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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vigilance" data-source="post: 1729163" data-attributes="member: 4275">Riiiiiiiight- so if you cant afford to lose money on books you should get out of the business? Nice one. On top of Phil and Mouse, I will be another person in the industry to tell you that modules aren't a profitable portion of the business.They cost the same to produce as sourcebooks but have 20% of the base market. Sounds like a bad business plan to me (your disagreement not withstanding).In other words, if a company can make a really good adventure, they can make a really good source book and make FIVE TIMES AS MUCH MONEY. In the best case scenario.That's right, that 20% base market (the GM) is only ONE REASON modules are a bad idea.In the first place the setting of the module has to be fairly generic. Every detail you add basically reduces its sales base further. Is it set in a desert? Uh-oh... a certain percentage of that 20% just went away because their campaign isn't anywhere near a desert. Or there are no deserts on their world.Now let's say you have a suitably generic adventure, you STILL aren't done negotiating the mine field.The system itself makes it harder. What level is the adventure? 1st level? There goes a huge percentage. Even if you manage to write the module to a broad range of levels (let's say a five level range- which would be tough but its doable with some scaling notes for certain encounters) that's one-fourth of all campaigns. That's right, we have now reduced that 20% of the market by a *minimum* of 1/4 down to 5%. Oh sure, I'm sure you'll say you could include some sort of scale to allow any module to be used for all 20 levels. But even if that were theoretically possible, the average GM will pick up a module (if he picks up modules at all- many GMs have chimed in to say they don't ever do that) see the suggested levels on the back and say "not the right levels- oh well" and put it down. So to recap, a company can go to all that work and HOPE to appeal to about 5% of the market... or they increase their sales by 20 times for the same amount of work and capital investment and do a splatbook.If it was YOUR money on the line which would you choose? And I will laugh at any answer that involves "write modules" until you have published at least 4 of them with full print runs. In other words, unless YOU are willing to drop ten to twenty grand of your own money on printing modules, don't tell me you'd be willing to do it. You could just shut all of us narrow-eyed industry goobs up. Go write modules. Drive us out of business with them. And you do realize WOTC made the license in the hope that OTHERS would do adventures for them right? So even though WOTC *can* afford to take it on the chin to do modules they prefer not to. I know its not fashionable to complain about crunch, but despite your "disagreement" companies dont avoid modules for religious reasons, they avoid them because they don't sell the market is telling us that it is NOT tired of well done books full of feats and spells yet. Chuck</blockquote>

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