D&D 4E Combining Vancian and Will/Daily from 4E

[TimA]

My turn to LoL, did you read? The $25 is for for printing, binding, and shipping for all the books that came out in a year.
Of course if you want to go by your estimate of $5 per book, I can adjust that number from $25 to $45. That would strengthen my argument unfairly, though.

No your entire argument is total bunk. Nothing can strengthen it to being more then empty bunk. Sorry.

Which would still be profitable in my estimate.

Much less so then a print book.


As I said, I was basing this off of the fact that almost all of these books can be found for 10% - 20% cheaper than Amazon, who is already selling them for 10% - 30% off the cover price. Since Amazon's business plan most likely does not involve hemorrhaging money, I feel pretty safe assuming the price they are selling the books for is at least cost.

Actually you dont have the first clue how Amazon works. So let me briefly explain it.


1.

Amazon DOES lose money on many sales. Its part of their business plan. They make it up in advertising, their patents on E-commerce processes and by selling certain products that in fact have a huge markup.

Many individual products are actually sold at a small loss though and they are used as a teaser to get you in the virtual door to buy other things which do have a huge mark up.

Some gaming books are likely one of those products sold at a loss because gamers tend to buy other books like fiction novels and video games on which the company DOES make money. The D&D books themselves are simply considered a marketing cost to Amazon.


2.

Many of the books on Amazon, ARENT BEING SOLD BY AMAZON. They are also a listing service for 3rd parties to list their own products for re-sale or even direct sale in the case of producers.

So your assumption that Amazon is buying and storing lots of D&D books they need to turn a profit on is faulty. They are just letting WoTC list their books there. WoTC can then sell them to consumers at or below their own MSRP while still making more money because of cutting out the traditional middle man.




But you may be as in the know as you believe. Can you point me towards anything that indicates the wholesale price of the D&D books published last year?

Yes I am. I've been in involved in wholesale distribution for retailers for about 12 years now as a career. I know all about how it works and where the money is.

And no, WoTC would never publish the wholesale price. That would undermine their retailers and their own direct online sales. You would have to get a catalog from someone who owns a gamestore to show you the one they get from WoTC. There are several store owners on this forum you can ask if you like.

Of course that would likely violate an NDA or two and get them sued and shut down so they would likely tell you no.

Granted, I didn't account for server costs, nor IT. But given the number of customers they serve, they would have to have the most expensive IT department I can currently imagine being staffed by human beings in order to have the cost per person exceed $0.05 per month.

LOL thats so far off its laughable.

Heres how you actually run a business. Pay attention.

Assume with Magic cards that WoTC is in the 10-15 million dollar year income range. Thats a 35% federal tax.

6$ per customer per month. 72$ a year gross. Less 35% = 42 per customer. Assume a 20% operating cost (hardware, power, bandwidth,etc) which is fairly low but IT runs low in that regard. = 28$

So you have 28$ per customer profit per year just assuming taxes and hard cost of business expenses.


Median Salary for an entry level IT systems analyst. (your basic IT guy) is 54,000 a year. However the employer pays FUTA and medicare taxes on his salary as well as the cost of insurance plans. Generally pushing the real cost of en employee to around 1.3X of salary.

For a real cost of 70,200 For just one IT guy.

70,200 divided by 28 Means you need 2500 DDI customers just to pay for 1 entry level IT guy in order to break even. How many IT guys do they have? How many who are more then entry level? How much does the department head make?

Thats not even your real ROI on a DDI customer though. You have to figure customer acquisition costs. Thats how much it costs to get them to sign up before paying you a dime. Advertising, etc.

This varies wildly per industry from 400 up to 5,000 per customer. But they have a built in base so lets low ball even the low end and say they have a 200$ cost of acquisition.

If you figure that in you have to retain each DDI customer for almost 10 years before they break even on the cost of acquisition. During which time of course company costs for maintaining the account are being accrued in the form of labor and space rentals.

So to get specific for DDI since the 60K members have been bandied about lets use that number.

