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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5733848" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, I was DRASTICALLY far off, lol. Or maybe I guessed a number from the recollection of the prices I've seen for these products recently, which was not exactly all that far off, as I have demonstrated, and was FAR from being even close to so inaccurate as to have any effect on my basic argument, which was that the RB was a LOT cheaper than the BB and thus comparing them directly against each other wasn't really a valid comparison. Of course it is easier to argue about trivial details instead of substance...  Funny, I went to Amazon, and Amazon said $27.88, so I went with that, lol. I realize you take offense at my price comparisons, but AGAIN, the salient point is that there's a considerable price difference between RB and BB, which may be 2x if you can find it for $24 instead of 3.5x, but since when do you expect a product that costs half as much to be equivalent to the more expensive product? You're arguing trivia instead of addressing the ACTUAL point of what I said.  OK, I don't think Essentials in general has vast listings of different types of items, but it certainly has enough items to supply PCs with more than enough basic items to play a perfectly good game. I don't know what else is in the DMK, I presume it doesn't have regular items in it since the HotF* books do, but I'd point out that if we are considering ONLINE materials that even without DDI WotC has a pretty hefty roster of stuff. You can download KotS, another 'starter' adventure, and ALL of the LFR adventures for instance. Again, if we're going to compare things then we need to compare comparable things. This is why I stuck with the books/sets. Once you bring other stuff into the mix where do you end? Again too, if we're comparing the BB to HotF*/DMK then the 4e stuff has 30 levels worth of rules, the BB has 5. I think overall it is a pretty fair comparison. Realistically you will want more stuff with either of those selections before too long.   No, you can certainly run a good game for quite a while with what is in those 2 books. There are a couple dozen items in HotF*, and IIRC several more in the DMK adventure (not sure exactly how much overlap there, but there are some). Given 6 levels for each item you CAN get by for 30 levels with them, though most of us would want more. Still for FIVE LEVELS you need more than a couple dozen items? 5x4 = 20, you aren't even going to give away near all the ones you've got in 5 levels... And again, as soon as you bring in PFSRD I'm bringing in the full LFR library, which has easily 100's of monster stat blocks and a LOT of items as well.I don't have the slightest issue with your opinion of anything. All I was ever pointing out was that it made more sense to compare equal things or to at least understand that when you compare the RB to the BB that it is a LOT cheaper product that clearly has a slightly different purpose. For $12 IMHO it serves as a pretty good basic intro to the game. TBH I think if they'd have jacked up the price 5 bucks and included a couple more levels of play I think it might have been better, yes, but clearly they were aiming for an MSRP < $20 to keep it in the impulse buy category. I'll also go back to my own experience with the original Holmes basic of so long ago. We only played it for a couple weeks before we ran out and got more D&D stuff. I doubt we even got to 3rd level. Actually I think we did, but my point is the RB wasn't designed for a lot of replay value, it was designed to be replaced in a month with the HotF*/DMK/MV/etc as needed. Clearly the BB OTOH aims to serve as a longer term game. Instead of being seen as just a bare starting point clearly they wanted something that you could play through for a while. That's great. It just seems hard for me to understand how WotC could have done that for $20...  Again, maybe the Paizo product strategy proves to be a better strategy. I don't think we can fairly say more than what we personally prefer. If there were a 4e version of the BB done BB style? Hmmmm, it would be cool, but again wouldn't it just basically be HotF* and DMK and maybe 10 pages of 'creatures and treasure'? I think they COULD do that for the same price and it would be cool. I'm just not sure at all that what they did was bad or foolish, just different.</blockquote>

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