News Digest: D&D New Releases, Savage Worlds New Edition, Sequel to Tales from the Loop, and more!

Matt S1 · Sep 7, 2018

As a DM who started in 1977, that D&D art book was an intant buy. Amazon for $31 folks.

Jhaelen · Sep 7, 2018

Mhm, Things from the Flood looks tasty!

Abstruse · Sep 7, 2018

Jhaelen said:
Mhm, Things from the Flood looks tasty!

Not...the adjective I'd use after looking through some of the art from that book...

tmanbeaubien · Sep 7, 2018

Matt S1 said:
As a DM who started in 1977, that D&D art book was an intant buy. Amazon for $31 folks.

Even better - the special boxed edition is $76 and change instead of $125!! I'll take it!

Abstruse · Sep 7, 2018

Just so you know, anytime I list the price in a column, I always try to list the cover price or MSRP of any book or game, because that rarely changes. Places like Amazon or Wal-mart are almost always going to be between 20-40% cheaper because of how their distribution and profit methods work (they sell so much in volume that they can discount to razor-thin margins off wholesale), and many other outlets will have lower prices as well through various discounts. This is especially true of novels and not-directly-related-to-games books like the art book. However, those discounted rates fluctuate a lot, the discounts on a lot of game books or boxed sets aren't usually that steep (because they don't move in the same volume), and most independent stores can't discount nearly as much since their overhead is more - particularly local game stores. And it's very, very rare (like it only happens when something's out of print or otherwise hard to find) that anyone charges more than the cover price or MSRP.

I just don't want you walking into your local game store expecting to pay $30 for Starfinder or $75 for that special edition Art & Arcana book and get sticker shock, thinking your local store is trying to rip you off or that I lied about the price.

barasawa · Sep 7, 2018

I like Savage Worlds, and a real boost in it's popularity among the group I'm in is that the rule book (soft cover) is $10.
Suddenly going up to $30 is NOT going to be popular with them.
Some will still buy it, but if they're tripling the cost like that, I sure as heck hope they make it totally worth it

Abstruse · Sep 8, 2018

barasawa said:
I like Savage Worlds, and a real boost in it's popularity among the group I'm in is that the rule book (soft cover) is $10.
Suddenly going up to $30 is NOT going to be popular with them.
Some will still buy it, but if they're tripling the cost like that, I sure as heck hope they make it totally worth it

They haven't released specific details yet, but the Savage Worlds Deluxe Explorer's Edition (the current printing of the current edition) is a digest-sized book. Which is why it retails for $9.99. This is most likely a standard RPG-sized book, which puts the price point on par for PEG's other similar releases like Savage RIFTS, Deadlands Reloaded, Flash Gordon, and the various non-digest companion books and campaign settings. And it's still way below what anyone else in the market charges, since the standard price is about $50-60 for a core rulebook. Granted, those are typically hardcover and not softcover and you don't see a lot of softcover releases outside POD...

Either way, I'd expect the new edition (Seriously, Shane, just please call it Savage Worlds 2nd Edition and don't pull the crap WotC tried with "D&D Next is just the playtest, we're calling it just 'Dungeons & Dragons' now (even though everyone calls it 5th Edition so much we eventually caved) thing that makes it hard to distinguish for press), to eventually get a digest-sized rulebook at a similar price point later on down the line once they have better support for the game and can fine-tune the rules and justify the sort of massive print run that makes that price-point feasible. Don't want a warehouse full of a print run that calls them "Bannies" because someone's finger slipped.

barasawa · Sep 9, 2018

Abstruse said:
They haven't released specific details yet, but the Savage Worlds Deluxe Explorer's Edition (the current printing of the current edition) is a digest-sized book. Which is why it retails for $9.99. This is most likely a standard RPG-sized book, which puts the price point on par for PEG's other similar releases like Savage RIFTS, Deadlands Reloaded, Flash Gordon, and the various non-digest companion books and campaign settings. And it's still way below what anyone else in the market charges, since the standard price is about $50-60 for a core rulebook. Granted, those are typically hardcover and not softcover and you don't see a lot of softcover releases outside POD...

Either way, I'd expect the new edition (Seriously, Shane, just please call it Savage Worlds 2nd Edition and don't pull the crap WotC tried with "D&D Next is just the playtest, we're calling it just 'Dungeons & Dragons' now (even though everyone calls it 5th Edition so much we eventually caved) thing that makes it hard to distinguish for press), to eventually get a digest-sized rulebook at a similar price point later on down the line once they have better support for the game and can fine-tune the rules and justify the sort of massive print run that makes that price-point feasible. Don't want a warehouse full of a print run that calls them "Bannies" because someone's finger slipped.

