a -80 difficulty modifier, which technically supported scores above 100, but after a while, rolling against a 130% STR score became a futile effort of mostly auto-success skill rolls, and the system started to break down. It was fun with scores in the 40-80 range, and outside of that the dicing system started to break.

Mind you, this is a roll-under game too, as rolling high for skill checks was bad. Despite some designer's negative feelings to roll-under games these days, I still like roll-under games and it is not terribly hard to shift your perspective so you can see low rolls (for skills and tasks) as good, and high rolls (for damage) as good.

Overall, this was a fun game system, and it held up and was fast and furious action at the tabletop. Not a lot of game systems can say that nowadays, when they send you spiraling in a rules reference nose dive through a 600 page rule book to find out the difference between a "stunned" and "dazed" condition is because some game designer never asked the question "do we have too many conditions?"

You see this "fear of speaking up" in so many game designs nowadays, where game designers work in committees, and nobody wants to upset anybody else and get their cool rules sub-system cut because the game needs to be streamlined. Good game design means saying "no" to 90% of the crap that creeps into a game, and keeping things simple. Star Frontiers is a good example of a design that had a strong core concept, and a designer who valued keeping it streamlined and straightforward.

The Game World

While we liked the base Star Frontiers setting and the classic Zebulon modules, one of the huge pieces that was missing was a universe guide. They gave you names of worlds and a simple map, and that's it. I would have loved to have a star system generator, or even a random sector generator like Traveller had, but the game provided little in the way of creating new adventure locals and starmaps. You were supposed to make everything up as you went, but I wanted more referee support for designing worlds and places in space to explore.

Our game first became stagnant on the base map, and then it blew up and over expanded with all of our add on starmaps. We never really achieved a great balance to new worlds and making things interesting, and this remains one of my great "do over" wishes in my gaming career. We expanded early too, so we were using the spaceship rules from other games to explore the universe, so our star system maps went from 2d to full Space Opera 3d with 100s of LY of XYZ 3d distance, and then back down to 2d XY when we realized we didn't want all that math and complexity. By then, the damage was done, and our established star map was a mess.

Part of the problem was not having starships at the game's launch. Another part of this is that we were expecting Star Wars type adventure and exploration ships, and when Knight Hawks finally launched, they delivered ships that were closer to 2001 and NASA than TIE fighters and the Millennium Falcon. We couldn't escape the gravitational pull of Star Wars on what starships should be, so the more primitive starships with outboard engines (aka Star Trek) and no artificial gravity felt like a shock to us, and also we had been using other game's starships, so we completely ignored the Knight Hawks aesthetics and kept with our original borrowed designs.

Technology

Space Opera was our AD&D to the D&D game world of Star Frontiers for us. We borrowed so much from Space Opera, weapons, tech, sensors, hand computers, vehicles, heavy weapons, and so much more we were really playing a Star Frontiers rules version of Space Opera. We were kids, so we didn't know better, and everything was good. It was just more cool stuff to play with, so we dove in and had fun. Some ships from Traveller showed up and those were cool too.

You discount that as you get older and become a purist and a lore snob. When you think about it, kids don't care if you have light sabers in Minecraft, those are cool and they want them there. Does it matter that light sabers have no place or role or history in the so-called "world" of Minecraft?  No, not to a young mind, and that's how we were.

Later, yes, we did become purists and rules snobs, but we left our old choices in our game and lived with them. There is something to be said for tradition too.

That said, there is a lot of cool tech and gear in Star Frontiers to play with, and even a Car Wars inspired vehicle combat system that was fun, They had this strange hang up where they kept calling "lasers" as "blasters" or lasers and tried to make the same thing be both. Or perhaps it was the pull of Star Wars again and people wanted blasters, and the designer wanted "lasers". Why not just call them "blasters" and be done with it? You can see the hard sci-fi versus fantasy sci-fi conflict in this game, and it is a strange mix of genres.

