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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ConcreteBuddha" data-source="post: 172321" data-attributes="member: 3139">I've been thinking this subject over, I took a couple of days to get my thoughts collected and I think I'm ready to make a point here: RPGs are books. Now this is a crucial point, IMO. I agree that with an average roleplaying book ($20) you can eke out many hours of leisure enjoyment. Compared to a movie ($8 for 2 hours) or a video game ($50 for 50 hours), it seems like a roleplaying book is a wiser investment.However, when a consumer picks up a book, any book, from a "normal" bookstore (Waldenbooks, Barnes and Noble), they are "used" to paying $5 to $30 for a book.This is the perceived Value inherent in the medium. This is what defines the basis of whether someone will spend money on the medium.It doesn't matter if the book took 100 years to write or if the quality is above par or how many authors contributed or what have you. All of this stuff is a modifier, while the physical representation of the product is what defines how much a consumer is reasonably willing to pay for said product.Let's look an example of another book: Moby Dick. Someone is reasonably going to pay anywhere from $5 (cheap paperback) to $30 (collector's hardback) for this book. And that is quality literature that took someone years to write. When a person is walking through an average bookstore, and all of the other books are on the $5-$30 price scale, if that consumer picks up a roleplaying book, and the price tag says $50, their gut feeling is going to balk at paying that because the price is outside the norm of the medium .Therefore, IMHO, RPGs are not going to reasonably increase in price until the medium (book) generally increases in price....Are there things that retailers and publishers could do to "fix" this problem? Yes. They could: 1) Separate each book into multiple trash-romance-style, "mini" books. A lot of publishers already do this and it doesn't work for reasons that another poster already pointed out. (I think it was John Nephew, but don't quote me on this.) 2) Combine the roleplaying books with another medium and sell them at a higher value. As in boxed sets, miniatures, computer programs, etc... 3) Change to or create an alternative medium for RPGs. This is by far the most drastic, but not necessarily unrealistic.I was thinking that a better medium for RPGs would be a laminated hard copy of rules and statistics in a 3 ring binder that is specifically marketed towards actual gameplay. It would come with erasable pens and an eraser. The supplements (MM, class books, etc...), would all be laminated with holes punched in them for easy addition to the binder. The binding would not break, you could spill stuff on it and it would clean, you could mark up the rules...And the best part about this is: it is a new medium. A publisher could call it and price it at whatever would sell and the consumer would not have the "book prejudice" that plagues current RPG manufacturers.If this is not a new idea, then please tell me why it is not functional. (Because I'd really like to see the PHB in a laminated, indexed, easy to follow, no mess, markable medium. I'd pay $60 for that.) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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