Other products and other companies aren't relevant to the pricing. Of course, unless PEGinc has added a LOT of content of some kind, I can't see them justifying a tripling of the cost. Of course, world books or settings are where they really get their money, but we're talking about the rules, not those. Now if they've added enough rules to that rulebook to bulk it up without doing the scam of increased font size, then they've pretty much thrown away and shot with orbital nukes their motto of 3Fs (Fast - Fun - Furious).
Of course I don't expect a lot of changes or expansions to the rules at all, so what are they doing to justify that much higher cost for the paperback version? Sure we don't know, otherwise I'd know whether it seemed kosher or not. That lack of knowledge has me a bit worried about it. After all, there are lots of gamers that don't have a lot of spare cash to toss at revamps of the game engine, and unfortunately I am often one of them. I have to weigh all my prospective expenses against my limited funds.
And yes, I did notice that there will be a conversion document released so technically you don't have to get the new book, but it's just not the same. People like having an updated copy at hand, and after all, if the previous $10 version and a free document brings you up to date, then why the triple price? I expect that printing costs in general have gone up, but I doubt they're anywhere near triple. On top of that, I wouldn't be surprised if the print run will be high enough to get discounts from the printers like most bulk purchases.

Of course RIFTS, and especially Flash Gordon were more expensive, they had to pay someone else a big licensing fee. I have no idea how much, but I bet the Flash Gordon was a whole pile of pretty pennies. But, those aren't the rules that everyone needs, they are settings, and the Players usually only need a couple of pages of the new stuff, not the whole book.
You know, if you look for games out there that are just the ruleset/engine, you can find a number of them that give PDFs of that for free, but not the adventures and settings.

I totally agree about the naming, it's not just a reprint with some errata, we know they have other stuff, so having a clear indication of which one it is can only help. Had enough trouble with trying to find the correct errata between the 1st printing release, deluxe, explorer, etc. As to tacking on some kind of adjective or other random word, that's way too confusing for everyone. (Take note Android Devs, nobody knows what the sequence of Icecream, Jellybean, Gateau, and Popsicle are. Use freaking numbers so it's obvious to the users! Speaking of which, how many readers knew that other than being a french cake, gateau isn't a release of the Android OS, at least not yet)

Also on the name front, you can only get away with a word based version delineation once, after that it's confusing, and PEGinc has used a lot of them already. Though if they used "Reloaded" as it's the current revamping name for settings, it might work, except it's not the same version as that in those various "Reloaded" products. So I guess that wouldn't really work either. I really hope some of the folks over at PEGinc read this post

Abstruse also mentioned POD (Print On Demand). Sure it might be an option, but after all costs for that, it'll probably be as expensive or more so than the kickstarter book. After all, I'm pretty sure that PEGinc will have a large enough print run to have a scale of economy price break from the printer, whatever company that is.
As to run size, that's one of the great things about getting funding from a kickstarter for a product you ARE doing. It's like a preorder, so you have pretty much a guarantee of a certain sales level. You can of course add a bit more to handle those retailers didn't kick in and the stragglers that missed also the kickstarter for some reason or another. It's no where near the gamble that a blind production run can be.

But I'm babbling far too much and going into the details about my thinking, but I guess those aren't really necessary.

Boiled down to the basics:

$30 is too much for just a mod of the rules they've been selling for $10.
Maybe it has enough new stuff to make it worthwhile, but we don't know yet.
Products that are not just a ruleset/engine aren't something to compare SW to, which is JUST an engine/ruleset. (At least as far as we know)

Please be aware, I'm not for or against the new version of SW yet, though I am hopeful, but it does spark some big questions with the tiny amount of info we currently have. Also, I'm not trying to argue or fight or anything else with anyone, just trying to be clear. As to opinions, we all have them, and as long as they don't bring someone to try and hurt another, that's perfectly fine

Thanks a lot for reading this annoying long post

Abstruse · Sep 9, 2018

barasawa said:
Other products and other companies aren't relevant to the pricing.

Except it is when you're talking about industry standard pricing. These factors are set because, unless you're talking big names, freelancer writers, designers, artists, editors, layout, etc. all pretty much get paid about the same amount. Print costs are more or less the same, the only variables being page count and print run size (most printers lower the per-unit price the more you order, so the cost goes down per book at 5000 copies, 10,000 copies, etc.) So yes, it's more accurate to compare the cost of the book to other publishers than it is to a digest-sized reprint of rules that were already written and edited that just needed to be laid out for the new format.

Speaking of size, this probably isn't going to be a digest-sized book like the Deluxe Explorer's Edition is. It's more likely to be a standard sized book like other RPGs are, closer to 8 1/2 by 11 than the 6 by 9 of the current printing. That's what the original Explorer's Edition was printed as (the Deluxe Edition didn't come out until 2011). Also, this is a new edition, not "a mod". Even if there's backward compatibility to an extent, it's probably not going to be just minor changes since, even from the information released so far, it's going to have some very large rules changes and game term changes with whole sections being redone.

Oh, and POD is way more expensive than a traditional print run. The only difference is you can't do a print run in small numbers. It's the trade-off between the two. Print 5000 at about $4 a book and hope you can sell them all to recoup your costs, or use POD which costs $12 a book. No large publisher is going to use POD for a main product run because the costs are too high, even factoring in storing books before they sell. It's also much slower, so a print run for a POD release selling a few thousand copies may take weeks to actually get to everyone that ordered it instead of just shipping everything out at once. PODs only work for small publishers (who wouldn't be able to sell the numbers at first to justify a large print run unless they get lucky in crowdfunding) or for keeping products in-print that don't make sense to have large warehouses full of products (books for previous editions of the game, like they're doing for Dungeons & Dragons, GURPS, and Cyberpunk 2020).