The game wants to be "hard sci fi" (more so than Traveller, especially when Knight Hawks was introduced), but the players don't really care and want to have fun, at least in our experience. This leads to fantasy elements creeping in, like sci-fi melee weapons, flying monkeys, and alien worms with hypnosis. The game and designers could never make up in their minds, and it remains as a strange mix between fantasy and hard sci-fi. It is in a way sort of like AD&D being a mix between gritty and high fantasy, this was trying to be a catch-all sci-fi game.

In my feeling, Star Frontiers never got to a fantasy sci-fi level, and it remained as a Traveller+ sort of game. With our Space Opera modifications, it got there and it played how we wanted it to play. It was sort of a quandary with us where Space Opera had the better gear and starships, and Star Frontiers had the better rules.

Metaplot

Beyond the Volturnus series, the game just had a standard "bug eyed aliens" metaplot that worked better for security and war types of games. The Volturnus series was an incredible joy ride, and it remains a classic sci-fi planetary exploration and survival sandbox to this day. The game never (in our experience) got beyond that series of modules, while there were some interesting one-offs later, those felt too tied to Knight Hawks style technology for us to enjoy as much as we did the first Volturnus modules. I can remember counting the days until the next one of these modules were released, and improvising adventures on the small planetary map for all the trapped sci-fi explorers until it came out.

For us, when Volturnus was over, the game took on a military turn, and we never got back that cool "planetary explorer" vibe and feeling. You couldn't strand your adventurers on a new planet every time, and the game was waning by then and there we no new sources of fun, so we moved on to Car Wars and then Battletech. It was still our go-to sci-fi game, and chasing the Sathars became to focus of later games.

If the game were just Volturnus and you couldn't "go back home" and had to make your home there I'm feeling this would have been a stronger game. As it is, for us, when the characters went back home the game felt done and over with, pirates and aliens became enemies. There is something to be said about having a great start and basing the game from that point - if you had to explore the systems around the planet and make your home among the stars from there that would have been very compelling for us, and felt like a "fresh start" rather than saying goodbye to the world, leaving it to the mega-corporations, and wondering why no other planet in the universe was that 'fun' to explore.

Mega-Corporations

Speaking of mega-corporations, one of the lamest expansions to this game (for us) was the Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space supplement, where TSR forced the "color bar" chart of Marvel Superheroes onto the game, changed all the rules, drew weapons with the worst Apple IIe or Commodore 64 art I have ever seen, and ripped up the game's story for some sort of Shadowrun inspired "corporate wars" plot after a galaxy wide "blue plague" apocalyptic event. The game became too much about what the game's mega-corporations were doing, and it felt like every time you discovered a new world, not far behind you were multi-national mining and development interests ready to make any of your discoveries or small mining outposts irrelevant with mass development - and worse, they would come in and start some proxy war over the new system with mercenaries and sabotage.

It felt like you couldn't compete anymore on the small scale, and you had to join or own a mega-corporation to compete. We didn't incorporate these changes, but the pressures were still there. The days of setting up a small mining operation and pulling molybdenum a couple hundred kilograms at a time from an asteroid and netting 50,000 credits were over, and any sense of small scale adventure were gobbled up by multinational corporations, banks, and shady armies of mercenaries.

It's like these space people had no ethics, and Star Law would never bust a space mega-corp CEO for running a mercenary army of space pirates in a far-off system. It became the norm in the game, and we felt Shadowrun's influence have too strong of a pull on a game that was supposed to be about space explorers and blasting things with laser pistols.

At that point, the last heroes left in the game for us were the military, and the space explorers part of the game waned as a backdrop. So our game shifted into the "protect civilization" mode of fighting off the "bug eyed aliens" and "space pirates" and an occasional "deal with corruption" plots. Yes, it became like the interplanetary political and military drama of Star Wars and there it stayed.

Character Types and Skills

One thing we loved about the game were the strong support for all types of character skills and "adventure time" - as every skill was important. You could play a medic and be needed on an adventure, along with being a scientist character or even a psio-sociologist. Really? You can play a space psychiatrist and contribute to the group's success? Yes, everyone was involved. The game also smashed the "space mechanics have no fun" trope that even the later Star Wars RPG from West End fell into, as a technician, your skills were needed, and you drove the vehicles and fixed the team's laser rifles and the party was good.

