The Quality of Gaming Products Today

[bloodtide]

But, I hate it when I get a book and it just feels like another GM's rantings rather than a well-written sourcebook written by a professional game designer.

Does anybody understand what I'm saying?

Well, every RPG book is just 'one GM's rantings'. One nice touch to the Mongoose quintessential books is that back page of designer's notes.

And I kinda feel like I won't like half the book, not matter what anyway, so it does not matter much.

But one thing: the Physical Quality. It's nice to have a hard cover color book, with great full page art and pretty sigils on every page....but if your just going to use that as an excuise to jack the price of the book up to $40...then don't bother. I'd much rather have plain black and white text and no art for $15.

 

[Spatula]

I was a seasoned gamer by the time 2E came out.

Well, I dunno if maybe you didn't see a lot of the 2e products, or you're forgetting a lot of the garbage that TSR was shoveling out in those days. The company farmed a lot of work out to freelancers who had no oversight or coordination (or quality control, from the looks of things). Which led to some nice books but also a lot of dodgy material (especially in the Complete Handbook line). This was one of the failures of TSR that was specifically called out by Dancey & co. that they tried to fix in 3e.

 

[Umbran]

Maybe I was too naive to notice, but my group loved the heck out of the UA.

In terms of rules content, much of it was, in retrospect, horrible.

It may not be just that you (or I, or any of us) were too naive to notice. There is a general human tendency - the bad things of the past tend to fade in the mind. We remember the good times, but no so much the issues. This isn't just "nostalgia", which is often used to dismiss solid opinions. This is outright neurology.

Go back to those books, and try to run a game with them as you'd do it today, and you might find them different than you remember.

 

[Water Bob]

Well, I dunno if maybe you didn't see a lot of the 2e products, or you're forgetting a lot of the garbage that TSR was shoveling out in those days.

I bought a ton of 2E AD&D stuff. That was right in the middle of my late teens and early 20's. I played stuff that I never used and finally sold on eBay back when 3E came out.

Maybe I didn't know what I was looking at back then, but I generally like what I saw. I loved the Forgotten Realms.

Go back to those books, and try to run a game with them as you'd do it today, and you might find them different than you remember.

Actually, my campaign just over a year and a half ago, before I stared my Conan game, was a 2E AD&D based game.

I hadn't looked at those rules in over a decade. Maybe 15 years. And, I decided to do it "by the book".

I will tell you, I still like 2E, but there are a ton of contradictory rules and rules that don't make sense in that edition of D&D.

 

[gamerprinter]

But one thing: the Physical Quality. It's nice to have a hard cover color book, with great full page art and pretty sigils on every page....but if your just going to use that as an excuise to jack the price of the book up to $40...then don't bother. I'd much rather have plain black and white text and no art for $15.

The full color art and high production values of a given book isn't usually an excuse to jack the price up, in fact if publishers could put out a full color book for the same price as a B/W book, they'd all do it.

It's usually the other way around. Publishers want to put out a high quality book, but when the find out the cost to produce a full color hardback with any volume - it end's up needing a $40 cover price.

For example, some time this year, I'll be releasing a hard cover setting handbook for my Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story setting. I've had the goal of maintaining high production values in the adventures and supplements - by getting top quality artists for cover and interior illustrations, (I'm a top-end fantasy cartographer so they all have killer maps), and I did the page layout myself to insure a top quality looking books are designed. Most of our products have been PDF releases only - all with full color art and maps. Now that I'm looking at a hard cover, the costs are starting to point out that I might be only able to release a hard cover as a B/W only book.

All my maps and illustrations so far are all full color, but that doesn't matter, the costs for printing a full color hard back is exhorbitant - it might take a patronage (Kickstarter) to fund a full color book.

If publishers could produce full color books that were clearly affordable, we'd do it everytime. Making a book full color is not an excuse to drive the price of the book up - that's just silly. All the extra costs are profits for the printer, not the publisher.

 

[Serendipity]

I find that it helps to be picky about what you are acquiring for the game, regardless of it's source. Second and third party stuff is more infamous for being (charitably) sub-standard, but most of my favorite D&D books are third party stuff. (Hells, a couple of third party supplements are what brought me back to D&D in third edition.) Both WotC and TSR have put out some real lemons before, so I hold them to the same standard.
On a more personal note, spelling and grammatical errors bug me like nothing else and their frequency in gaming books (which is WAY too high) seems more dependent on who is doing the writing than who is publishing the book.

 

[Water Bob]

Delete me! I'm a double post!

 

[Water Bob]

I find that it helps to be picky about what you are acquiring for the game, regardless of it's source.

Back in my 1E and 2E AD&D days, I bought EVERYTHING that came out for a game I was playing. Whether I'd use it or not, I bought it.

I finally stopped that practice.

But, even when we decided to play the Conan RPG--our first d20 game. I purchased the entire game line--everything ever published for it. Even stuff I already owned in pdf. I wanted hard copies.

Probably not a good habit.

 

[ExploderWizard]

The thing about published products is that crap, or a real gem, can come from anywhere. Big companies are mot guarantees of quality and independent publishers can produce wonderful stuff.

Heck I've gotten free products from Dragonsfoot that blew some slick produced "professional" stuff out of the water.

The internet is full of opinions on products of all types so its fairly easy these days to get feedback on something that catches your interest before you buy.

 

[prosfilaes]

OTOH, even at half price, the set of six is expensive. I paid $10 bucks a book for a brand new crisp, clean set at my local Half Price Books. I can't imagine paying $120 for the set before it hit stores like Half Price. That's a lot of dough for an adventure.

A set is not an adventure; it's six adventures. In 1990, Call of Cthulhu's Fatal Experiments came out in 128 B&W pages for a suggested retail price of $20, which would be* $33 now. In 1992, GURPS Fantasy Adventures came out in 128 B&W pages for a suggested retail price of $20, which would be $31 now. In 1994, the Dragonlance Classics Volume III came out in 128 B&W pages for a suggested retail price of $15, which would be $22 today. In 1999, the 2E version of Against the Giants came out in 96 B&W pages for $18, which would be $23 today. A volume of one of Pathfinder's Adventure Paths has a suggested price of $20, for 92 color pages. So the cost of the Adventure Paths are pretty much the same as adventures have always been.

* The Inflation Calculator