Books vs. pdf's

[Breimh]

I have both book format and pdf format for the FASA Star Trek RPG. (And Dr. Who, too!) And while I do like having something tactile that I can easily page through to find the section I want, while running a game; I also like being able to just type in a particular passage or word for the computer to do a search for the section I want, when I'm gazing at the computer monitor, as I do the write-up for games. Not to mention, having a pdf of various sheets is so much easier than making a jaunt down to the nearest Kinko's for doing a slew of photo copies.

I have players who do games with me that hate pdfs, they continually whine and complain when I hand them a disc and say "This has all the materials you'll need", instead of giving them a list of books to try to go hunt down on e-bay, craig's list or any number of used bookshops in the area. For a game that is YEARS out of print, it's just easier in the long run to give them pdfs and say "read this, so you know how to play the game and what's going on in the setting".

Likewise, I have people who prefer the pdfs, but never do the simple search options for finding some bit of info needed during game-time. So we sit there while they wade through page after page. We continually hear "just a another minute or so." for at least a half hour, while they hunt through every last tome on file to try to locate what they were looking for. Meanwhile, one of the other players has found it in the books, and tried to offer it to them six or seven times!

Does anyone else have this problem of the war between using hard copies of books or electronic ones? How do you deal with it?

[Reynaldo Garza III]

I love both, but pdfs are easier to lug around, take up much less space, and you have EVERYTHING you could want or need at your fingertips despite the above mentioned problems. Looking around for old books and materials is difficult and expensive. I found quite alot of the old FASA materials online recently, and I'm looking for MORE! :)

To this end, does anyone have the ST:RPG 2nd Ed game Core Rulebooks on disk? I have the ship rec guides (and I found that there were more than one edition of several of them), but I'm looking for the 3 core books, the Klingon and Romulan guides, the Triangle rules, the traders and merchant princes book, the Orions guide and the starship construction manual.

Also, I would greatly appreciate it if anyone has the old "Stardate" gaming magazine FASA put out, please let me know? I'm specifically looking for several articles from them: "The Luna Base", "The Vedala" Alien race stats (The Vedala were an alien race from the Animated Series fleshed out for the game, but all the races from the TAS episode "The Jihad" were fleshed out in the same article), the Starship Damage tables, and any of the Jaynze Starships articles.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you and sharing whatever we can! :)

[Breimh]

I have yet to scan in my copy of the 2ndEd ST book, and save it to PDF. But I've done that with all the others I own. I loaded them all onto a 2gig jumpdrive and ended up filling the entire thing! I didn't realize I had that much gaming material just for what had been published for Trek's setting(s). :)

I managed to inherit a copy of the Deluxe Boxed Set of FASA's ST game from an old friend who gave it to the lending library of our former game club, when he was in the process of moving away from the area. I scanned all of that I could (can't really do the counters, when they're so small and all punched out/seperated; or the maps, because of how big a size they are) and have it saved as PDF, too. I've run the group through several adventures, and while we've found the FASA system to be fairly easy and has a fun setting to play, more of the group are interested in TNG/DS9/VOY, so we're now doing more with the LUG/Decipher rpg system, since a lot of that era is already established using that particular game system. But I have had a couple of them already saying that if we could figure out a conversion chart to transfer all of that information to FASA, they'd rather play that system than the other.

[Wil Hostman]

I have an Ebook reader (sony PRS505), and run with my laptop. The Sony 505 doesn't have a good search feature. but it's great for having reference pages open... as it gets a day or more of display time on a charge... most of which is the control circuits.

In general, tho', I don't share PDFs, since almost all my game PDFs are one's I've paid for (the rest are duplicates of my dead tree stuff or free official PDF's). I do point players to the proper reseller.

I've one player who won't do PDF at all. He's forced to just trust me with rules. The rest embrace it. My current group won't do Trek, but we game with laptops to hand often... 4 of the 5 people!

I much prefer to have both PDF and dead tree.

[Breimh]

I know a lot of people who like having both. I think it makes things seem a bit more "tactile" to many of them, deep down, as they flip the pages and stroke the spines of the books.

Others absolutely love turning their PDA into something that looks akin to (and often sounds like) a tricorder or data pad from the newer series'; and for a game like Star Trek, that helps so much with establishing mood and getting them into the spirit of more intense role-play that I have been encouraging it over the books.

There are still those who'll grab for my books, when we're playing, which is okay too. But that's generally because they're having trouble navigating their pdfs with the PDA or laptop because of general unfamiliarity with the device or the layout/pages of the books without looking at actual, physical pages from a side-view and gauging, "Ah, it's here towards the last 2/3rds of the player's guide."

[Wil Hostman]

The lack of search is the one HUGE drawback to the Sony PRS. On the other hand, it plays nice with my Mac. (Yes, a Sony device that plays nice with the Mac. Go Figure.) That said, I have to use Adobe Ebook Reader to load secure PDF and EPUB, but it will load them.

On the other hand, it's just as easy to use an unlocker on the PDFs...

The other big issue is that most PDFs of old games are not OCR'ed, or worse, OCR'ed poorly. I've done a good bit of OCR stuff, and it requires a lot of attentiveness to get it right.

[Wil Hostman]

As a follow on, The recently announced for late fall 2009 Kindle DX is a 9.5" screen, has a keyboard for search, and is announced at $500. It will display PDFs natively now... meaning your scanned but not OCRed PDFs should be readable now, and OCRed PDFs should be searchable. (If it has a touch screen, Sony might just lose out...)

Looking like just about the perfect gaming book reader... Sony, you noticing?

[Breimh]

Sounds good! Thanks for the update. =:)

[Achbar]

Does nto matter in truth, just play the game and enjoy it.

[Breimh]

We do, but this small "bone of contention" can sometimes sour or even sabotage a game from what I've been witness to. So this is why I've asked others on their opinion that might be beneficial for those who might also have such problems... and to also keep discussion circulating in this group. =:)

[Wil Hostman]

The other problem is that, by definition, any PDFs of the FASA STRPG are of questionable legality.

They violate Paramount's trademarks, and FASA's copyrights, unless one considers them the one backup permitted under 1990's copyright laws (I've not found it in current laws, and I'm not a lawyer nor law enforcement agent, but a composer, so it's an important bit of my life), and FASA can't give permission for the copyright violation.


Some players strenuously object to such ebooks unless you can prove you have the originals; others object to them even if you have the originals.