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I have always had mixed feelings about magic being dumped into cyberpunk. As a standalone genre, it also cleaves very much to the era that birthed it. It is hard to make a real replacement of the Japanese megacorp and not changing it.

I think its a case of people thinking "OSR" rather than specifically the term "retroclone." But it is a good point that people seem to be echoing in the comments about specifically what a clone is. The OSR is much more than that.

I think it is very Arthurian. The court & proper knighthood follows the new (but authorized) morality within a 'contained' land. But you have the theme that man can only aspire to perfection, which isn't really possible in the transitory world. The struggle is to avoid a 'fall back' into the...

I can understand charging for the playtest (as opposed to free), as that's one way to get people invested in giving some feedback. But buying the playtest on PDF should include a copy of the final PDF when it is available and a coupon towards some discount on the physical version.

Or there may be some other transformative / disruptive force, such as a higher performance / better formatted wiki + (ouch) AI. I just started a campaign using some beta rules using Google Docs with a group split between video conference and 'in person,' and am surprised how well it is going...

I think it can be a useful or valid excuse, because art is usually a fixed price. One of the original, great values of crowdfunding is that it can remove the sting of having to put up so much money (including art) before making money. They used to reward supporters too with much better...

Publishers that want to compete with each other know what their customers want. Some go the full color experience for their core products, and that is expensive. They've completely and fully monetized their PDF businesses, and also put out starter sets. A lot of businesses will 'eat it'...

I suspect that for many of those critical minerals, something is in the works. We have become critically reliant on China and that's got to change. That really has to be addressed in labor visa reform parallel to improvements in robotics (and AI to drive it). Yeah, that makes better sense...

That's true, but it is an issue when items get drop shipped directly from China to an end buyer.

Unfortunately, the port situation is its own sort of mini-problem (as we found out in the Portland area when a small dispute between unions shut down the international shipping port for years), but they are entitled to charge for the process. I believe the Trump administration was also...

The out of balance shipping rate and the import scheme? If so, the former enabled the latter. Without ultra, ultra cheap rates, those Chinese companies couldn't afford to send you a dozen cheap socks for $5. The 'de minimis' exception problem is that $800 wasn't very 'minimis', and the number...

The de minimis problem was a major exploit that needed closing. Shipping by mail China -> USA is ultra cheap because China was / is allowed to claim 'developing status,' whereas USA -> China is very expensive. This is also how companies like Shein are able to curb stomp American companies. A...

Yes, it makes a lot of sense, but it doesn't serve the customer when they are paying full cover price and the shipping costs are terrible as compared with Amazon. The addition of a PDF just doesn't cut it.

I agree. And there are significant shifts happening already. As a parallel to this, when we changed from floppies to CDROM, the CDROM was just treated as a big floppy. But developers were able to do far, far more in terms of what the space enabled. Right now, AI is producing content in art...

That's possible, but I think there are other complicating factors as well. In the lifetime of 5th edition, we've seen prices get kicked up quite a bit, on the full color printed books. But we've also seen much higher and more monetized use of PDFs. That's not entirely terrible given that console...

Right, it is possible. I imagine that Diamond could have 'hosted' much larger blocks of inventory at Amazon for some savings and so ate it on their margin because they were making enough on other sales. I see that in tech often enough. But it does make me wonder, given that game distribution...

Not a lawyer. But I saw first hand a number of tech companies get screwed out of inventory when some tech distributors and retailers imploded. You have to muster significant legal help to go to bat for you to protect your consignment goods, and it may well be you don't want to spend several...

They don't necessarily do, but I know quite a few older GMs for example, that buy stuff and never end up using it. They have more disposable income.

From a business perspective, that 20% may well be more important if they represent a larger amount of income than the 20%. Those older buyers may not get the most use out of what they buy but, they have income to buy more. But that's not to say millions that don't spend money aren't important...

I think its worth looking at this as a form of business disruption and an opportunity reconfigure how games are made and distributed. The tabletop game industry is made of companies that already make very different products (based on their component parts and what you need to play), so tariffs...