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

[weldon]

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.

We are talking about Tyranny of Dragons specifically. Delricho and I are suggesting that producing a single book for that AP would be more profitable than splitting the same content into two books and selling them separately. If you look at Elemental Evil, it follows that producing a single book (Princes of the Apocalypse) for this AP will be more profitable than splitting it into two books released a month or two apart.

 

[BrockBallingdark]

I ran Red Hand of a Doom once and might run it again while updated to 5e. It'll be in pretty rough shape when that's done.
And I woul totally run Rise of the Runelords again. And might if I ever end up with a second group.

My Red Hand of Doom is a little rough too.

I've run the Rise of the Runelords twice already with different groups. I don't buy a AP to run only once, hence hardbacks work for me.

 

[Jester David]

"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.

It's probably closer to 50% more. APs contain 60 pages of adventure, for 360-pages in the entire storyline compared to Hoard and Tyranny, which have 96-pages each. But you level much slower in Pathfinder, even using the Fast track, so there's a lot more filler combats.

Still, the WotC storyline books are a bit on the anorexic side.

 

[Jester David]

My Red Hand of Doom is a little rough too.

I've run the Rise of the Runelords twice already with different groups. I don't buy a AP to run only once, hence hardbacks work for me.

I have the big collector's edition of RotRL, so I definitely want to get two uses of that bad boy, even if I need to convert statblocks. Plus all the accessories I've purchased.

 

[Kaychsea]

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.

You aren't far off but it's probably less (ca. 75c-$1 IMO), but if we assume $1.50 that probably means a retail difference of nearer $6 depending on the trade and retail markups.

Pricing PDFs when they are in competition with books on the shelf is a difficult issue. Assuming you are in 1st print you are still covering development costs and each PDF is likely to be cannibalising your shelf sales. So price it at the levels some people seem to expect and you will lose money. The only time it makes sense is when you aren't worried about development costs (ie sold out 1st impression) or are pricing them at a reasonable point from the start, probably 15-25% off print. The lower number if you don't think you will sell more copies in total. The problem with this approach is that people aren't stupid, and a reasonable number of people will wait you out, particularly for non-core product, which is pretty much everything WotC will be providing for the foreseeable.

That's without factoring in sales lost to piracy.

 

[Sailor Moon]

My Red Hand of Doom is a little rough too.

I've run the Rise of the Runelords twice already with different groups. I don't buy a AP to run only once, hence hardbacks work for me.

Is your copy of Runelords the hardback or softcover?

 

[Tony Vargas]

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 don't care for them myself (preferring to come up with my own stuff if I run a campaign, or running 'free' pdf for Encounters/Expeditions), but they do deliver a lot of pre-packaged adventure. You could play one of those things for years. Apportioned out over 4-6 people, that's a pretty good value.

 

[delericho]

It's probably closer to 50% more. APs contain 60 pages of adventure

The last several Pathfinder volumes have had 50 pages of adventure. And, as I noted in my previous post, the D&D ones don't include stat-blocks in the text, which makes a big difference (especially at higher levels in Pathfinder).

 

[Jester David]

The last several Pathfinder volumes have had 50 pages of adventure. And, as I noted in my previous post, the D&D ones don't include stat-blocks in the text, which makes a big difference (especially at higher levels in Pathfinder).

Pathfinder APs don't tend to print monster statblocks either, abd just refer you to the appropriate Bestiary.

 

[delericho]

Pathfinder APs don't tend to print monster statblocks either, abd just refer you to the appropriate Bestiary.

"The Divinity Drive" has 15 full stat blocks printed in the 50 pages of adventure.

(I would add that each of these 15 takes up about half a page. It is worth noting, of course, that this is a high-level adventure which means the length of the blocks is unusual. However the number of full stat blocks presented is not.)