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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="Janx" data-source="post: 2885528" data-attributes="member: 8835">I'm a regular on a music site, as well.  They complain about the same problems.Signal to noise ratio.  As in too many choices of music, most of them bad, it's hard to find the good music.One quoted story, was a guy saying "My son has a  CD", and the response "Who doesn't"  The barrior to publishing is so small for music AND RPGs, news, editorials (aka blogs) that anybody can do it.  The result, is a glut of content, and little means ot filter out the junk.In the old days, the barriers to entry were high enough that publishers put some effort into what they produced, because the costs were too high to risk a flop.  Now, anybody can post a new RPG or album they made at home.Ben Lehman's comments are indicative of this problem.  Yes, it's initially great to cut out the middlemen. But now, everybody's doing it, it'll be harder and harder to reach a viable market.  The RPG industry IS important if you want high quality products and you want to meet people who are playing the same thing (so you can play with them).Consider this, if you want an RPG in a nice hardcover with good art, layout, and editing, are you going to get that from a self-publisher who's sold 500 copies?  Good physical product costs money.  To pay for that, a company needs a large print-run, and lots of customers.  That takes LESS fractioning of the market, with fewer competitors, so that more RPG players will see your book as a desirable product.  If they're distracted by a plethora of alternatives, they are less likely to spend money on your product.If you're just a gamer, you don't have to care greatly about the game industry, and from that perspective, Ben Lehman's lack of comprehension on the problem and focus on the gamer is great.  But if you produce products, you ARE part of the industry and you should very much care about the big picturem of which customer satisfaction is merely one component of it.</blockquote>

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