This post made me start thinking, despite not having created a complete game, much less published one, about how the business of the RPG industry should be approached.

I haven’t really gotten to play Diaspora yet, but the decision by the creators to not publish a PDF until they can present the file as a product in itself, rather than just a dump of the book layout, seems like a pretty cool idea to me. It could just be that weird holdover from reading The Fountainhead, but there’s a large part of me that thinks that is of the opinion that a person’s product is his or her own to do with as they please. I also think that, while it may not be a profit-driven decision now, it could be a really good way of looking at PDF releases in the future.

A lot of folks have said that they have problems reading electronic copies of books on a computer screen, and I wonder how much that can be mitigated by creating PDF’s that were designed for digital distribution from the ground up. Also, this could start the trend toward gaming material that could be more easily ported to an ebook reader. I know that White Wolf has also made some statements about moving in that direction, which is awesome.

Brad Murray, one of Diaspora’s creators, has a very astute blog entry about how information is presented and correlated between physical books and electronic documents. Reading it made me realize that these issues haven’t at all been addressed in most available PDF game documents. I very much think that they should, not just because it’s interesting, but because I think that electronic distribution with an option of a print-on-demand physical book is likely the future of the entire industry, especially as the cost of the reader technology drops.

This is one of those weird situations where the niche hobbyist is really going to do something innovative that will ultimately inform, at least in some small way, how some of the bigger players in the industry will offer their products in the future.