The Gaming Den

I was thinking of just playing around at first and making smaller "books" as it seems like a common request.

Keep the one awesomeTome and just split it's content out into different, smaller, more bite-sizey PDFs.

Mostly just rhetoric for now until I have a minute to really sit down and look at all this.
The table thing can be done.

Maxus wrote:I suppose you could ask Koumei how she does her handiwork.

Koumei? Little help here? You've done some nice-lookings PDFs. How do you do it?

I believe she uses a WYSIWYG editor and exports the file to PDF.

I use LyX with the following settings that I remember:

• Document Class: Book
• Numbering and TOC: Include down to subsections in TOC, and number parts and chapters
• PDF Properties: Use HyperRef Support
• PDF Properties: Bookmarks tab: Generate Bookmarks

My procedure is:

• Put the title on the first line with style "title"
• Put the author next with style "author"
• Insert --> List/TOC --> Table of Contents
• Next row is the title of the first chapter with style "Chapter" (not Chapter* -- that isn't indexed)
• Sections and whatnot use section- and subsection- styles and whatnot
• Various type of list and the "paragraph" style are used as appropriate

Other helpful things:

• Document --> Outline : this will show you the table of contents on one side, allowing you to easily navigate the document, and make sure you've set the various headings to the right levels
• View --> Source : this will let you see the LaTeX source for whatever you're mucking with. I normally don't use it when I'm not messing with equations (Ctrl+M), but it sometimes helps if you're confused about what's going on with formatting

Note: \chapter*{} instead of \chapter{} makes a chapter that isn't in the TOC. The TOC and the Index aren't the same thing.

LyX is a nice wrapper around using LaTeX itself. If you have the time and mind to learn LaTeX itself I highly encourage you to do so. There's guides all over, I started off with the WikiBook. I use MikTex for LaTeX editing. I've made Ends Of The Matrix, After Sundown, and most of the 3.5 SRD as PDFs using MikTex (Here). It's hardly dark magic, but it can be bothersome when a thing stops displaying how you expect it to come out and you have to look up why.

I've attempted to use Lyx itself before, but every time I do I end up wanting to use features at the LaTeX level that their WYSIWUG editor doesn't support, and then I get depressed about that and go back to just using MikTex. If you don't know LaTeX I expect that you wouldn't run into that difficulty.

Which one of the Tome Classes is regarded as the best put together? Like it hits all the check boxes of level appropriateness.

The Monk sorta gets universal love.

I've always been fond of the Barbarian and the Assassin, myself, but seems like the Monk has the broadest appeal.

Maxus wrote:The Monk sorta gets universal love.

I've always been fond of the Barbarian and the Assassin, myself, but seems like the Monk has the broadest appeal.

Ah, me too. It just hit that sweet spot of "easy to grasp" and "fun to customize"

One of the players in my group liked the fixed Paladin a lot. Another wants to try out the Jester.

Regarding the latter; was it in the original Tome, or is it one of those things that came up later in related material?

icyshadowlord wrote:One of the players in my group liked the fixed Paladin a lot. Another wants to try out the Jester.

Regarding the latter; was it in the original Tome, or is it one of those things that came up later in related material?

Which version of Paladin are you using? I've come across a slew of them.

I came across the Kantian Paladin. Wasn't that the one that belonged to the original Tome set?

icyshadowlord wrote:I came across the Kantian Paladin. Wasn't that the one that belonged to the original Tome set?

Well look at that... didn't realize there was a Paladin stapled in on these newer PDFs. If I recall correctly RoW and the original Tome posts didn't include the Paladin.

The Kantian Paladin is I'm pretty sure not a Frank and K production. It's community material tacked onto the pdf. Why that merits an inclusion over the veritable mountain of other Tome stuff produced by the community is beyond me.

Wait, it's not even a Frank and K product?

That's odd. Either way, a player of mine approved of it.

Said player was originally against the use of Tome, but is willing to give it a shot now.

Chamomile wrote:The Kantian Paladin is I'm pretty sure not a Frank and K production. It's community material tacked onto the pdf. Why that merits an inclusion over the veritable mountain of other Tome stuff produced by the community is beyond me.

Because it was made earlier. They just shoved any old crap into the Tome pdf back in the day when there where very few piles of crap and there was only one pile of each type of crap.

But now with 14 Paladins existing, see if you can convince them to add your version.

It's one of Iameki's classes, http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=39220. They got that and skill feats and a lot of other material included by virtue of being there first (and most of it being reasonable or good).

By the way, if you want a copy of the (almost) entire SRD already in LaTeX form I can give you the sources for that one. If you want to make a unified-rule-book thing of some sort.

The Magic Items section still needs formatting (which you'd replace anyway if you're doing TOME), and it doesn't have any monster entries at all. Oh, and it's like 700 pages when you put all the rules in one big single thing like that. Other than that it's cool.

Lokathor, I personally would be interested in that, particularly the Spell section. One of the things I'd wanted to add to the Tome PDF at one point was the SRD spell section with the Tome spells added in.

Lokathor's done some pretty kickass stuff on his Google site. I prefer his version of After Sundown for readability and images.

Lokathor, I checked out the SRD PDF, and I see you had the same problem with the huge-ass tables in the spell section I was having. I had all the spells formatted except for properly displaying tables. I'd still enjoy seeing the source though.

icyshadowlord wrote:One of the players in my group liked the fixed Paladin a lot. Another wants to try out the Jester.

