Basic Fantasy RPG Core Rules 3rd Edition

[Solomoriah]

So it looks like the only rule change to tacking was that you can tack at 1/3 in a light breeze now? Does 1/4 throw the numbers off too much?

Ship movement rates are all divisible by 2 and 3. Not all are evenly divisible by 4, however. Sticking to halves and thirds avoids fractional miles.

Anyway, I love the new column in the table. Much easier to read!

Thanks!

As for the bear and bee, would it look better if you switched one of the pictures with its text block?

They're fine now. The two pictures were side-by-side in R103; I moved the bee down the page in R104 to make the page more visually pleasing. To me, anyway.

[greymark]

Question ... on page 153:

The player rolls 1d20 and adds his or her Ability Bonus for
the score the GM thinks is most appropriate, as well as any
situational bonus or penalty the GM assigns.

So for ability rolls I would think that the intent here is that ability score bonuses and penalties would apply? If so, then you may want to consider changing the wording to "... his or her Ability Bonus/Penalty".

This would be in line with the wording on page 4 in the Character Abilities chart.

[Solomoriah]

Greymark, with respect... if the reader can't figure out what I mean from the text, he or she needs to consider remedial reading classes. This isn't a programming project, where exact wording must be obeyed at all times. I personally like how it reads, and find it entirely clear... unlike my original version of the spell preparation rules for Magic-Users, which were quite obviously inadequate.

[Dimirag]

I prefer to use "modifier" as I said before instead of "bonus/penalty" or just "bonus", but its not a really confusing thing.

[pmjdebruijn]

Hey, thanks for the continued polish on the already great base Basic Fantasy RPG document. Though I noticed some potential nitpicks in r104, for your consideration:

I noticed the PDF's don't have all the metadata (Title, Subject, Keywords) set.
File - Properties - Description, where I'd suggest to put "Basic Fantasy" or "Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game" in all the fields.

I also noticed that some images have been anchored to the page as opposed to being anchored to the paragraph (like the majority of images):
- The halfling image on page 6
- The weapons rack image on page 10
- The horse image on page 55
- The water? wizard image on page 60
- The bugbear? image on page 62
- The dog image on page 69
- The gelatinous cube image on page 82
- The skeleton image on page 90
- The manticore (& wizard) image on page 104
- The orc image on page 109
- The shark image on page 115
- The adventurers and monsters in the dungeons image on page 123
- The wraith image on page 127
- The warrior vs goblins with banner image on page 150
Anchoring stuff to the page logically makes for very weird text reflow situations, typically it's a good thing to avoid when possible. In small documents it's usually a non-issue, but in large documents, like BFRPG, it can be painfully apparent at times.

Also I'd like to suggest creating the PDFs with Archival (PDF/A) mode enabled:
File - Export as PDF - Archive PDF/A-1a (ISO 19005-1)

[Solomoriah]

Hey, thanks for the continued polish on the already great base Basic Fantasy RPG document. Though I noticed some potential nitpicks in r104, for your consideration:

I noticed the PDF's don't have all the metadata (Title, Subject, Keywords) set.
File - Properties - Description, where I'd suggest to put "Basic Fantasy" or "Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game" in all the fields.

In the 10 years I've been doing this, no one has ever asked about the PDF metadata.

If I have a moment, I might consider it.

I also noticed that some images have been anchored to the page as opposed to being anchored to the paragraph (like the majority of images):
---- hack hack hack ----
Anchoring stuff to the page logically makes for very weird text reflow situations, typically it's a good thing to avoid when possible. In small documents it's usually a non-issue, but in large documents, like BFRPG, it can be painfully apparent at times.

Actually, PM, anchoring images to the page has, in my experience with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice over the last 10 years, the effect of insulating the images from text reflow problems. LibreOffice 4.4 still tries to choke on graphics now and then when reflowing, and those that are anchored to the page are the least affected.

I'm aware of the issues from rather a lot of first-hand experience. Because our documents use a lot of "keep with next paragraph" styles, the text tends to behave in a bit of a chunky fashion. Images anchored to paragraphs add to the chunkiness. LibreOffice often makes a bad decision when reflowing, and in many cases (to wit, ALL of the cases you pointed out) reanchoring the image to the page is what it took to fix it. They might not all still need that treatment, due to subsequent textual changes, and when I find one that is page-anchored that needs to be moved I always try to anchor it to a paragraph. I'm not going to proactively try to fix them all, in the process going through yet another flow check, just so I can say I did it.

Also I'd like to suggest creating the PDFs with Archival (PDF/A) mode enabled:
File - Export as PDF - Archive PDF/A-1a (ISO 19005-1)

This gives me no benefit that I can see. I still go through most of the same issues with my printing companies; the only one who actually seems to care is Lightning Source, who I will not use because they can't get the cover colors right. They want PDF/X-1a, which I can't even make with my current toolset.

I'm really not sure what any of the changes you've suggested will do for me, honestly. If you could back up your suggestions with explanations, use cases, etc. then I could evaluate them more fully... but as it stands right now, it's a bunch of work I don't need to do to get this book printed properly.

[pmjdebruijn]

@metadata, well it's not critical indeed, but it would be nice to get in when some other changes are pending anyhow. but I totally understand you're not going to make a new revision merely for adding the metadata.

@anchors, I noticed issues, where in one the earlier pages I accidentally inserted a new page, which caused of the following text to shift, except of course for the page anchored images, which are now a page too early, which in turn caused more weird shifts, as it severely messes up per-page positioning. This is a non-issue as long as the count page doesn't change, particularly in the earlier pages. Considering the accidental discovery above, I presumed page anchored images were left-behinds from earlier days, so I took a few minutes to structurally check the whole document for all of them, and report them as I did. I understand that this change doesn't make the current document any better in a directly tangible sense, but I thought it might make things (editing) potentially easier for future revisions.

@pdf/a: pdf/a isn't about printing directly, it's about using stricter subset of PDF, ensuring longer term readability of documents (it tries to minimize implementational oddities of different PDF readers).
A more tangible benefit of PDF/A is that it implies the use of Tagged PDF (which can be enabled separately), which helps people who depend on accessibility technologies to be able to better read documents (at least in theory it should):
Some more info: http://www.pdfa.org/2011/10/the-value-of-tagged-pdf/

[Solomoriah]

PDF/A makes the document bigger, and doesn't help with printing. Neither does metadata help.

As to the page-anchored images, I will say that I always ask people to review the PDF rather than the ODT. It's there so you can easily borrow bits, make your own version, etc. Yes, those images are a pain if you are changing the document content substantially... I tend to do more page anchoring as I get closer to a final print version, mainly to fix recurrent flow issues. But since I've discovered that LibreOffice on different platforms formats the document differently, I've stopped worrying about those details so much... even if I do everything "right" a change of platform is fairly likely to screw it up.

There have been many times in the course of this project where I have had to substantially reformat the book because of new versions of LibreOffice (or OpenOffice in the early days). Final layout, it seems, will always be difficult.

[The Angry Monk]

Hey Chris,
Thanks for all your work. I really appreciate it. BFRPG is my favourite version of the game we all know and love.

[Solomoriah]

Why thank you, Monk!