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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wedgeski" data-source="post: 2723755" data-attributes="member: 16212">Assuming I agree with the inference that RPG sales are declining (jury's still out I guess, we're getting conflicting reports all over the place), a few comments:And yet many of these products are smaller, more bite-sized, and cheaper. I don't think the number of producers is necessarily a factor other than potential purchasers are drowned in material as soon as they visit RPGNow. When that happens it's almost inevitable that they gravitate to someone already in the top-20 list.And yet in theory they have more disposable income as they get older. I know that's true for me and most of my gaming friends, anyway. I buy things now that I wouldn't even consider buying when I was 15 and dreaded a new Monstrous Compendium Appendix because I knew I wouldn't be able to afford it.I would have to say I agree with this. CRPGS and MMORPG's offer a quite different gaming experience than a true RPG, but they're hugely addictive, limited-disposable-income-swallowing monsters, highly accessible, with a ready-made gaming group of hundreds of thousands always on-line. Compare this to the headache of building and maintaining a regular gaming group. As bandwidth and technology improve, these games will get closer to a tabletop experience, and the problem will only get worse.Having said that, I successfully play both without much trouble, but only because I have enough money to support both hobbies, and because I was playing D&D long before Everquest or Baldur's Gate hit the scene. If I was a fresh-faced entertainment-seeking gaming virgin, and I was presented with both options, I fear the flash-and-grab of World of Warcraft would appeal to me more than the 1000+ pages of D&D rules. Even if I gave D&D a go, the (likely) poor level of gratification I would achieve from my first few sessions would be a turn off, unless I got lucky and found a good group with a patient, imaginative DM.Too true. I'm not sure, even after years of thinking about it, how tabletop roleplaying can be effectively mass-advertised though. Only those who commit themselves to getting a good experience will get one - in other words, you get out what you put in. A movie, a book, a CD, a video game.. all of these media can value-add to the participant with words, sounds, a visuals.I agree and have thought this myself in the past. Some kind of industry-approved 'Certified By' sticker would certainly start to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I'm sure we can all think of a few people we'd like on the review board. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Whether it would serve only to bolster the more cash-rich publishers and unfairly label the poorer ones as inferior is a problem, though.This is not endemic to the RPG industry (see: Diablo, Doom, Half-Life, and countless other absolutely massive computer games which have gone on to make shed-loads of cash). It may contribute to user dissatisfaction, though.</blockquote>

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