Of course, everyone had a couple military skills so they could shoot guns and hit things with electro swords, and those were cheap enough that even the medic could by a couple levels of beam weapons and get in on the alien-blasting fun.

Part of the success of the Star Frontiers skill system were all the detailed subskills laid out in the rules, and all the cool stuff you could do with them. In Traveller, so what you have Medic+1, you can't do anything cool with it beyond sit in the medbay. In Star Frontiers, you can treat poisons, heal wounds, do surgery, deal with alien diseases, and all sorts of cool subskills that referees could use to design challenges for adventures. This is a great example of the rules helping shape the challenges in the game world, and it remains a great part of the original game's design.

We made the mistake of adding dead-head and single-use skills that did nothing special (art skill, motorcycle skill), and that watered the game's focus down. The original skills are nice and tightly-focused, and they are detailed enough that the cover 90% of what you need.

Except crime skill and law skill, which we added to support our Star Law campaign, and we added subskills for those that did forensics, lock picking, forgery, and other cool stuff. Some of the skills we added were good, and a lot of the others were filler.

You Can Still Play This

There is a site out there, http://www.starfrontiers.com/, where you can download PDF copies of the rules, and it is in a sort of fan-supported version of the game. This was done with the blessing with TSR and it still continues today, as far as I know this understanding continues.

The Future?

Star Frontiers was a product of its time, where television shows such as Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica filled the airwaves, and that sort of heroic and noble space adventurer was the ideal. Today, things seem like a darker world mood, and our Dark Knight and the moral ambiguity of Game of Thrones makes the freewheeling space adventure game seem a little quaint and old fashioned. Of course in a game like this you can have bug-eyed evil space aliens, but in today's sensibilities you need to understand what the evil space aliens are angry about and send space ambassadors to endlessly discuss treaties and letters of understanding.

Sathar = Orc, got it?

Good.

That said, I'm not sure they could do another space game like this nowadays without writing a 600 page rulebook and making the game so expansive and rules heavy we would need a shelf of rules encyclopedias to sort it out. The tone would change too, to something darker and more nefarious like genetic manipulation and mega-corps, and the original charm would be lost.

Sometimes yes, I like my games simple and fun, and that spirit of adventure built into the game with no moral ambiguity or shades of gray. These are the heroes, here are some blasters, let's hop on our spaceship and get out there and save the universe, one planet at a time.

That, to me, is Star Frontiers.

Pathfinder World Design: Realms of Proteus

Check this out:

http://realmsofproteus.blogspot.com/

I am doing an interesting world design this summer in another blog for Pathfinder, a sort of Hunger Games meets Matrix style dystopic future where players of the "fantasy game" are trapped in a virtual world/fantasy game until they can reach level 20 and escape - with perma-death and no logging out. Think of this as a world gone mad that is using a virtual reality game to select the world's leaders and you are close to what I envision it to be.

I am doing a post every other day describing the world, and it is a cool design which breaks apart all of Pathfinder's books and expansions and gives each one a place in the world. You can play with as little books or as many of your collection as you want, everything has a place, and there are some strange goings on inside the world as well that open up possibilities for intrigue and dark conflicts.

It is really a game? I love the "sinister forces" angle to this project where the players of a virtual fantasy MMO can't get out and have to deal with demons and other sinister forces that are possibly real.

I am enjoying writing this, and I am doing the entire blog as if I were a survivor of the game giving new players hints on what to expect, so there is a fun fiction angle to the blog as well that I love doing. You have to read it from the start though, since it is a complete story, so make sure you catch up on the posts if you are interested.

Enjoy!

Free and Open Means Community

Being a creator, it is difficult to be creative in games which do not have open licenses for third-party content. This was a problem I had with 4th Edition D&D, and it is currently a problem with 5th Edition D&D (though OGL was spoke of by the team, to be fair).

