Paper comes in reams, in rolls, and in packets. It's sorted by color, by material, and by the weight of an uncut stack. You can print on it, draw on it, write on it, and even burn it. When pressing wood pulp into sheets became common, the sheep of the world could begin to live free of the threat of people being inventive with their skin.

Without the mass production of paper, the printing press wouldn't have had a chance. Neither will your game.

Black and White and Read All Over (Packets)
"...your race packet even has a list of Persian words that I researched for everyone to use in character."
"That's cool. So when can I get a copy?"
"They didn't quite get printed this month; next event for sure!"
"That's what you said at the last game."

How do your players get information about your game? Do you have a website where rules and setting notes are housed? Do you have access to a laptop with all the information you'll need to reference? Do your players have their own PDAs that they can load with character sheets and rules information?

Your answer may be "Indeed!" and for that, I salute you. However, not everyone is as technologically savvy. The most extensive use of paper in a gestalt game will likely come from packets, character sheets, and related handouts.

What is a packet? It's just a short document with related information, usually for player consumption. You could have a packet about a particular race or faction, a packet of historical or political information about the setting, a packet of house rules, and even a packet of plot notes for the staff to carry. A packet is like a book, only much shorter, hardly ever bound, and much less likely to make you any money.

But they're useful to have, and you have to write them before you can print them. This is where your staff responsibilities become useful. Packets wind up consuming a lot of the development time for a game, because they generally have to be written well enough that people will take the time to read them.

Why would you want to take all this effort to make packets for your game? Well, it really depends on the game, but there will be a few constants.

Few gestalt games manage to exist exactly in a well-known setting, even those that use the rules from a popular developer. There are probably a few house rules, at least, and back-story about the game's location that the players are supposed to know. The more inventive your setting becomes, and the more rules you develop on your own, the more extensive your documentation will need to be.

Meanwhile, your game will likely include players that don't always have time to read the information on your website and who may not pay attention to your verbal descriptions unless they're sure the information is relevant.

In a small game, you can pause the action and answer a player's sudden question of, "wait, is it normal for dwarves in this game to worship a squid god?" In a gestalt game, it's much harder to know when your plot is being missed or misunderstood by players that forgot a crucial detail in the original briefing. It's much easier to keep everyone literally on the same page by having reference materials handy. With packets, you can return, "the information about the dwarven religion is available on page eight of the setting packet."

Lastly, packets can give your game a sense of legitimacy. Humans have a historical fascination with things that are written down (more on that in a bit). If a potential player for your game can be handed a document that outlines the most important things he'll need to know to play your game, there's an immediate shift from seeing the game as a bunch of folks getting together into an actual professional undertaking. Printed words are just that cool.

Of course, this can readily backfire. Any document that sees player hands should fit the level of involvement. A new player probably doesn't want to take the time to read a thirty-page tome of dense setting material just to decide whether to play. A one or two page synopsis of what's cool about your game is probably sufficient. During character creation, the documents can expand a bit, and the big packets can come out once the player is fully hooked and actively looking for more details to expand the character concept.

Some players will stop at the highlight sheet, and that's okay too. Not everyone is a reader. But the fact that the information is available in clear, written form is liable to impress even those that will never get around to reading it.

The plan can also backfire if your documentation is, well, bad. Early on, your team should have identified who is the best writer, but you may be lacking an excellent wordsmith through no fault of your own. Be honest with yourselves about this fact, and don't issue any documents that might reflect poorly on your game. You can be excellent storytellers and game masters without having the gift of written words, but poorly written words are an effective way to convince players that the rest of the game is poor as well.

If you're doubtful about your skills as a writer, employ third parties to read over your material before it's printed or posted to the web. Catching major spelling and grammar errors is a must, and that's often as simple as paying attention when Word starts underlining things in red and green. Break up dense paragraphs when the subject changes and break up major subject changes with new headings to make them easy to find when players are looking back later.

Being a good writer is a skill that takes years, but it's possible for most people to turn out serviceable documentation. Having the elements of your rules and setting available in printed form increases the appeal of your game and makes it easier for players to quickly synch their expectations to your presentation.

1000 Words are worth a Picture (Text Props)

People are drawn to the printed word as to little else. Until the past thousand years or so, literacy was almost always the sole province of scholar-priests who recorded the Truth in unchanging ink. Despite the modern rate of literacy, there's still an element of the mystical to the written word. Things that are written down tend to seem more important than things that are merely said.

This seems to be especially true in roleplaying games. When given the choice between a seemingly credible NPC and a seemingly ancient piece of text, players will believe the paper before they'll believe the spoken word. Speakers are fallible while text is not, or at least so they seem to believe.

Fortunately, writing things down is one of the easiest ways to create a game prop. Computers come with a wide variety of attractive fonts. Paper can be singed, crumpled, rolled and tied, or water stained to give it a sense of age and importance. You can cipher the text or tear it into sections to create fun for the puzzle solvers. It's a lot of prop for a little work. There are a few caveats, however.

If you're going to encode your text props, be sure there are one or more people who actually enjoy deciphering. Also, make sure that these people are going to have the time to decode the text at your game; if they spend all night fending off wall-to-wall monster attacks, there's little chance that the text will be available for the morning encounter. Finally, encoded text should regularly be worth the effort of deciphering it. If players feel that they wasted an afternoon to learn something that any NPC could have told them or which wasn't useful, they'll stop taking the time to do so.

Separated text has a different problem. If you've split up the text, be prepared to figure out how it will get back together. The larger your game, the larger the chance that there will be players that refuse to cooperate with one another. If Team A has part of the text prop, enemy Team B has another, and clueless Player C has yet another, the text on the prop may never be used in the game. Worse yet, Player D may manage to get all the pieces and decide not to share with anyone else, even though he can't make any practical use of the information. If you're going to break up your text props, make sure it's obvious to a wide range of players exactly why they need to cooperate on putting them together, or the prop may never get put back together.

Lastly, a range of fonts is excellent for creating text props, but make sure they're fonts that will actually be legible after being aged or otherwise turned into props. Many script fonts are hard to read straight off the printer, and become worse on water-damaged, crumpled paper. Some players will work hard to decode a clearly ciphered document, but few will take the time to make out text that's simply in a hard-to-read font. Even a font that's tolerable in the light of day might get ignored if handed out late in the evening. Take into account the potential lighting conditions and font complexity before pressing Print.

That's it for this month. Next month, the inevitable question, "Are we ready to run the game?"