Pricey Book Question

[DanMcS]

I'm looking at buying the Book of the Righteous, because the Holy Warrior class seems like such a great idea, what should have been done in 3e to begin with really, a customizeable paladin.

Thing is, the book is padded with 300 more pages of material I'll get scarcely any use from, it's all campaign specific, and they want $40 for it. In their dreams. Yeah, yeah, it got a whole lot of high praise from reviewers, but I don't think it's worth $40 dollars for material I don't think I'll get that much use out of.

And now on the green ronin website I see they're releasing another product with the 'unholy warrior', to milk this cow a little more. Bah.

Man, if they would release the holy warrior class as a PDF for 5 or 10 bucks, or maybe it and the 'unholy' one (which seems like blatent cash-cowing), I'd buy it in a heartbeat. It would be all value. As it is, I started typing here intending to ask people how they've used the extraneous material in this book, to see if I could talk myself into it. But now I'm unfavorably inclined enough by the second book that I don't think I should buy either.

So has anyone bought this overpriced thing? Does it sit on a shelf, or how is it useful to you if you don't intend to scrap your own campaign and use their mythology?

 

[MEG Hal]

It is one of the best reads out there, I think it is an excellent resource, and would recommend it to everybody. I say it is worth the price.

 

[Nightfall]

Got it, love it. I will say it's expensive but worth EVERY cent. Aaron Loeb, you should be very proud. Btw I am probably going to get Unholy Warrior. Mainly because I need some more unholiness!

 

[Voadam]

the pdf products Call of duty and Forgotten heroes: Paladins have a bunch of different paladin prcs and variant paladin core class options. Librum Equitis compiled has a couple god champion classes as well. If you want just holy warrior options for less of a price tag I'd recommend any of the three.

 

[Crothian]

So has anyone bought this overpriced thing? Does it sit on a shelf, or how is it useful to you if you don't intend to scrap your own campaign and use their mythology?

I bought it, gave a it a glowing review, and deppoite not using any of it as is I'm still happy with the purchase. The greatest thing this has done is give me the perfect example of how gods and churches should be written up. There are a lot of great ideas in the book and I think it can be very useful.

However, if you only want the class then I'd suggest going with another alternative. In the more expensive books, there are lots of little gems like this so it's not like GR is the only one doing this.

 

[Henry]

Seeing as how Aaron is online right now, I wonder if he'll get to see this?

I can understand your pain, but the best thing I can say is to see if you have somone you know who has the book to share the mechanics of that specific part with you - sounds like you won't be needing any of the Intellectual Property part for your needs, and all you really need is the OGC.

 

[DanMcS]

It's not really pain; it just kinda boggles me that people would say "it's a great read", or "I don't use it, but it's worth the price"; it's a RPG book, it's supposed to be useful. I don't really buy gaming books for reading alone. There are a lot of varying-quality fiction books out there, but even some of the newest, hugest, and arguably lowest-quality Tom Clancy meganovels aren't $40, and they're much bigger than 320 pages.

I'd like to buy it on principle, because it's probably the best book of its type. I think that companies that produce quality stuff should be rewarded, so I don't think I'll just copy the OGC.

But more and more companies are producing massively oversized books and jacking up the price. This book and some others I could name could probably have been three reasonably sized ones at 1/3 the price. But they probably wouldn't have sold all three to everyone. Making the book so huge, they get more sales out of it by essentially stuffing extra material at customers.

Maybe there's a legitimate production reason for these megasized books coming out, but I doubt it. Companies need to stop stuffing, and start producing tightly focused, useful books. If they release them as PDFs, their profit margins would even be higher than if they went for the 'stuff them all between one cover' method.

 

[Piratecat]

This one sure is worth the money. It's chock full of stealable ideas. I like that in a book.

 

[aurin777]

Something that erked me was you mentioned that the book will not be useful because it is "campaign specific." I have not read the book, but the mail selling point that it does use is it IS NOT campaign specific, and it is easy to be thrown into any game that you are currently running. From what I saw when I flipped through it was a bunch of useful and premade material that can be used to outline the pantheon of any game in need of one.
~~Brandon (glad to have ENWorld back online)

 

[AaronLoeb]

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...=sr_8_1/002-8040369-1132837?v=glance&n=507846

It's currently under $30 at Amazon.

I dunno, man. The 300 pages you call padding is the stuff in the book I care most about. Obviously, I can't tell you how other people end up using it in their campaigns, nor am I going to try to sell you on it. The point of the book was not to provide a new class -- the new class was necessitated by the point of the book. I wanted to create a whole bunch of extremely complete religions that could be used in isolation or as a whole, and that required (in my mind) not relying on the same Paladin for every single church. None of it is campaign-world specific. In fact, it's meant to be useable in any general d20 campaign world.

Is GR trying to rip you off by charging $40? No. GR did everything they could to keep the price down. The book is about 270,000 words, which, at usual page counts and font layouts and stuff for RPG books would have been a 416-page book. They kept the book much smaller (mostly through the genius of Hal Mangold) to keep it affordable -- and they still got world-class art packed into most every spread.

Is the book for everyone? No. I say so in the introduction and try, in the very opening pages of Chapter I, to make it absolutely clear what the book is and isn't. To me there's nothing worse than buying a game or product that's billed as X only to discover that it's actually Y. So, GR and I have made every effort to be exceedingly clear about what BotR is. When you're next in your FLGS, check out Chapter I. If it sounds useless to you, for the love of all that's holy, don't buy it.

Honestly, the inspiration for the book (in this iteration -- it was actually a cancelled Role Aids product in the early 90s) was to reach a crowd that you are likely not a part of. I sat down with friends to play a 3E game and we were "wingin' it" in terms of game world, like most people I know do. We didn't have a lavishly detailed campaign setting, nor did we really want one. But everyone at the table, being really obsessive RPers, wanted to know about their characters' religion. So, we used the religions that come in the PHB. But those don't have a lot of detail, and none of us knew jack or squat about Greyhawk to get more detail. As we got more and more into the characters (it was a great campaign), we wanted more and more detail about our religions, and the DM simply had to keep making up minute detail and record it so he wouldn't forget. I thought -- "wouldn't it be nice if I could make BotR so that someone could know a whole lot about their characters' faith without it requiring the DM to buy into a complete campaign setting."

As it turns out, the book has been embraced by a much wider crowd than I was thinking of in those first days of work, which is absolutely fantastic. People are redesigning campaign settings, incorporating and altering material as they see fit (as well they should). So, you might get the impression from the positive reviews and kind words on message boards that I think the book is for everyone and is of endless utility and everyone everywhere will benefit from its bounteous wisdom. I don't. I'm absolutely astounded at how warmly its been received, surprised and delighted at the industry people have shown in using it, and don't recommend it to you if you just want crunchy bits. It's just not about that. As I said, I think Chapter I quickly and clearly describe what it is about.

Thanks,

AJL