RPG Design in Word 2013 Help?

[Octopusapult]

Foremost, I hope this is the, or at least an, appropriate place to leave this question.

How the hell do you make a decent looking RPG in Word? I am so displeased with... basically a lot of it.

No page borders seem good, none of the designs are doing it for me, I'm losing my mind trying to make myself happy with the overall feel of it. It just looks so bland and boring, and when I put art in, it looks out of place because everything about the rest of it looks so modern. It's really bugging me, any tips are greatly appreciated.

[Teddy]

You're not quite giving us all the information here. What is it you're trying to do? I assume that since you're using Word, you're writing an RPG rulebook, yes? What do you have so far? All the text, I hope? Background designs? If my brief look into the D&D 3.5 rulebooks are sufficiently representative, the background of the paper is more important than anything else for conveying the right atmosphere.

Could you share an example of how it looks so far, so that someone may provide more specific tips and criticism?

[Grinner]

The easiest answer is "Don't use a word processor for layout and publishing", but the simplest thing I can recommend is dividing each page into two columns, making it much easier on the eyes.

Images are trickier in a word processor. I really don't know how to help you there.

[veti]

Foremost, I hope this is the, or at least an, appropriate place to leave this question.

How the hell do you make a decent looking RPG in Word? I am so displeased with... basically a lot of it.

No page borders seem good, none of the designs are doing it for me, I'm losing my mind trying to make myself happy with the overall feel of it. It just looks so bland and boring, and when I put art in, it looks out of place because everything about the rest of it looks so modern. It's really bugging me, any tips are greatly appreciated.

It sounds like you're trying to use inbuilt Word themes, none of which are likely to be optimised for what you want.

As Grinner says, Word isn't the best tool to do this kind of thing, but you should be able to get a reasonable (though not brilliant) result. However, it's a lot of work, and you need to start from the assumption that it's not designed with your project in mind, so none of the preset styles and themes is going to work. You need to build your own.

If you don't know how to do that - it's not particularly hard to learn. But you do need to learn it.

[weckar]

Out of interest, what sort of tools would you suggest instead?

[Teddy]

Personally, I would probably slam my head against LaTeX until it gives me what I want, but it requires a bit of familiarity with markup coding, and can be an utter pain when you don't agree with its preferences on what should go where...

There exists better software, but I would have to ask a friend of mine about that, and he's currently in Taiwan...

[Jay R]

If you are an expert in publishing, you won't ask.

If you are not an expert in publishing, then don't try to fill the expert role.

Write your rules - that's your area of expertise. Then look for a publisher and let them handle their end of it.