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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derulbaskul" data-source="post: 1318697" data-attributes="member: 1581">Nightfall,That's the way I feel about people who contribute and distribute free material through fansites etc.... However, as soon as a price tag goes on a book then the publisher is saying, "This has value therefore I am going to charge you." If the purchaser then discovers that the value is limited because of quality issues (ideas, execution/mechanics, general editing) then that becomes a legitimate issue.Also, consider this: S&SS has a track record of producing really, really broken stuff. I mean, we're not talking the unadulterated crap level of FFE, but we are talking a really poor reputation for broken mechanics etc.... However, they're ideas are often really, really good. What they need to do is look at threads like this and go, "yes, we can do better than that". They're not alone, of course. Even WotC had a fairly disastrous run with the softcover splatbooks, Mongoose and AEG have also had fairly problematic products.Anyway, this is not a rant about prices: I value everything against how much I pay for a movie. A movie entertains me for about two hours. I pay AUD13 for that which is AUD6.50 per hour so provided my use of the book "costs" me about half that or less I am happy. However, just as I hate seeing a bad movie irrespective of the cost, I also hate wasting item reading poor material.Back on-topic, I regret purchasing the first few products by the publishers mentioned above and simply do not do so any more. I think I have all the WotC products and I really only regret my purchase of eTools (Hero Builder's Guidebook has more utility that this), although my disappointment with MMII has become a tangible thing (although Fiend Folio is so good, IMO, that I think I've forgiven WotC). D&DG was also basically terrible: deities don't have stats, IMO, but if they did then they would be based on the Epic Level Handbook.Although this may be an heretical POV, I also regret my AU purchases. While it's all very interesting, the Diamond Throne world lacks that "certain something" (actually, I would have preferred something based on Monte's Ptolus articles), I really miss alignment and I would have preferred that it used 3.5E mechanics except for the revised magic system to increase its ease of use. Looking back, I would have preferred that it required the 3.5E PHB to use and the extra space used to provide a system that replaced alignment, along the lines of The Riddle of Steel's spiritual attributes or Exalted's traits (although I am not sure what they are called... but they're things like a Compassion rating etc...). Actually, the extra space could also have been used to better describe how runes work, an issue that seems to crop up with some frequency on messageboards.</blockquote>

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