The Gaming Den

For all those interested, Dragon_Child is planning on running a playtesting session with the Atlas ruleset. The Atlas ruleset incorporates quite a few game design elements that have been discussed on this board over the past few months into a single cohesive system. In designing this system, I have attempted to incorporate balance, flexibility and simplicity. I have put in quite a few hours on this project, and any help at all in polishing it off would be appreciated.

Information on playtesting can be found here:

http://s14.invisionfree.com/Atlas_Arcane/index.php?showforum=1

The Atlas ruleset is still quite unpolished, especially in the area of spellcasting. However, it is very much ready for playtesting as the core mechanics are essentially done. Plus, I'm sure it'll be fun for all involved - especially if you like having a hand in something new. All recommendations, criticism, comments and suggestions are very much appreciated.

Here is a direct link to the ruleset for all interested:

http://www.eternalspires.net/~aycarus/Cydronis.pdf

Not to be setting things off on a downer...

But why the heck do people persist in using that horrible pdf file format?

Its buggy and bloated, it crashes browsers of all makes, especially on low bandwidth like most of my continent gets, and you can't easily edit it.

Simply because it's portable and can't be easily edited.

PhoneLobster at [unixtime wrote:1133251508[/unixtime]]But why the heck do people persist in using that horrible pdf file format?

Mainly because then it has the desired formatting when printed out. A copy of the original .odt file for the current build is available here, as well:

http://www.eternalspires.net/~aycarus/Cyrdonis.odt

There seems to be some missing information. I didn't see the halfling race represented. Surely twas a minor oversight.

clikml at [unixtime wrote:1133306912[/unixtime]]There seems to be some missing information. I didn't see the halfling race represented. Surely twas a minor oversight.

World-dependent, of course. Necorum doesn't have halflings, but they do have tribal gnomes that will happily eat tresspassers in their land (they're not so much cannibals because they don't actually eat other gnomes).

wrote:Simply because it's portable and can't be easily edited.

Not being editable is not a good feature its a big ugly flaw. It screws over people with bad eyesight or an aversion to certain squiggly fonts. In this situation it also makes it very hard for anyone play testing to cut and paste text to discuss here or elsewhere or make small alterations for play testing purposes before printing out.

Printing correctly is niether unique to pdf nor of actual interest for most electronic documents. If I just want to browse the file and see what the rules look like the clunky and unpleasant acrobat reader is not nearly as comfortable or quick to use as a text editor or html browser.

I'd take the portability more seriously if I'd ever actually seen pdfs run reliably anywhere on any of the countless systems I've ever used. Which I haven't. In the mean time there are dozens of other formats out there which are a lot more portable. The most glaringly obvious being html. And the "less" portable formats, like word documents and rtf actually work very reliably on most systems (unlike acrobat which never works reliably) and are actually remarkably more portably than some folks imagine.

Like I said I can't understand why anyone ever uses the pdf format. It doesn't even do what people say it does.

Seriously. Burn all pdfs.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
if you guys want to discuss acrobat or pdfs in general, take it to the off topic forum. This thread is for soliciting playtesters.
[/TGFBS]

I've registered on the board. See my post there, regarding my possible involvement with this.