Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 3945276" data-attributes="member: 1465">Utterly complex topic <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Since a long time I got the habit of never buying a RPG book before having read all the reviews from ENWorld at least, possible more from other websites.For me they are very important, but I believe that I'm in the minority, and I agree with the publishers who believe that reviews in RPGing are not useful. Most people buy stuff out of gamer's compulsion: they see the cover on the shelf or WotC website, or they read half a dozen posters in the same thread deeply detailing their personal opinion with a summarizing "W00t!", and they're sold. An advertisement well-placed and well-designed scores much more than a review on the average...Review quality is subjective.Personally I wrote only 3 reviews, spent a few evenings on each of them trying to be the best job I could. I am sure no one bought a copy of those books because of my review, and I doubt they have even been read by more than a couple of people... The fact is, I wrote that review based on what I myself would want to read in a review, but is this really useful for others? For instance, you mention John Cooper: his reviews are excellent, but they also serve a very specific purpose. Many gamers may not need that information at all.Certainly, many reviews which are 5 lines long are seen as "useless" by many, since it's really impossible in 5 lines to list all the good and the bad of a book, with a little why. However, to many readers what sticks to their mind is just the final grade. If you have a low average, people may not even spend time reading the reviews. If you have 100 votes with a 99% average score, you can be sure that people will notice it!In this regard, I think ENWorld has a problem, because you cannot "vote" a book unless you write a review, but writing a decent review takes time that few people accept to spend. The result is that most books have too few reviews and too few votes.This is the greatest problems IMHO. RPG books are supposed to be USED not just READ. How can you truly be informative if you write a review BEFORE playing with the material? To review a PC game they sit down for hours in a bunch of people and play the game until they have a decent grasp on it, because you cannot judge a game when you still haven't understood the controls for instance... Instead, we write RPG books reviews and sometimes we haven't really read the whole book front-end. Playtesting reviews are the most valid ones, but how many are around?</blockquote>

Verification