If I build something, naturally I want to share it, for profit or not. I remember TSR AD&D and 2E with the silliness third party publishers (and even individuals) had to go through to make compatible content, and that is a time that is 15 years ago and thankfully over with, for the most part.

And then by some miracle we got the OGL and SRD, and it was mostly a good thing (save for electronic and game publishing). It was great, and the Open Gaming license today survives and thrives with many game, a lot having nothing to do with d20 or D&D. It was a gift that kept giving, and it continues to give today.

I seriously think 5th Edition could have been put out with full OGL and SRD support, just like 3rd Edition and they would have seen the same or even greater success. D&D is what it is, there's no taking that away, and being open and compatible from the start would have just won over many and led the industry again.

I like Legend, and I love the thought at being able to use that system to build an entirely new game from - that is cool. I like Pathfinder and the OGL/SRD, and I can share my ideas and even sell them if people become fans and want to support the idea.

I like the OGL/SRD retro-clones, those are exciting and cool as well.

I love all the games with open licensing, like Traveller and others - these are great developments and gifts to the gaming world.

I want to be someone who does more than buys and plays a game, I want games that I can share my creativity with the world. I'm finding myself drawn to those and playing those more than I do my collection of "play only" games. When you buy an open-license game, you are becoming a part of a community of creators and players - and not just players. I find more and more the community matters, and fostering a large and vibrant creative community is where I like to spend my gaming time.

Playtest #1: Adventures Under the Laughing Moon

We picked up Adventures Under the Laughing Moon - Role-playing Game (Volume 1) at our last comic-con (Las Vegas) and got this one signed by the creator - which is pretty cool. This is our current RPG play test, and we are working through some of the character design rules and how the game works. Design-wise, it is an interesting game.

This is sort of a D&D type game, and the basic set does a good job of laying out the 'basic set' of the first few spells, monsters, and options for building characters. This is a skill-based system without levels, and it also uses sectional hit points and wounding, along with an over-riding stamina system designed to subdue you before your character's limbs are hacked off. Wounds take off body part hits, but all wounds do stamina damage and reduce your character's effectiveness and consciousness.

The big difference with this game is that special combat moves are bought into with skill points, such as sweep, head butt, block, and parry. You have to level up all your tricks, and all combat actions are used with a randomly rolled number of combat "action points" each character determines each turn.

Where some games abstract combat, this one dives into details and reminds me of some ways of the Runequest or Legend systems. The difference between this and those other two is this has a combat-stunt focus, where Legend has more of an abstract and free-form stunting system where the player invents moves (using their skill as the base) and the referee gives it a difficulty. This is point-buy character build melee stunting, and it is interesting from a building characters sort of point of view.

Character generation is straightforward, and there are some omissions that we would like cleared up, but we haven't gotten hung up. We wish there were a few more points to spend during character creation, as we are finding we are ignoring all the neat options that you can buy for just being able to hit or cast magic at a basic (more than 5%) level. It feels tough to get the character you are feeling you want, at least for us, so maybe we are doing something wrong (or characters really are very inexperienced to start).

We wanted a few more world details as well, and yes, we haven't read the books this was based on, so this will be an interesting play test. That said, we wanted some background detail about the world to get us started, like a really cool  starting town with some lore or something along those lines.

Also, pregens! What we would give for some pre-generated characters for use with new players. I can see this game taking 4+ hours to explain to a new group and go through character creations page-by-page, this was our experience with 4th Edition D&D, and this one with a edetailed point-buy system feels like it will be harder for new players to grasp what's important and what they need to perform well with the idea they have in mind.

This looks interesting, and it is a beautiful game - full color throughout. We expect to be having fun with this one and reporting back soon, so stay tuned.

Old-School Gaming is our Minecraft

"Take a look at this," the computer sales clerk says, "Dual SLI cards, the latest Intel 8-core, 64 GB of RAM, and..."

"But does it play Minecraft?"

