D&D 4E 4e price increase?

[Piratecat]

On that note, I hope I'll be allowed this comment: watching _some_ of the biggest 4e boosters on this site and how they treat anything but joy at all things 4e - I never, ever want to play D&D with them. Way to represent for 4e!

Allow me to interject with a comment. This sort of statement is utterly useless on these boards. Feel strongly about it? Cool! Tell it to your cat, or your buddies, or your spouse. But don't type it here. Blanket insults aren't something that anyone particularly wants to read.

Feel free to email me if this is somehow unclear.

 

[crazy_cat]

1.) Than you would guess wrong, at least in the world of adults…

QFT.

I really don't see why the minimal possible price increase for the PHB/DMG/MM is causing such an issue. I have them on pre-order with Amazon.co.uk at £41.11 (with free delivery) and this translates to about US $80 at the moment.

This amount should not be an issue to any sensible adult given they have at least five months notice to save up for the event.

To put the amount in context I took my partner and our daughter out for dinner on Sunday evening as we couldn't face cooking - nice meal at a pizza place, one glass of wine each for the adults - decent tip left - no change from £50 (US $100 approx)

The core D&D books are probably the best value purchase you can make, assuming you will be actually using them to play D&D and not just putting them on a shelf (and even then they offer pretty good value IMHO )

 

[Vigilance]

Odd? I don't think so. If your happy with the game system you are using right now then why the heck would you want to spend a $120.00 to replace it?

Because I want the new thing!

You're still looking at this from a financial cost benefit angle, and I'm looking at it from a "want" angle.

This is a total luxury item. Any game is. The "value" of Final Fantasy XII had nothing to do with how happy I was playing FF X. I love FF X and replay that game about once a year. But I still wanted FF XII.

If you can afford to buy something new and different just because you want to its great to know you can waste money like that. However, I would guess $120 is a significant amount of money to most people.

Um, we're talking about a luxury item here.

Your 3e books were a "waste" of money too. You never, ever needed them. You wanted them, because they would entertain you.

I wanted them too, and I also want the 4e books. While price does enter into it, only loosely. If the books are 40 bucks, I can afford them. Maybe not all at once, but 40 bucks is in the range that I can afford.

So to buy 4E, the answer to the question I posed would have to be yes. Unless blowing $120 "just because" has absolutely no impact on your finances. Like others have mentioned, $120 to most gamers, especially young gamers, and those in college, etc... is a very significant amount of money to spend on something you don't need, since it would only be to replace a RPG your already happy with, and already own.

Dude, I'm a freelance writer.

I'm not Mr. Moneybags, and its annoying to me that anyone willing to blow 40 dollars (ZOMG) on a book is being portrayed that way in this thread.

Spending $120 on 4E only makes sense if you don't like what your playing already.

No, spending $120 dollars on 4e makes sense if you think you will get $120 dollars of enjoyment out of those books.

Again, when I bought the 2nd Master and Commander book, I never took the first one into account. Book 2 in the series didn't have to be "eight dollars better" than book 1, and book 3 didn't have to be "16 dollars better" than book one.

I thought I would enjoy reading them. I could afford them. I bought them.

So unless spending money wisely is odd, my question is not odd.

Dude what?

Spending money WISELY would be taking 120 dollars and buying some Microsoft stock with it. We're talking about luxury items here.

NONE of its wise. Its books for pleasure reading. Sheesh.

40 dollars is not an unreasonable amount to pay for a hardback book, so long as you think you will enjoy it.

 

[borc killer]

The core D&D books are probably the best value purchase you can make, assuming you will be actually using them to play D&D and not just putting them on a shelf (and even then they offer pretty good value IMHO )

I could not agree more with that statement.

Also to the people that say “the books are full of errors and typos”… how in the world did you get an early copy of the books? Can you photo copy it and post it for me?

All sarcasm aside I do expect some errors but I also expect this first run of books to be better than they have in the past just based solo on the database they moved to.

We wont know until we have them in our greedy little hands. *shrug*

 

[an_idol_mind]

So a couple of bucks here or there would stop you from purchasing a new edition of a game that you enjoy?

When 3rd edition came out, I was pretty deeply in debt and getting geared up for college. I still enjoyed the 2nd edition game, to the point where I wasn't convinced that the new edition was going to be an actual improvement. But I had been paying attention to the development of 3e, and I figured the low cost of the Player's Handbook made it worth checking out. I bought it, liked the rules, and switched over. Had I not purchased the book, I would have been quite happy with 2nd edition AD&D for a while longer -- it was a game that I enjoyed, and therefore I wouldn't have lost much entertainment value had I chosen to spend my money on other things (like getting a better meal plan in college, for instance -- I spent a lot of that semester pretty hungry due to poor planning and lack of funds).