Regarding the latter; was it in the original Tome, or is it one of those things that came up later in related material?

Jester appeared in the Dungeonomicon, so is an "official" Tome class (if we assume that official means "Races of War, Tome of Necromancy, Tome of Fiends, Dungeonomicon, snippets from Book of Gears and Tome of Tiamat"). IIRC one of the ancient editions included the Jester as some kind of modified Thief or Bard, and Dungeonomicon included some amount of "resurrecting ancient treasures from older editions".

I don't have the pdf on me at the moment, but I think a few of my classes are included there. I have no problem with this per se, but if we're not opening the doors to "Den community creations in general" (for instance I like several of Kaelik's classes), they don't really belong there. Even if we are, the War Mage, Ninja and Swashbuckler have been fixed up a bit in recent times to be less "filled with silly jokes and all over the place" and more "good at some specific things, doesn't automatically get hosed at level X without bandaid equipment".

Deciding on which of the manifold Paladins and which of the various Rangers we want to make "official" might not be a bad idea either. Both have multiple entries on the "Den creation" thread, so whenever someone says "I want to play a Ranger" in a game, you have to ask "Which one?"

I pretty much keep the Kantian Paladin on speed-dial for a Paladin class.

So that gets my vote.

Why don't we do this in Microsoft Word?

...You Lost Me wrote:Why don't we do this in Microsoft Word?

Because it's fiddly and does stuff you don't see at first that can accumulate and cause problems or just bloat. A markup language like LaTeX or HTML doesn't have that problem.

Also, anyone can edit LaTeX for $0 using a plaintext editor on any OS, while using Word would require everyone to use Windows and shell out $XXX to all have the same version of Word.

Basically, if there's going to be more than one person working on it total (not just at a time), Word is probably not the best choice.

Why not use Open Office?

SRD Source: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/118 ... D35pdf.zip (~2mb)

Note that I didn't actually finish formatting all the tables in the Spells section, looks like all the spells after Control Weather have funky tables. Most spells don't have tables, but the Summon X section will be shitty as hell. I was meaning to get back to it eventually but stopped playing DnD for a while. I tend to work on whatever book I'm playing the game of

Why not use Open Office?

We're not talking about a small 10 page report, or even a 100 page report. The AwesomeTome (version 0.7r139) is about 400 pages and missing a large amount of what you'd even need to play it as a complete game. The SRDpdf is 700 pages before you add even a single word of Tome material. Even though you won't be purely gluing the two together, creating any sort of work of this size is easily going to come out to several hundred pages. Any sort of office document software (OpenOffice, Word, WordPerfect, etc) is simply not designed towards easily editing documents of such a scale. They don't do much in the way of automatic regeneration and updating, or much in the way of automatic anything.

LaTeX isn't just an editor, it's a compiler. It reads in source, does processing, and spits out a file. This allows you to all sorts of fancy things, but top of the list it allows you to have internal links (clicking a skill or spell's name in the PDF goes to that entry) that automatically update themselves as sections get moved and page numbers change from adding and removing content. It also allows an index to be generated automatically. You just insert your index entries through the text and the complete index will get generated and inserted wherever you want. Again, like with inline links, when you change or move your text the index will get updated during the next build, no work from you.

Because it's a compiler it has functions. All sorts of functions for all sorts of things, and you can even create your own. You know how Frank puts those little quotes at the beginning of each section in stuff he designs? Wouldn't it be a fucking pain in the ass having to format that special style every single time it shows up in a document? Naw man, the top of my document says "\newcommand{\tagline}[1]{\vspace{-6pt} \textit{#1} \medskip}" and now it's no problem. Makes the text set off to itself a little vertically, italic, and I don't have to remember it. All I do as the writer later on is say something like \tagline{"What we have here is what we call a non-repeating phantasm."}, and then the formatting is kept consistent.

What's more, and this is SO FUCKING GOOD as a feature that I'm making it its own paragraph, if you change a command because you decide you like something to look differently, it'll update that change through the whole document just by changing the definition. I mean I know that seems obvious, but fucking hell that's sweet like you have no idea. "\newcommand{\dicepool}[1]{\textcolor{dicePoolColor}{#1}}" is a command I made for the After Sundown PDF (tablet version). Every single dice pool entry gets highlighted in green so that when you're scrolling past quickly on a tiny screen you can still see where it's telling you what to roll. If I wanted all 150 or so dice pools to be displayed somehow differently, then I change one spot and they all get updated. WYSIWYG editing programs sometimes have "preset" formats you can apply to an area, and then you can change that area by changing the preset, but there's usually a very small and limited number of slots for that. LaTeX has no such artificial limits.

Did I mention that LaTeX lets you include one file inside of another file? It does, and that's SO GOOD as a feature. In the PDF, I've got each spell or class or skill entry in its own file, then each chapter just lists out what files it's supposed to include. More, the chapters themselves are in their own files and then the main document puts them in order. You can edit small and focused parts of a larger document, and in a collaborative project that's just what you're looking for.

LaTeX is pretty much PHP/HTML/CSS for PDFs, which makes it infinitely more agile in performing this task vs a word editor.

Anyhoo I second Koumei's notion of attempting to figure out which of the many Tome-inspired classex should be 'officialized'.