Visually hard to read

[PX-15945]

Are me and my group the only ones who find the Beta visually hard to read/focus on compared to the old .A.E.G. and D&D 5th ed. books?  Generally speaking the pages seem to be unecessarily graphically crowded in a compressed layout  making it hard to read/focus and wasting page space. Switching to a more spaced out less graphic heavy 5th edition style would be an improvement and help attract more casual and D&D focused gamers.

The main problems, (from my perspective) are the following:

1.The page borders are too thick making the contents seem compressed and wasting page space.
2.The side border graphics, (left side gate and Asgard/Norse text and the right side: Phoenix Site, "menu", .glyph, and .D.H.D. graphics) seeme to be uneeded, (the right side graphics inparticular).

3.The page elements need to be more spaced out so as to be more easily read.

4.Stone background texture needs to fill the whole page, (no white background text boxes).

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 6, 2020 by PX-15945

[Tumola]

While I don't find it hard to read, I share your dislike of the layout. The font is too large and there is padding and margins missing. Overall, I find the layout not very professional. It just doesn’t look good. It it weren't for the cool art, this actually looks like a home brew rule book (not talking about the content, just the presentation).

I can give a few examples which to me look exceptionally bad:

• Bullet lists and sub headings don't have enough spacing after the bullet (sub headings don't look good with bullets anyway) (ex. p. 66).
• Several blue "note boxes" have a black border. Doesn't look great (ex. p. 59).
• The first row of several tables is higher than subsequent rows (ex. p. 122).
• Tables don't seem to have a consistent appearance. Sometimes they have rows with transparent backgrounds, sometimes colored. Sometimes they have a special header font, sometimes not (p. 47, p. 118, p. 298, p. 302 for comparison).
• The borders of tables inside info boxes just look chaotic and don't always line up or overlap (ex. p. 123, 310).
• I find it especially tedious to read all the feats, because you have just so many pages, most of which look identical and plain boring. It's actually tiring to read (pp. 84).
• Stat blocks of enemies just look awful (not that they look great in D&D). I mean the information is all there, but the formatting and presentation is just the most basic thing (p. 299).
• Right sidebar: This looks actually pretty good, only the text is not aligned in the center of it. Instead, the center axis is slightly shifted towards the left. Why don't you just left-align everything?
• Bulleted lists are not really laid out as proper list items. This is especially apparent on page 9 and 311. You can clearly see in the item with "Claw" that the bullet is part of the text content, because the next line is flush against the start of the bullet.
• On page 12, there are suddenly new heading styles for the blue boxes which look awful and are never seen again.
• Blue heading boxes (p. 31) look weird when they are flush with a container border but still have a border radius. I would remove the border radius on sides where it touches a container border (in this case I would remove the border radius on the right sides).

In my opinion, a general issue of this layout is too much borders that are too thick, font is too large, not enough margin and padding. The index in the appendix section actually looks much better since the font size is not so large.

Finally, I want to emphasize that I don't want to offend anyone. The developers clearly did a great job adapting OGL D&D to Stargate. I just want to give as much constructive criticism as possible to make the final product as good as it can be.