The best value in gaming is gone...

[dragonlordofpoondari]

I do indeed worship at the altar of the Oneness.

--Erik

All Hail the Great Brown Boognish!
Hail!

 

[Treebore]

That is definitely another thing that is going to have to be cleared up for me. Do I only have access to all the info as long as I pay rent? Or will those compilations at the end of the month be downloadable? Able to be printed on demand?

Yeah, OP, your right. The best value in gaming is gone.

Pathfinder and GameMAstery are the next best things available!

One good thing this whole 4E announcement has done for me. I was wondering how I was going to afford supporting Paizo and TLG every month, and buy all the other RPG stuff I want. With WOTC 3E and 4E now out of the picture, its become much easier for me.

From here on out I buy nothing but adventures outside of TLG for my D&D fixes.

Thanks WOTC!!

 

[Mitchbones]

I want Dungeon. I don't care about Dragon. I don't care about some virtual tabletop or web-enhancements that I can get free now anyway. I want 900+ pages per year of ADVENTURES.

With the DI, that (assuming they keep it at the same level of content) will cost $120. With the magazine format, it only cost $40. And now I don't even have a hard copy... I'll have to pay a lot more to print it out!

The magazine is the best format in gaming. It is far, far cheaper than books. Buying adventures singly or as part of Pathfinder/Gamemastery will be at least as much as the DI costs.

And no one is making Dungeon alternatives. All I've seen (ala Kobold Quarterly) is Dragon alternatives. And Pathfinder is just adventure path. I want unconnected adventures where one can be used without spoiling the others, in case you want to DM in one and play in another. And I want variety. I want a magazine like back in the good old days before the Paizo boys club where the editors didn't write half the adventures. I want the slush pile... I want the days where Dungeon published at least one adventure a month from a new author, with many of the others from up-and-comers. I remember when Chris Perkins was just some guy who wrote adventures and submitted them to Dungeon, and still had at least half rejected! Where will the new game designers come from now?

I guess there's still Dungeon in the DI, but it's not print and it costs $120 a year... might as well buy print modules for that. The best value in gaming is gone.

Of course, this is the third time Dungeon has been killed... the first was when TSR went bankrupt. It came back from that thanks to WotC. The next time was when Polyhedron killed Dungeon... I stopped subscribing when I got an issue with only a single adventure in it... it was a terrible value just like with the DI now... I resubscribed later when the format changed back to all adventures. And now it's died again, with only an overpriced online-only version to replace it.

I'm not feeling very charitable towards 4e right now. My hope is that the DI will flop and Wizards will go back to making the magazines again and Dungeon will be back, ressurected for the third time. Not likely, though. They could make money... even if they doubled the price of Dungeon, it'd still be a better value than DI or Pathfinder.. surely they could make enough money then?

The horse died a long time ago, please stop kicking it.

 

[Agamon]

Pathfinder and GameMastery are the next best things available!

This is truth.

 

[Cassander]

I probably should not have strayed into my less severe issues with the lack of variety recently in Dungeon due to 1/3 of the adventures being adventure path and having the editors and same people writing adventures rather than having ones from the slush pile. And I do think the adventures in the paths and written by editors are good... I regret that it sounded like I might be insulting their abilities... my only issue is lack of variety, and that's just an editorial decision. But the price is part of what insulated Dungeon from problems with variety/adventure selection... even if you don't use some of the content, it's still a good deal.

My main point is that no matter how good the DI or Pathfinder are, they still won't be anywhere close to a good a value, adventure page/$, as Dungeon was. I wish Paizo was still making a magazine instead, or Wizards, or somebody. Paizo said it made them money, so it seems like the ideal product. It delivers the best value to gamers and still makes money. Why aren't there MORE magazines out there? The production values are top notch, the adventures are good, and you get lots of pages/$, even taking ads into account. It's over twice as good as any other product in terms of value. So why no more magazines?

 

[MKMcArtor]

So why no more magazines?

Because the magazine business sucks, frankly. And starting up a new magazine that could even possibly maybe have the same amount of exposure as Dragon or Dungeon would cost at least 10s—if not 100s—of thousands of dollars. I'm hoping Wolfgang Baur's Kobold Quarterly becomes a profitable success for him, but I doubt I'll ever see it on the newsstands.

 

[Scribble]

I will miss being able to glance through a new dragon on the train or on the can.

But being more likely to use it in my game, I like better.

Maybe I'll invest in one of those ebook readers, so I can still glance through it on the train... or the can.

 

[megamania]

I wonder.... no I hope WoTC is reading these and rethinking their current course of action.








doubt it........

 

[Erik Mona]

I too am voting for Kobold Quarterly to eventually replace Dragon on the newsstand (eventually). The first issue is pretty cool.

--Erik

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

The press pack at Gencon says $9.95 a month.

Per person. No more handing off an issue to someone else to read or run. Got a six person group, and you're looking at a $70/month for content and a character generator.