OSR movement threat or menace?

[Fuchs]

In my group two use an electronic sheet, one prints a custom sheet out. Another group I was in used to make custom sheets on the computer and printed them out. The oldest of us printed out reference cards for each of his character's techniques from Bo9S and has an electronic sheet. And we're grognards who mostly never played 4E. The new generation? They are growing up with electronic readers and smartphones and apps.

When I build a character I don't really need an electronic chargen program - I can check the forums and threads first for examples and templates. But I stopped printing character sheets out since it's far easier to use my android pad. I stopped carrying books around too - I have all ebooks on my pad as well.

A few years ago I was laughing at the thought that wrist watches would fall out of fashion - until my own brother, half a generation younger, told me he didn't own a watch anymore, using his cell phone to tell the time. And I started doing this as well, between my desktop computer and my smartphone I don't really need a watch on my wrist, I wear one more out of habit.

In the near future what you offer in electronic form will be more important than your dead tree version.

[shadzar]

How many games even have electronically compiled lists for classes and character generator apps that aren't barely-usable garbage? Do any?

SR3 has the NSRGC, which is fairly awesome. It's not perfect, but it's the best character generator I've ever seen.

AD&D 2nd edition. still the best character generator out there. last time i checked, and before vista incompatibility, AD&D core rules 2.0 expansion was selling for $300 on ebay.

1.0 sucked ass on the scale of PCGEN and Army Builder.

[wotmaniac]

That sounds like the way 3.x handles spells.

That's the 3e organizational system,

No. Well, at least not in Core. 3e puts the class' spell lists in the same chapter as the master list. Doing it the way I described was all well and good for the expansion classes; but doesn't really have anything to do with the Core format. However, this does dovetail in to Frank's first point ....

While I do indeed see what you're getting at with the whole issue of expansion material, I think you're making mountains out of molehills. As long as you have your list right in front of you, and know the fucking alphabet, it's not really all that hard to look up your spell description(s) (especially seeing as you're gonna be writing it all down on your personal selected list anyway).

I completely agree with you about formatting and bloated word counts.
That being said, I think you make a false analogy between d&d spells and SR spells; and is an issue that warrants a bit of a detailed discussion .....

As I pop open the SR4 Core (for the first time, I might add) and flip to the spells section, the first thing I notice is a HUGE difference in design choices.
When you say "15 spells per page", I see that what you actually mean is "6-8 spell effect descriptions, each with 2-3 swappable templates, and the templates are all written in abbreviated short-hand" -- but even that's only the Street Grimoire; if you look up at the Adept spells, you're only getting 8-10 per page (which means that, while better than D&D, you're space estimations are still off by half). This is actually a kind of design choice that I have advocated in the past (and still do) -- and if I remember correctly, you argued that I was wrong in that advocacy (though, to be fair, IIRC, I was advocating an even more modular design, and I think your point was that I had taken it to an extreme that made things too fiddly ... but anyways ...). Using the SR design model, the D&D spells of Fireball, Delayed Blast Fireball, and Fire Orb (for example) would all be clumped together in the same spell description with 3 swappable templates -- just like Shatter, Powerbolt, and Powerball. And while the D&D entry for Telekinesis may be long as fuck, it's actually 3 very distinct effects, and would be written as 3 separate spells if it appeared anywhere else (and actually was broken down like that for the psionic version).
If this overall method of writing spell descriptions is indeed one of the things you are advocating for a game like D&D, then we are in accord in regards to design (both in simplicity and utility) as well as this aspect of page count.

Another aspect that makes this an unfair comparison is the issue of character design. SR uses skill-based characters vs. class-based characters. In the skill-based model, when you have several different types of power schemes (resource management, power sources, power availability, etc.), then things are automatically simplified for you. You can segregate everything in to their neat little packages and just have the players select what they want for their characters as they need. However, saying that a character has the Adept quality is not the same as calling a character a Wizard. There are certainly similarities (in that it identifies available power schemes); but the whole skill-vs-class thing makes further comparisons invalid. Presumably, in a class-based game like D&D, you're gonna have a certain amount of over lap between the classes (in all aspect of power scheme); and as such, it's harder to put your power groups in to these neat little packages.
(not exactly sure what my point was right there; but there it is)

Conciseness is another point you've really been hammering.
Glancing through the SR spells, it strikes me that these guys went to great lengths to be very direct and to the point when they wrote those descriptions (and I applaud them for it). OTOH, WotC products, overall, wallow in extraneous verbosity. And yes, much of that is the grammar they use in explaining procedure and other crunchy bits -- sometimes it becomes painfully obvious that these guys either are complete idiots or have their rate-per-word (to include the clarification errata they'll have to write later) at the forefront of their minds.
But that's only half the story.
Something I noticed about SR is that much of the crunch reads like stereo instructions; contrasted with D&D, where the writer is clearly trying to invoke a certain amount of imagery, with the goal being to capture the readers' imagination. Now, maybe there's something about the SR "culture" that demands the exclusion of imagery fluff (which, in turn, creates its own kind of imagery because of the particular tone and mood); but D&D is a very different animal -- the whole "capturing imagination through imagery fluff" is imbedded in to the very foundation of the game (and throughout every aspect therein). While this is mostly a matter of style, said style is such a part of the identity of the game that it is also (to a certain extent) a necessary design mandate.

Okay -- I think I've meandered long enough (making this more "discussion" than "debate").
But this is the Den, so ..... something something barrel of cocks, nyeh.