Minecraft is a cultural phenomenon, and it is also one of the dominant forces in gaming today. It "gets it" by being so simple. It isn't complicated, it doesn't need RPG stats, and it doesn't need the latest game engine - it just is what it is, simple and infinitely expandable. It is also fun.

I am reminded of old-school gaming in this regard. Go into the dungeon, steal the loot, get XP, and avoid monsters. Combat isn't supposed to be exciting or well-balanced, this is a dangerous world and you have limited resources, so cheating the system is a part of the game. Fighting sucks, and it is an overall loss if you have to go in with spells flying and spells slinging.

I think that is a huge difference between true old-school gaming and the old-school clones (and I feel D&D 5 is an old-school clone as well) - there is this notion of a balanced, fun combat experience. This started with the magic-card-if-ication of D&D with 3E, where yes, tactical combat is a big draw of the game, and of course "modern" game designs have to make every aspect of the game fun and enjoyable. With 4E, we went back to the tabletop, and everything was 'balanced and fun tactical combat'. With 5E, we still keep the 3E balancing, but 2E's scripted story-gaming comes back with players having parts written in for them during character generation, and builds and combat are designed to be satisfying.

All choices are good, right?

Not really. Combat isn't supposed to be enjoyable or balanced in true old-school gaming. The rules aren't designed to protect you from bad choices, lousy rolls, or stupidity. You are a lucky hit away from a kobold killing your cleric, a poison dart killing your thief, a fireball killing your fighter, or an accidental step into a pit full of green slime away from melting your expendable magic user. Avoiding combat is what makes the game fun, tricking monsters, sneaking through the dungeon and disarming the traps, and putting the royal golden corkscrew to the dungeon master's well-thought out design.

Old school gaming is closer to a puzzle game or a text-adventure game than it is Diablo 3. You listen, you think, and you act carefully. You avoid combat if you can. You beat the dungeon master's diabolical designs. You sneak out with the golden chalice and the princess, and laugh as the dragon wonders "what just happened?"

With Minecraft, yes, combat is enjoyable, but it is also something that doesn't net profit (other than xp and an occasional item). Some combats are less enjoyable, and should be avoided (creepers). The zombies will show up, and you need to defend your fort. The game is not all about "enjoyable combats" though, since building and exploring are the game's main focus. There is a theme in Minecraft of "make your own fun" and I feel this is closer to an old-school game's philosophy than the more modern balanced/fun videogame-inspired designs.

In an old-school game, you were given a bunch of pieces and told to "make your own fun". With newer games (starting at 2E), you were given "stories" to "play through" and (with 3E) "balanced combat systems" to enjoy "building characters" with (4E and 5E). In an old school game, a 9 hit die green dragon could come stomping into town, and players were left to figure out how to deal with it through wits or clever roleplaying. Fighting it? Out of the question.

In newer games, we get the concept of "CR" or challenge rating tool to build encounters with, and a dungeon master who pulled the green dragon plot on a group would be frowned upon for not "balancing the encounter". It is really an alien concept pulled from self-balancing videogames, and one I feel that has no place in old-school gaming. If a party of level one characters wanted to go out and lure an owlbear into a pit and steal the beast's loot while it tried to climb out - so be it. That owlbear could probably clock them all in two rounds, but the risk and danger is what made the game fun.

The dungeon master didn't 'balance' things, the dungeon master created the world, and the players judged risks and were free to explore and adventure wherever they chose, and against whatever level of challenge they thought they could get away with. Sound familiar? Yes, that's Minecraft. A dangerous world where you could do anything you want, and there are no 'stories' or 'balanced fights' - you make your path through the world, you cheat death, and you deal with the challenges by working with what you find.

You are free to make your own adventures, and you are free to take as big of a risk as you can find out there in the world. The more you explore, loot, and exploit - the better off you are. And if you can do it all while avoiding unnecessary fights? Genius. In a way, it is philosophically the same game.

D&D 5: Expensive Modules

I am not a fan of the $50 adventure module format. I miss the days where adventure modules were lined up and sold like $6-$8 32-64 page folios, almost like magazines on a rack.