60K gets them 1,680,000 Per year. Sounds good right? Oops.
Cost of acquisitions means that those 60K members cost 12,000,000 to get. So your only 10.5 million in the hole at the end of this year, things are looking up..... and 9million in the hole for your initial customers only at the end of year 2, and so forth and so forth

You can see for yourself with the simple, actual, business math how long they would have to maintain this stinker to turn a profit. And all of that assumes a 100% retention rate of customers year to year. Which is very doubtful.

Nope sorry, DDI is a stinker of a business decision and always was.


I admit being suprised that you have the gall to laugh at my logic while you propose a 49% tax on a web database and app set. Even at 24.5% state and 24.5% local, that seems far beyond credible.

Thats because you dont know what your talking about. As stated above the Federal alone is 35%. Plus state and local. Many companies pay over 60% in taxes and fees just to operate.

I will never disagree with increased quality, but it isn't nessasarily the fault of the book if it doesn't sell. Betamax was superior to VHS, Sega was superior to Nintendo, the Tucker was superior to any other car at the time, yet all failed.

Beta had a very limited library and cost much more to produce and sell. It was not beaten by a comparable product. It was beaten by a much cheaper product with more uses.


Sega being better is by no means a fact. They attempted to reach out to a more adult audience in a time before adults were ready for it. Sega lost because they tried to run while the video game industry was still learning to walk. Totally different.

The tucker failed for many reasons. Bad publicity, a hunk of crap prototype in the unveiling to the press and a very public criminal trial for stock fraud among them. Hardly a comparable situation.

"Well there's your problem."
Obviously, nobody in WotC or Hasbro has a shred of business acumen, or at least, they keep all those people in the mail room...

I have no doubt there were many people who told them it was a stupid idea. They just didnt listen. Companies do it all the time.

If they had actually followed through with a good virtual gaming table and continuing online support they could have raised the price of DDI and gotten far more customers, maybe even blossomed it into its own online game to push 4e with and then DDI would have been a marketing cost. it wouldnt, by itself have needed to be self sustaining.

That is probably what they had in mind at first and might have saved it. However when they scrapped the VTT they should have dropped the whole thing.


No, I think instead we can say this. Obviously they believe differently than you based on the information they have available.


You know who else had an opinion based on the information available?

Rhythm and motion ( Blackberry )
Netflix
Kodak
MF global.

Should I go on? Just because a company decides on a course of action doesnt mean its a good one



So, Facebook? Don't they have a D&D thing now. (I honestly don't know, I abandoned my Facebook account ages ago.)

According to my NWN complete box, yes they do. Its called heroes of neverwinter. Never tried it but facebook can be a great avenue for games and advertising. Just ask Zynga.

3 letters.

 

[Arlough]

[MENTION=6690878]TimA[/MENTION]
Apparently you are too busy being clever to have noticed we moved this to a thread that isn't about combining magic methods.
If you want a response, make your case there.

 

[TimA]

[MENTION=6690878]TimA[/MENTION]
Apparently you are too busy being clever to have noticed we moved this to a thread that isn't about combining magic methods.
If you want a response, make your case there.

if you have to duck my points in this way then I win. Kind of like in WWE when one wrestler is out of the ring for a 10 count.

You bailed. I win. What more is there for me on this topic?

 

[Neonchameleon]

I could potentially get behind that idea if it weren't for the fact that each encounter apparently has its own energy reserve. That just doesn't work well for me.

It's not that each encounter has its own energy reserve. It's that when you rest you recover a certain proportion of your energy. And to me that makes perfect sense - both that you recover some and that you don't recover all.

I'd rather have a common energy reserve (using tokens for example) and a set of spells appropriate for encounter-based use. Then you expend a token to fire of any one of those spells. Next round, you want to cast it again so you spend another token on it. Then you've got a common energy reserve, but you can pick the specific mix of how that energy is spent.

I would consider doing the same with dailies too, particularly for martial dailies.

What about instead of at-will, it's like 8 times per day? Or some good number depending on the assumed average usage in a typical adventure? That might satisfy both camps, those who want at will, and those who want resource management

I like your idea but I think it partly misses my personal biggest issue with the vancian caster:

At low levels he doesn't have enough magic to be that magically useful. Being able to at-will magic missiles does help somewhat though so that's a good step.

But at high levels he has way way too much magic. A high level caster has 30 or 40 actual good spells and he'll never be able to use them all. Though he will be able to use many of the most powerful ones I suppose, that means that his character sheet is bloated with tons of useless stuff he doesn't even want to use.

