D&D 5E Supplemental books: Why the compulsion to buy and use, but complain about it?

[steeldragons]

Personally, I think good GMing advice is more important than half-a-dozen different healing modules.

Agreed, 1000%...which is rather noteworthy as I can't recall the last time I agreed with pemerton. hahaha. But, yes, this is spot on.

 

[Hussar]

Agreed, 1000%...which is rather noteworthy as I can't recall the last time I agreed with pemerton. hahaha. But, yes, this is spot on.

It's been a really weird month. I find myself agreeing with all sorts of people lately that I really rarely agree with.

 

[TwoSix]

It's been a really weird month. I find myself agreeing with all sorts of people lately that I really rarely agree with.

At least you still disagree with Mistwell. The world has not completely fallen off its axis.

 

[MichaelSomething]

This is super big so I'll chime in with some witty statements...

-I can make a character you'll hate no matter what the restrictions or house rules are. Warforged bounty hunter with a French Canadian accent? Half-Orc Bard who raps as his Bardic Music? Fighter who cherry picks a dozen books for the WORST feats to get? The possibilities are endless.
-Would you people who hate splat books pay WOTC to NOT make more books?

 

[pming]

Hiya.

-Would you people who hate splat books pay WOTC to NOT make more books?

Yes...er...sorta. They need to re-start Dungeon and Dragon magazine...in print format, not digital. They need to wait one or two years. Then they take the most popular and "good" articles, ideas, spells, etc and put them in a SINGLE hardback book (like what Unearthed Arcana was for 1e...yes, I know a lot of 1e folks don't like UA, but a lot of 1e folks do...the concept is solid, IMHO). I'd happily pay them $80 every year or two for a nice "compilation" like this. I'm not going to pay them $20 six times a year for books I'm only going to be using 20% of the material...I'd rather just give them nothing and make it up myself.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Half-Orc Bard who raps as his Bardic Music?

This is awesome.

 

[aramis erak]

Hiya.



Yes...er...sorta. They need to re-start Dungeon and Dragon magazine...in print format, not digital. They need to wait one or two years. Then they take the most popular and "good" articles, ideas, spells, etc and put them in a SINGLE hardback book (like what Unearthed Arcana was for 1e...yes, I know a lot of 1e folks don't like UA, but a lot of 1e folks do...the concept is solid, IMHO). I'd happily pay them $80 every year or two for a nice "compilation" like this. I'm not going to pay them $20 six times a year for books I'm only going to be using 20% of the material...I'd rather just give them nothing and make it up myself.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

Print mags sell poorly across the board these days due to several issues.

• paper costs are proportionally far higher than they were 10 years ago
• people are looking online for equivalent content
• OCR has gotten better, so pirate scans are closer to OEM PDF, and thus erode a larger chunk
• many people are looking for electronic versions (PDF, ePub) instead, due to increased use of tablets and dedicated reading devices
• In order to keep prices down, advertising space allotted has gone up (and thus content down)
• Advertisers don't want to pay as much for the lower circulation
• Advertisers don't want to pay as much for non-content-adjacent ad space, which there is now more to fill
• Shipping is more expensive now.

I seriously think that, if any game can sustain a genuine print mag, it's D&D, but to be blunt, I don't think the workrofit ratio is going to make it worthwhile.

Many of the smaller games do magazines, but they do them as PDF, and allow PoD add on at cost to consumer. Which, by the way, ain't cheap.

 

[pming]

Hiya.
[MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION] : I agree with all your points. Still doesn't change what I'd like. My primary concern and pet-peeve about digital stuff:

(1) too expensive for the actual work/effort put into it (once the production pipeline is up and running, the digital price should lower significantly...it never does....ever).

(2) DRM. It was a horrible idea then...it's worse now. Hate it with a passion! It does nothing but punish honest consumers...it does nothing to stop "pirates".

(3) just about all companies will half-donkey it; they will take the most simplistic method of creating, say, a "digital magazine", and ignore almost all of the benefits of it actually being digital (such as using layers for PDF backgrounds/borders; allowing multiple languages; allowing easy printing...sections of the "pdf", color choices for fonts, etc; embedding links, sounds, video, interactive forms, etc.). In short, they basically just try and make a "dead tree" book that you can see on your screen.

