Day 17: Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?

Kind of a filler question; hope you’re having an awesome weekend so far!

I didn’t love legal paper until Apocalypse World came out and then I learned to loooove legal paper. Just a smidge more information and you can print it yourself, yay. My Game Chef finalist entry from 2016 is a legal-sized thing.

I think it was Rob Brennan who pointed out that the indiegame legal paper fetishism is total bullshit if you’re not American, because they just don’t have an equivalent paper size? I guess? I thought they had something called A5? B5 maybe? I guess it’s not easy to get and isn’t really the same size, so you still end up printing your PDFs in some squished way. Anyway, I guess it’s a thing?

Heard that Apocalypse World 2E dropped the legal-sized playbooks, so just watch the rest of the #pbtamonoculture follow suit. I think if Vincent Baker had declared for 11×17″, we’d see an uptick in oversized printer sales and Kinko’s jobs. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

18 thoughts on “Day 17: Do you buy your legal-sized paper by the ream or by the case? Do you ever try to reuse your playbooks or just start fresh every time?”

  1. Jason Morningstar I remember how weird it felt to sit and read, like, any of the Swedish language stuff Target sent me for visual reference. Or my copy of SLA Industries. Kind of…long-ish and/or narrow-ish. Something…unsavory.

  2. ISO paper sizes are all based on a single aspect ratio of the square root of 2. A0 is one square meter and each smaller size is half that. If you fold an A4 sheet in half you have two A5 sheets. If you fold a letter-sized sheet in half you have nonsense garbage.

  3. In a string of maddening errors a few months back, I printed up some AW2e playbooks for Gary Montgomery and discovered that I’d managed to do so on big ole 11×17″ sheets of paper.

    My last bit of patience was spent upon that discovery. Later – less angry – I was able to admire how spiffy the large-scale playbooks looked. They have quite the presence, and I’d be all sorts of into having them hit the table.

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