D&D 5E Are hardback AP's a waste?

[77IM]

I really only want to buy adventures in PDF format so I can print them out, scribble on the pages, and rearrange them. I'm currently running Phandelver off of a hard copy, and flipping back and forth between the map, the room entries, and the monster statblocks is painful.

 

[weldon]

This actually came up in another thread and so I figured it would be a great topic to discuss.

Do you think big hardback AP's are a waste of money?

I do because of the following reasons. I feel like Wizards could save a lot of money in printing costs by going either paperback or digital format. Let's be honest here. How many of you run the same AP repeatedly? I play with the same group of people so it wouldn't be plausible to run the same AP again because the group already knows what to do. The mystery has gone out of the AP. It basically just becomes this shiny book sitting on my shelf.

If you have to have something physical, then why not just go with a paperback? You could print it for a lot cheaper price and sell it for less. I think what would be best are for these things to go digital. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper and you could charge people 2 or 3 quid per adventure and maybe a fiver for an AP. After you are finished with it, you would then feel like you got your money's worth out of it and just leave it sitting there on your hardrive without it taking up really any space.

I just think hardback adventures are a bit much and could be dealt with a lot better.

I suspect you're overestimating how much case binding adds to the cost. At the quantities Wizards is dealing with, the case bound book probably costs $1.50 (US) more to print than a perfect bound softcover. It might be less.

Considering the market for D&D, I don't think Wizards would see any significant increase in sales by dropping the price of Horde of the Dragon Queen from $29.95 to $28.49. I suspect that demand is fairly inelastic.

If you want to assume that the cost of printing is about 20% of the price of the book, then we might be talking about a $22.49 price instead of $29.95. Again, I suspect demand is relatively inelastic and would not be worth the trouble.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I hate adventures in hardback unless they have something that really ads to the game. I end up marking up adventures, cutting stuff out, adding notes, so the book being pretty means nothing.

I've got softcover books from the 80's that are still fine, I had hardcover books from the 00's that quickly fell apart. Its all in the binding. I'm just more on the usable side and the classic modules with maps on the cover that weren't made "artsy" as much as functional were much better.

And HotDQ's binding is suffering from being laid open on a table.

 

[Uchawi]

But see... the real point is not to get product out there on the market as cheaply as possible. As a matter of fact... it's to get product out on the market as expensive as possible that people are still willing to pay for.

That's the sweet spot you look for... the delicate pivot point that is going to bring in the most money while still getting most people to buy it. That's why the D&D core books were $50... because they knew they could charge $10 to $15 more than other company's books for the same page count because players were going to be willing to spend that extra cash for the D&D name. By the same token... they charge larger prices for official D&D adventures than what indy one-or-two person companies charge for adventures because they KNOW players want the "official" stuff.

Hell... we have huge threads right here on the boards (some of them started by yourself) complaining about the fact that WotC isn't putting out more material for the game. So you're demanding higher-priced product rather than just picking up cheaper, PDFd, already available material *precisely* because you want the D&D name slapped on it. So of course they're going to charge you more than just a couple quid for it, because you're demanding to pay for it.

I paid the higher price for the players handbook, because that book holds the most value as a DM or player. But that same high price discouraged me from buying the DM guide or monster manual.

5E is so simple that the DM guide did not add much from a complexity standpoint to enhance what is already in the players handbook, and there are plenty of monsters available as free supplements to discourage me from investing a lot of money in the monster manual.

 

[delericho]

I didn't end up buying HotDQ, purely because the fact that it was a hardcover put it out of my price range. I've bought a few Paizo APs now (all softcover), because they're just in that price range that I can afford to invest in a gaming product that isn't a core book. I know that HotDQ has more content than the Paizo APs but I think that's part of the problem as well. I don't know that I want to invest in that much of an adventure path straight away. There's always the risk that it's going to be a stinker, which means that I've wasted that much more of my money (I think HotDQ is about/almost double the price of the Paizo APs).

"Hoard..." and "Rise..." are about twice the price of a Pathfinder AP volume, but have about three times the adventure material. Partly this is because the Pathfinder volumes also include a fair amount of supplementary material that is just lacking, and partly it's because the WotC ones don't include many stat blocks - most of them are in the free online appendix.

In fairness, I think WotC have realised that the format of Tyranny of Dragons doesn't really work, and so I'd expect future paths to be a single larger hardback (as with the upcoming path).

I don't think adopting the Pathfinder model of more, smaller books would work for WotC, though. The problem is that sales of a series of adventures always start much stronger than they end - with every additional volume you shed a lot of customers. Pathfinder mitigates this a lot via the subscription model, which D&D just can't do - WotC simply aren't set up for direct sales.

 

[weldon]

I think WotC have realised that the format of Tyranny of Dragons doesn't really work

Why do you think that?

 

[delericho]

Why do you think that?

Why do I not think the format works, or why do I think WotC doesn't think the format works?

The reason I don't think it works is about price points - the two ToD books are rather thin for a rather hefty RRP. Partly this is due to them being in hardback, and partly because there's a minimum reasonable price WotC have to charge for a book to be worth printing at all - I don't think we will ever again see a D&D book from WotC with an RRP of less than $30 (okay, plus or minus a few cents). But they can probably produce a single-volume path with double the page count for $40 and both give people a better deal and make more money themselves - everyone wins.

The reason I think WotC thinks the ToD format doesn't work is quite simple: they're doing something different with PotA.

Of course, I may be wrong on any and all counts. I don't discount that possibility.

 

[neobolts]

If that were true then that's what Paizo would be doing but they don't.

I would argue WotC and Paizo are doing it in a somewhat similar way. WotC's start to finish moedules (like upcoming PotA) are similar to Paizo's collected hardbound APs (hardback Rise of the Runelords, for example, rather than individual AP books that only cover a few levels of play).

 

[weldon]

Why do I not think the format works, or why do I think WotC doesn't think the format works?

The reason I think WotC thinks the ToD format doesn't work is quite simple: they're doing something different with PotA.

I was responding to your statement directly. Why do you think Wizards thinks that?

So while I agree with your assessment that 1 bigger book is more profitable than 2 smaller books, I strongly suspect that Wizards made PotA a single book because they had the time. As long as we're talking personal opinion here, I suspect that Wizards didn't decide that the format doesn't work as much as that's what they had to do for launch and now have the luxury of doing it the "right" way. There just wasn't time to prep both halves of the storyline for the August start of Adventurer's League and the other ToD events (MMO, etc.).

 

[Sailor Moon]

Where does this 1 bigger book is more profitable than 2 smaller ones comes from? If those two smaller books are more popular than the one then the two are clearly better.