A while ago I made a post about things that I look for in a third party product. Those things were very general, not going into detail and mostly applying to anything I look at. But there also little things that don't matter in a way that makes me rate a product higher or lower but are strangely important to me in terms of general appeal and how often I will use something. Below is my top 3 list of small important details that I like to see in third party products.
3. Pictures of Creatures
I like fancy artwork as much as the next fantasy geek, but I can live with pages and pages of crunch so long as the layout makes it readable. The exceptions are monsters and races. If it's described well enough in it's flavor text a monster or race can be perfectly useable. In theory anyways. That doesn't mean that I will personally use them. I have one monster product that is kind of lukewarm as opposed to bad, but I'll never actually use it due to the lack of pictures for every monster. It just makes me feel no impact so I'm not attached enough to even look at the stat block a second time, let alone use it for a campaign. You can get away with this when you have templates or a bunch of variations of the same monster, but even crappy art will compel me to use a monster as opposed to no art at all. Its even worse for races, because those are things that build a campaign world and something that you're more likely to spend a lot of game time interacting with.
2. One Page Wonders
Here's a few scenarios; The PCs find a vehicle and need the stat block. I want to use one monster for a session. I want to give the PCs a magic weapon or a weapon with a magic weapon property. I want to use one race from a book but not the others. What those things have in common is that it is very annoying when that information shares a page with other information. In the case of vehicles, especially complex vehicles I like to be able to just hand the PCs a sheet of paper of the page I printed out without a bunch of other information coming with it. Luckily magic items take up block-like chunks of pages so its easy to cut them out and put them in a trading card sleeve, but sometimes half the information is on another page so I just don't use it. Sometimes I don't use all the races in a book and want to print out just one or two to hand out to my players. The worst of them all is the rare time where monsters run into each other's pages too much. Sometimes printing snippets of a pdf is useful, especially if it's information that you want to hand to players. Having wonky pages makes this harder and makes a product less useable to me.
1. Separation of GM and Player
One thing I really love is player guides as companions to fatter campaign setting books. One of the main reasons why I like published material that is very good with rules language is that I like to be able to hand things to players and have the players be able to sort it out for themselves. This means I don't want to overload them with books information that I don't want them to see or things that I only use as a GM. From a printing cost perspective this is the best because more often than not GM information is not really required at the table. I'll do prep work to determine what environment properties or monsters or items I'll put out there, which is work that happens at my computer or with a tablet. While hard copies of books are easier to navigate and share I don't really need to print out or buy material that the players don't really look at. This means that books with too many subjects that bounce between GM tools and Player options wind up getting overlooked. Normally I don't have to deal with this. Setting books often have all the player options grouped up in one place but there are a few products where it's a general melting pot of GM and Player material and it is just outright difficult to deal with and I wind up not using them.
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