Survey: What People Use to Read Game PDFs

Somehow even though I'm not a designer, I've been thinking about game layouts and how different PDF layouts display on different devices, and yesterday I'd gotten a bit curious.  What are people using to read their PDFs?  What do they use to run at the table?

So naturally I decided to collect data.  Yesterday I ran a couple of surveys to find out what kinds of devices people were using.  The first survey I ran, I shared with r/osr on reddit as well as the OSR Discord.  A few hours later, based on feedback I got as well as some new thoughts that occurred to me, so I shared an updated version of the survey to r/rpg on reddit.  

Here are the results.

OSR Survey

I know the extra large images hang over my sidebar, but large just wasn't large enough to read everything really easily.  

Phone is 3.5%

General RPG Community Survey

What Can We Learn From This?

First, aside from the surveys not being identical, differences between them could be Discord vs reddit just as easily as OSR vs general RPG community, so don't read too much into it.  I have a sense that most of my responses in the first survey came from Discord, but no way to tell for sure.

Second, some people misunderstood the directions and responded based on how they play right now rather than in non-covid times.  So both online play and laptop/desktop usage are a bit overstated, but probably not by much.  

Third, I had no idea tablets were so popular.  Apparently 51% of American adults have a tablet now.  I had no idea they'd caught on that well.  It's good for designers since tablets read pretty much any format well, but tablets will never be a solid majority in any use case so you can't just assume people are using them.

Fourth, a lot of gamers have a lot of devices.  At least 55% of respondents have both a desktop and a laptop, plus 58% have a tablet.  I mean, damn.  

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there's a fairly predictable split between GMs and players, with GMs mostly using laptop/tablet at the table and players mostly using phone/tablet.  Or nothing I guess; I didn't think to include that but in person, most players don't all have their own copy of the book.

Presumably if they started having a book at the table, players would be more likely to read on their phones.  There might be some social barriers there like not wanting to look like you're texting, idk.  

Another thing to note is that because the proportion of people saying they use a laptop while playing matches up so well with the proportion who say they play online, my initial assumption was that almost all people who play with a laptop are playing online.  Looking through the individual responses, this isn't the case; more people than I expected bring their laptops to in-person games, as players.  In my experience this is partly a function of table space, i.e. if the gaming table is bigger people do that, but if it's small only the GM gets to use a laptop.  

When I started this I had the idea that single-column layouts display better on phones and double-column displays better on laptops.  Several people told me I was wrong and that's not always true; it depends on column width, maybe epub is better for phones, or a PDF designed to reflow really well, some people would rather just do two-column and deal with the hassle of scrolling back and forth, etc.  So I can't recommend a specific format here.

One thing that was agreed on is tablets handle both single- and double-column well, but not triple-column.

If there is one big takeaway here, it's that designers should think about how they design player-facing products differently from how they design purely GM-facing products.

Purely GM-facing products, like adventure modules, can focus on optimizing for laptop/tablet, which mostly means laptop since again, tablets work for everything.  That still may leave out as much as 10% of GMs according to this poll though.

Player-facing products on the other hand, need to work for all device types, and that may well mean you want to have two different versions, like a single and a double-column, or a PDF and an epub.  Thankfully for most independent product lines this means the core rulebook only, which is the one that sells the most and thus can most justify the extra expense of having two versions.  

P.S.  A lot of people said internal hyperlinking is really important.  I know we all know this and it's pretty much independent of what device you're using, but if I don't point it out someone will ask me why I didn't.  Plus I agree with it– do more of this, designers.