I could use some enlightenment as I believe I'm missing something.

If you're publishing an Ashcan of your game in which it is not complete and you're hoping for feedback, why offer it in hard-copy as opposed to PDF?

I understand why someone would offer only a hard-copy of the final version of their game but for an ashcan edition it makes little sense to me. Sure, if you want to publish a hard-copy in addition to the PDF - go crazy, but why neglect the PDF direction? It is the most accessible medium, lowest barrier of entry, and allows you to offer an upgrade to the consumer when the final version is published.

I don't mean to be rude, I genuinely believe I'm missing some crucial detail.

There are plenty of models for getting your ashcan out there. Selling a bookish item at a con is one way.

Releasing a pdf into the wild for free is another.

Selling a pdf is another.

Putting up a web site for the game and having it up on a blog is another.

There is no one right way to getting a game ready to publish.

But there are plenty of wrong ways or ways that don't work for X and Y because of whatever and whenever.

For my purposes, a hard copy version of the Blood Red Sands Ashcan allowed me to test out the layout / format options I'm thinking about using as well as test out the actual game itself.

The ashcan was 8 1/2 x 11 landscape, coil bound on the top edge, so when opened (vertically) you got an 17 x 11 portrait flat-field to work with. That would not have been easy to test as a PDF.

It works both ways: if the author takes the time and effort to put together a hard-copy, you know they are serious enough about it to make playtesting it worthwhile.

Posted By: Jared A. SorensenYou can't set fire to a PDF.

Jared wins.

Outside playtesting is a tough egg to crack, in all honesty. You can have a really great game (Thou Art But a Warrior, How We Came to Live Here) and still have almost nobody playtest it, aside from groups your organize yourself. However, once you get a few people playtesting and posting about your game, you can usually get a few more, and then a few more. It'll sometimes peter out, though. For example, when the GoPlayNW folks started playing Geiger Counter, there were a few weeks where I got 60% of all the outside play AP the game has ever had. Since then, I've gotten a few one-line notes that people have played and enjoyed it (which is awesome, don't get me wrong), but only a few isolated AP posts. Those are still super useful and I'll read over them like a hawk when I get around to writing the final version of the game, but it just goes to show that playtesting is a seesaw.

From my perspective, anything a creator can do to make it more likely that people will playtest their game is a good choice. And this means releasing it in as many different formats as they have the time and energy to do. PDFs are great, but if they don't get people to sit down and actually play your game, you may have to try something else. Sometimes selling or giving away free print copies, even ones made on a photocopier like the Geiger Betas I gave away at GenCon, might help you with that... but, then again, they might not. I'm not sure if I've received ANY posts from people who picked up one of those hardcopies. That doesn't mean they were a bad idea, necessarily, but that I'm not sure they worked in this particular case, at that particular venue, without me running the game and helping get folks excited about it (since I had to bail on actually going to GenCon at the last minute).

Another issue is that... who is your playtesting audience really? People have to be fairly committed to helping you with your game in order to playtest something, which usually means they have to be so excited about playing your game that they want to play it even when it isn't complete. Honestly, folks who are really into indie games -- especially other indie game creator-publishers, the folks whose attention you might think you need to get for your game to be vetted / successful / etc. -- are probably less likely to do independent playtesting for you. They already have a bunch of games they've been wanting to play for a while, in addition to their own game projects that they need to playtest. If you can sit down with them at a housecon (frex. JiffyCon) or a larger convention (Dreamation, GenCon), you'll probably find they're more than happy to play your game and offer feedback, but getting folks to independently commit their own time is harder.

All that of which is to say: finding independent playtesters is hard. You want really smart, thoughtful people who aren't already strongly committed to other projects and games, so they can take the time and attention to get excited about yours and actually play it, ideally more than once. Honestly, you may be more likely to find those 1) locally, among people you've talked to in person about your game, 2) on a general site like RPGnet, or 3) from among the lurkers on SG more than from among the people who post a lot or have published one or more games. How do you find those people? Really, it's anybody's guess.

Lots of valid reasons in this thread and I thank you all for educating me.

Posted By: JDCorley
The whole point of an ashcan is to get people to pay for what they normally are paid to do - playtest. Physical artifacts have value and thus help with the purpose of ashcannery.

I can definitely identify with that point as I believe many of the games I've played are worth much more than I've paid for them. However, I would be MUCH more likely to pay $7 to play the PDF ashcan version of a game rather than the $15 + $5 for shipping - maybe that's just me and no one else shares that behavior. For instance, I doubt I would have purchased Poison'd if it was not available as a PDF.

Some people are PDF people. Some people are hardcopy people. Some people are both.

Also:

Some people are chocolate people. Some people are strawberry people. Some people are both.

I can't explain why I like hardcopy any more than I can explain why I like chocolate. shrug

Really, living one Ocean away from where most games are made tends to make you into a PDF person... Unless you're too rich for your own good, maybe, or you're happy playing nothing but D&D most of your gamer-life.

It doesn't seem indisputable to me.

Unless we're no longer talking strictly about how folks like to get their indie games delivered to them. I mean, if we're talking about a worldwide printed media vs. electronic media divide, then I suppose I'd be willing to say that the worldwide printed media folks outnumber the worldwide electronic media folks. But I wouldn't personally be willing to wager that same guess about indie games folks.

Posted By: Graham

Posted By: Robert BohlFor the record, Poison'd is now in final edition.

It's in its First Edition, isn't it? I'm hoping that's not the final version.

Garham

I haven't heard of anything that suggests that this is the first of several forthcoming editions, but I haven't heard it isn't, either. I just meant to say that it's no longer an ashcan.

Posted By: Eric Provost

It doesn't seem indisputable to me.

Unless we're no longer talking strictly about how folks like to get their indie games delivered to them. I mean, if we're talking about a worldwide printed media vs. electronic media divide, then I suppose I'd be willing to say that the worldwide printed media folks outnumber the worldwide electronic media folks. But I wouldn't personally be willing to wager that same guess about indie games folks.

I am referring to the number of people who are going to play with (not read) a game with a physical copy vs. those who will do so with a PDF. Will do, and prefer to do, I mean. I'm sure there's some large overlap between those two populations, but it seems pretty obvious to me that there are more people who want to play games using a paper book than do with a PDF.

I could be wrong, of course.

Until we get decent hand-held readers (not jokes like the Kindle), people who buy pdfs will print them out if they want to play them. It's cheap and easy - and usually gives more practical results than the printed copy. I don't want a closet full of digest-sized publications. And stapled books are not nearly as practical as coil bound ones when gaming. I printed Grey Ranks and Steal Away Jordan landscape with two-pages per sheet and had them coil bound.

PDFs are digital backups even if you have a hard copy.

PDFs make it easy for someone to impulse buy.

PDFs make it cheaper to keep up with what's going on in the gaming world. (You're not going to play them all.)

PDFs make it easier to search for things and mark up playtest versions.

You should always offer pdfs separately.

You should always include a pdf with every hard copy (even an ashcan edition).

Hey Joshua,

I'm assuming that the bulk of your Beowulf sales came from GenCon.

How's the feedback stream been?

D

One of my most coveted possessions of RPG books is the ashcan edition of The Whispering Vault.





But I am arguing from a game collectors point of view...