(4) advertising; If I'm paying a monthly fee for access to a digital "DragonMag", that fee should cover the cost of making the product. That means that ALL advertising should be either removed completely, or put in the very 'back' of the magazine...where I can easily ignore it all or peruse at my leisure when I'm looking for something to buy. Doesn't bother me as much in dead-tree format...but when I want to print off a 9-page article from a digital magazine, and 25% of that is advertisements it just really grinds my gears! It's wasting paper, wasting space, wasting time and wasting my printer ink...on things I'm not going to likely ever buy.

So, if a "digital only" was available...it's have to go down in price after the first few issues (pipeline set up costs get covered), have no DRM, allow me to do what I want with it (disable background/boarder, print selections, etc.), have fully searchable text with fully hyperlinked ToC/Index, and have no advertising (or all advertising in "back"). In other words...not gonna happen.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[prosfilaes]

(1) too expensive for the actual work/effort put into it (once the production pipeline is up and running, the digital price should lower significantly...it never does....ever).

Or they burnt large piles of money getting it to that point, and once you've established people will pay something, cutting your prices to the bone is simply not a win.

(4) advertising; If I'm paying a monthly fee for access to a digital "DragonMag", that fee should cover the cost of making the product.

If you were willing to pay what it would cost for a monthly magazine without ads, you wouldn't be complaining about the price of a magazine with ads. You can't always get what you want at a price you're willing to pay.

 

[Hussar]

Hiya.

[MENTION=6779310]aramis erak[/MENTION] : I agree with all your points. Still doesn't change what I'd like. My primary concern and pet-peeve about digital stuff:

(1) too expensive for the actual work/effort put into it (once the production pipeline is up and running, the digital price should lower significantly...it never does....ever).

Wow, that's just so many kinds of wrong. Good grief, DDI was seven DOLLARS a month for 150 pages of text (remember you got Dungeon and Dragon with the sub). How much cheaper could it be?

(2) DRM. It was a horrible idea then...it's worse now. Hate it with a passion! It does nothing but punish honest consumers...it does nothing to stop "pirates".

What do you mean by DRM? Watermarking? Password entry only? What?

(3) just about all companies will half-donkey it; they will take the most simplistic method of creating, say, a "digital magazine", and ignore almost all of the benefits of it actually being digital (such as using layers for PDF backgrounds/borders; allowing multiple languages; allowing easy printing...sections of the "pdf", color choices for fonts, etc; embedding links, sounds, video, interactive forms, etc.). In short, they basically just try and make a "dead tree" book that you can see on your screen.

And, are you willing to pay for an interactive, 300 (ish) page digital book every month (after all, if you made Dungeon and Dragon the same size as a novel, that's the word count you're talking about)? And, note, everything that was in Dungeon and Dragon was indexed and searchable through the DDI. If you wanted to find the stat block for some creature on page 37 of Issue 303 of Dungeon, it was a click away.

But, you want all this for less than 7 bucks a month?

(4) advertising; If I'm paying a monthly fee for access to a digital "DragonMag", that fee should cover the cost of making the product. That means that ALL advertising should be either removed completely, or put in the very 'back' of the magazine...where I can easily ignore it all or peruse at my leisure when I'm looking for something to buy. Doesn't bother me as much in dead-tree format...but when I want to print off a 9-page article from a digital magazine, and 25% of that is advertisements it just really grinds my gears! It's wasting paper, wasting space, wasting time and wasting my printer ink...on things I'm not going to likely ever buy.

What advertising did DDI have? I'm looking at my downloaded pdf's from when I had a subscription and I'm not seeing any.

So, if a "digital only" was available...it's have to go down in price after the first few issues (pipeline set up costs get covered), have no DRM, allow me to do what I want with it (disable background/boarder, print selections, etc.), have fully searchable text with fully hyperlinked ToC/Index, and have no advertising (or all advertising in "back"). In other words...not gonna happen.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

Yes, because what you want is completely unrealistic and no one could ever make a cent trying to cater to you. Actually, that's not true. WOTC gave you a no DRM, fully searchable magazine with no advertising, but, true, you couldn't disable the backgrounds and it didn't go down in price after the first few issues.