Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Jaded Gamer Diary - What adds value



Evidently when I say something is overpriced I'm a bad person. Everybody has a different sense of worth and mine is appropriately counter to what several others think. I don't see added flash, limited edition covers, separating something in multiple books, etc as things that add any sort of value to a RPG book. Things like having all the rules I need in one book with a sensible design and layout as a symbol of value.


So I seem to attract the ire of those who love the Dungeons and Dragons design strategy. Spread the rules among two or three core books so they have to buy them all. This also comes around in an attempt to bite me when I complain about other games doing this. Different group of folks saying “Well you probably didn't complain when you bought the three core books for D and D did you?”. Well no I didn't complain because I didn't buy them. Last edition of D and D I bought was the old BECMI stuff years ago. I have a 3.0 Players Guide but that was given to me for free.


Limited edition versions of books simply make me facepalm and walk away. Really? Change up the cover and charge an extra twenty to whatever bucks. Maybe even make a leather cover for it, or a plastic one, whatever. No thanks, I'll take a regular version at a much lower price thank you. Or worse yet is when they try to toss in a handful of pages as 'exclusives' in that limited edition. So now we are supposed to think that extra hefty price tag is somehow covered. Yeah... um... no. Making material for you game hard to get only really accomplishes two things in the end: fans saying 'fuck it' and walking away or good old piracy and you get your game shared up over on all the torrent sites.


Actual useful shit. That adds real value to a roleplaying game. Tossing in a disc with quick character generation stuff on it (3.0 did get that right), hell yeah. I get a PDF copy of the game for free when I order the print version, okay. I get a good solid system with all the information I need to run it in one book along with the world overview and plenty of stuff to use to run adventures, that's a seller right there.


Strangely I would love the Palladium Games stuff if they had a better system. They hit all the value markers pretty much spot on with their core books... most of the time.

2 comments:

  1. As a player and a GM I have to agree and disagree.

    I like the 3 book approacb for D&D (especially the way it was done for 5th ed) and the 2 book approach for most other games.

    The players only need certain information, the GM needs a little extra, imo.

    The limited edition stuff is for die-hard fans, and in some cases just looks neat.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As a player and a GM I have to agree and disagree.

    I like the 3 book approacb for D&D (especially the way it was done for 5th ed) and the 2 book approach for most other games.

    The players only need certain information, the GM needs a little extra, imo.

    The limited edition stuff is for die-hard fans, and in some cases just looks neat.

    ReplyDelete