Yes, these new adventure modules are great-looking, with super-high production values, gorgeous art, and they are beautiful collectors items. But to me, they are just that, collectors items. Without a PDF so I can run them from my tablet, they have little use for me. They feel like they are primarily for reading and not playing. Would I like to read them? Yes, I am a fan of fantasy and would, but I still have that buyer's regret of never being able to use them.

Yes, you can get these for $30 on Amazon, but that's not the point. You are killing my FLGS if the price of these things are so high I feel forced to go to Amazon to buy. And yes, Pathfinder's adventure paths are more than two to three times as expensive for a 6-book run of $20-25 each, I get that (but those can be picked up in PDF for $12-14 each). But with the adventure path, this is a spread out release across a longer period of time and it sort of is like buying a quarterly magazine.

Still, I miss the old days. Not every adventure needs to be turned into a summer blockbuster. While it is nice to see some of the classics re-imagined, my group doesn't find much enjoyment in living in the grand spectacle. We tend to like the small, personal, local, and gritty adventures where things are down to Earth and less IMAX save the world. I miss the original Tomb of Horrors in that thin little paper folio, or the Slave Lords series. They are now purchasable via PDF, and that is a good thing, but I feel the larger direction here is all wrong - at least for me and my group.

With an expensive module, I have buyer's regret. I could buy the Witcher III for this price. I simply don't know if I will ever use another mega-module or if my group will ever play it.

Core rulebooks? Yes, I can justify those, since they open up options for all adventures. Modules? I prefer them to be smaller in scope and in price. Not every release needs to be a huge, AAA affair, and the lack of third-party support hurts my choices for buying the adventures I want to buy. It feels like it is getting harder for me to stay excited for this version because of the lack of options in rules, creative third-party support, and adventures. The D&D 5 system has beautiful books with an interesting simple system, but I dislike how tightly controlled everything feels with this version of the game.

Pass the Book?

We have both the Legend RPG and the $1 Legend PDF available over at RPGNow. Which one do we use more? I can't say we have even opened the softcover book yet.

The PDF? On my tablet and phone, and each chapter is printed out and stabled together in handy booklets. We could even have more than one copy of the character creation chapter printed out so more than one player can reference it when building characters.

You don't know how nice it is to be able to hand someone the skills chapter, someone else the character creation chapter, and keep the combat and adventuring chapters open to pages and ready for use. It's like someone has revolutionized our gaming experience, and I just can't force myself to go back to the hardcover "single user" soft or hardcover book way of doing things again.

And if the character creation chapter ever gets worn out, ripped, and stained I do not care at all, as I can always print out another copy. That isn't so easy with a $50 hardcover. I also have these on a secure and private little place in cloud storage so I can access them anywhere I go. My D&D 5 books? On my shelf, at home. With a PDF, if I have Internet access and optionally a printer I can play.

I like collecting things, and I like collecting books. I like the feel of them, and I like reading them. As I collect more, it gets harder to justify new ones. And for playing with them? I collect, so I always worry about them getting damaged - and many are. But PDFs? PDFs don't get damaged during play. I can collect a lot more PDFs than I can books. And PDFs are way more useful during play. So much so I find it hard to play games that aren't on PDF.

Now there is a limitation to all this. 1,000+ page games need not apply for my PDF good feelings and excitement, as those are way too huge to print out and own in a usable form with just the PDF. I like short, tight, simple games where more of the rules are in a core 64-128 page form, and easily printable and dividable into sections. I feel PDFs for larger games are only good for reference material or online reading, as printing out the spells of even basic Pathfinder would take reams of paper and be a nightmare to use at the table. Even though I have many Pathfinder PDFs, they are not as useful as PDFs of shorter and simpler games.

So there is a sweet spot for PDF games. Short enough to print out everything and organized enough that dividing the book up makes sense and allows players to pass chapters around as needed. The future isn't the traditional coffee-table RPG book collection for our groups, it is taking the form of a smaller, lighter, and easier to use and play with set of electronic documents that can be used how and in the forms we want to use.