It's the layout time.

Message:

As Red noted, he'd have to reformat 1300+ pages of text and tables for print. Something I don't think he feels is worth the time since his sales (Book 2 and 3) are you and Fred with Book 4 being you, Fred, Tony, and I.

You and Fred are also forgetting "Book 5," the compendium of additional Q&D after Book 4 in the Omnibus.

And, not to pick on Red, but Cutlass is now so sprawling I wouldn't actually want new print editions based on the current layout. I'd re-layout the entire thing into a different order. Let's use Book One and Book Five as a quick example. Book One has all the original ship combat tables - - Cross Ships, Traverse Decks, Engage Commander - - while Book Five has multiple alternate Ship Combat tables. In the PDF it's a pain to shift between several hundred pages when moving between tables. If printed, that's still flipping between two books for the different tables. Many of the tables themselves are a dozen pages.

The "Cutlass Tool" Conrad wrote up (an in-house thing where now most of the tables have been encoded into a database relatively quickly called up from a menu tree) is ridiculously helpful. I think Tony may have encoded a bunch of the tables into an Excel spreadsheet? Even as a PDF I'd love to hyperlink the hell out of Cutlass. Buttons, buttons everywhere, adding another 100 pages of length, but, say, linking at the end of a table to related tables.

Binders kinda are the way to go. Once we're actually set up in our house this summer I hope to start extracting tables to cut/paste intk new documents, and group similar tables together (Again, say, all the ship combat variations) - - OUTDENT the silly things (Laura, and the players at the cons I've given handouts of some tables all agree those I laid out with OUTDENTS are a lot easier to read than the tables I printed from Conrad's con handout which are INDENTED), and put in tab pages to seperate tables out. For play I don't need most of the "rules" as such anymore. With my custom character sheet laid out with skills broken out by trait, numbered with the inherent skills, and skills gained/level on the sheet I literally just need the tables to play.

Yours,