Now, I'm about to get married, I'm paying off my student loans on top of a number of other bills, and I'm looking into buying a house. I also have other hobbies that take a portion of my time and money, including comics and video games. To top it off, I'm in a similar situation to where I was with the switch to 3e, where I've been following the game but I'm not convinced that the 4th edition will be an improvement. Still, if the Player's Handbook was available for cheap, I might pick it up and give it a try. But those few extra dollars make a difference when everything else is factored in (particularly when the cost of living continues to rise disproportionately to my wages). As it is right now, I can either pay $105 in June for a game that I'm not entirely sold on (not to mention a game that I know will not include some of my favorite classes and monsters in the core books), or $0 on a game that I still have a lot of fun with.

 

[Imaro]

The core D&D books are probably the best value purchase you can make, assuming you will be actually using them to play D&D and not just putting them on a shelf (and even then they offer pretty good value IMHO )

Compared to? I find this a pretty blanket statement to make when the many other roleplaying games give you a complete set of rules for 1/3 the price of the D&D complete rules? This also has the added advantage of promoting more than one person towards actually running the game.

 

[Hella_Tellah]

Um, we're talking about a luxury item here.

Your 3e books were a "waste" of money too. You never, ever needed them. You wanted them, because they would entertain you.

I wanted them too, and I also want the 4e books. While price does enter into it, only loosely. If the books are 40 bucks, I can afford them. Maybe not all at once, but 40 bucks is in the range that I can afford.

Aww, be fair. If economic theory didn't apply to discretionary spending, we'd have no need for marketing departments!

Treebore's argument isn't invalid at all; he's not wrong to apply the theory of marginal value to a good that people don't need. Just because something doesn't have an inelastic demand (like food, a need) doesn't mean economic theory doesn't apply. It's completely reasonable to ask if a product will make you $120 happier--that's the only reasonable way to examine any purchase. It's an impressive feat of marketing that companies can cause us to lose sight of this and purchase something "just because we want it." Rational actors in an economy ask, "Will this product make me happier than any other possible use of the same amount of money?"

It is, however, a fallacy of reasoning to consider money spent on 3rd Edition books when contemplating buying 4th Edition books. The money is already spent, and you can only recover that investment by reselling the books. It's a "sunk cost," and doesn't factor into future purchases. It's irrelevant that you may have spent $5,000 on 3rd Edition products. The only question at hand is whether spending $120 on 4th Edition will make you happier than any other possible use of $120. You're right to ridicule arguments that take investment on 3e products into account.

As an aside, a luxury good is a good for which demand increases with increased discretionary income. I'd say D&D books are more of a normal good, since there's a decreased marginal value to increased spending on D&D books. If they were really luxury goods, like a Lexus or jewelry, there'd be no theoretical limit to the amount you might spend on them, given unlimited income.

(Props to my Microecon profs. Keep them dollas real!)

 

[Cadfan]

Ah, but your economic analysis fails to include the depreciatory effects of spite.

 

[jdrakeh]

Dude, you spend less than a 120 bucks a month on your car insurance AND connection fee?

Luckily, I seem to have finally escaped my history of Crushing Debt.

But, let's compare apples to apples shall we? We're talking the price of two video games. Lots of people buy two video games per year.

Yeah, I'm not sure that's a comparison we should make. I'm fairly certain that if you polled the consuming public about which got played more frequently -- tabletop RPGs or video games -- the answer would be, unequivocally, video games.

I know that, in the past five years, I've easily spent more time with video games. If this holds true for most other (which, again, I suspect that it does), $120 spent on video games is an investment that sees much more return than $120 spent on books.

Thinking about it, what hobby can I get into and enjoy fully for 120 bucks?

Stamp collecting, baseball card collecting, fishing (so long as you only buy the essentials), football (again, provided that you only buy the essentials), baseball (again, essentials), basketball (same deal with essentials), etc, etc. There are quite a few of them, actually. If you're treating fancy shoes and specialized professional play gear as necessary to partake in hobby sports, you need to consider every singel d20 supplement as necessary to play D&D, as well. To be fair, you know

 

[crazy_cat]

Compared to? I find this a pretty blanket statement to make when the many other roleplaying games give you a complete set of rules for 1/3 the price of the D&D complete rules? This also has the added advantage of promoting more than one person towards actually running the game.

Compared to nothing really. If you want to play D&D 4e you may be interested in buying the books - if you don't want to play 4e then you wont be interested. If you want to play another RPG you can buy that instead.

I did post a comparison that I think is relevant above howver - the core books for 4e will cost me less than a meal for my family in a local restaurant. For this amount spent on D&D books I'll get 3 hardback books 200+ pages each, in colour, which I will enjoy reading. Assuming I like teh system I'll also get an RPG to play - maybe weekly, with 3-4 of my friends, for 3-4 hours per session, sounds like excellent value to me.

If I don't like 4e they can join the other stuff on the shelves that I might read from time to time, and I wont buy any more 4e stuff.

People complaining about the 'extortianate' price of D&D 4e need to face facts - if you can't afford the game, which is a luxury item - nobody actually needs D&D, then you are not the WOTCs target audience. They want consumers who are going to actually buy their products.