I think that low level magic users should have enough magic to contribute magically in some capacity for several encounters. And I think that higher level magic users should not significantly increase this capacity, though they should increase their spell power of course. I'd like to see a first level caster able to cast around 8-10 spells per day with a 20th level caster really no more than double that (and of course not all 20 of those spells should be nova-powerful, it should be a range of relatively powerful and relatively average spells at all levels).

Because if you stab someone, IRL, with a knife you expect them to bleed out their RL HP.

Because if you use an encounter power in real life you.... what exactly are you doing?

If I stab someone with a knife IRL and score a critical hit I expect them to die. Not "Lose d4+2 hit points, either maximised or doubled - which is less than a second level fighter gets".

Saying "use an encounter power in real life" is about as meaningful as saying "roll a skill check in real life". Unless you say what the encounter power is or what the skill check is and what the context is I can't say what you are doing.

I, thanks to a friend of mine, was able to see early on that I made the flavor and the mechanics made... the result of a set of rules. My first Bard in 4e was just a reflavored warlord, for example. The sorcerer was chosen to have a wizardy feel without all the rule complications and binder of spell pages. While my wizard carries a spellbook, I as a player do not want to.

See arbitrary claim above.

The trouble here is that a specialist wizard is more powerful than a sorceror, period.

If the level is odd, a wizard should be able to cast 3 spells of their highest level (and knows two). 1 for being a wizard, 1 for the specialist school, and 1 for high int. Of their second highest level, the wizard should be able to cast four spells. And know a minimum of four. The sorceror can't cast anything of a spell level equal to the wizard's highest level, can cast four spells of their second highest level, and only knows two.

If the level is even, the sorceror knows 1 spell of his highest level and can cast it four times in a day. The wizard knows four and can cast up to four times - so the wizard, if he chooses, can spam with the sorceror at the highest level of spells - assuming he wants no flexibility. At the second level of spells, the sorceror knows two and can cast up to six times a day. The wizard only can cast four times a day but knows four separate spells.

So even in terms of spam-casting, a specialist 3e Wizard is only slightly behind the sorceror at even levels and is ridiculously far ahead at odd. And flexibility is power. So are free bonus feats (especially Scribe Scroll), and skill points. Which means there is a reason the wizard was preferred to the sorceror by most people. It's better at the same job.

As soon as we figured out how cheap it was to get wands made by third parties, thus saving us the XP cost, we were all over finding new ways to survive via wands.

Make them yourselves. XP is a river.

I have had the unfortunate experience of being in the ER when a victim of a knifing (kitchen knife at that) was brought in. He was not bleeding out RL HP. He was just bleeding, badly. Two strokes of a chef's knife and, without our amazing modern emergency response and medical repair system, he would have been dead. In fact, either wound should have done him in without aid.

Yup. And yet a dagger does 1d4 + modifier damage in D&D.

However, Wizards is trying to get the large amount of people that went from 3e to Pathfinder or never left. The 4e players are simply a minority because it sold poorly.

Or 4e players are a significant number but not enough for Hasbro's brand target. For that matter it is highly unlikely that if you combine all 3e players with all Pathfinder players it's enough for the $50 million/year Hasbro wants.

First off, 60,000 people isnt . It just really isnt.

And that's 60,000 people giving income every month. At one of my tables of 5 D&D players, we have a total of 1 with a subscription. And 1 other with most of the books but a lapsed subscription (me). 60,000 is a lower bound on active players buying stuff.

I really hope there is no assumed number of encounters a day, one, or six encounters a day or what have you, should be supported.

The only way you can do that with anything approximating balance is to put everyone onto simmilar cooldowns.

 

[Neonchameleon]

However, you do talk about reflavoring whereas I was talking about the original flavour of a class.

So, when I play wizards I play them because I'm looking for the pointy hat wizard. When I play sorcerers I am looking for the flashy spontaneous character. I don't come to a character saying "I want to cast, which has more utility" and go from there.
Might just be how I play.

And I play differently. I think up a character concept then see what I can do mechanically to fit my vision of that concept. Which sometimes results in seemingly offbeat class selection.