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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="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 4747144" data-attributes="member: 55271">(1) Why is it good for creators get paid? Because creators who can make their living from their creations can invest the time to create more stuff. (Money may also motivated unmotivated people to finish, polish, and/or make public work that they would otherwise not be motivated to present.) Thus, under your scenario, the talented people I buy stuff from would have less time to produce the stuff I like and, therefore, less of the stuff I like would be produced.Verdict: Bad(2) Why is it good to pay for products? Because some of that revenue can be used to either supply and/or justify investing capital into the development of a product. Whether this utility is valuable to you is a matter of personal opinion, but utility requiring greater investment than just the text can be found in high quality illustrations, handouts, cartography, and so forth. It can also be found in things like professional editing and indexing.Sure, all of this can be done for pure, labor-of-love type stuff. But, to some extent, that circles us back to #1. And a lot of the skills we're talking about here will still be paid for in other industries, leading to a talent drain out of roleplaying.Looking around at existing labor-of-love material, we can see that some of it can be very polished. But a lot of it isn't. And, of course, there's plenty of stuff that people are asking money for which isn't polished at all. Sticking a price tag on something isn't a guarantee of quality. But, in general, I think it's safe to say removing development capital will reduce the average quality of product.Verdict[/i]: Bad(3) Will the lack of commercially available, mainstream products result in fewer new players entering the hobby? Almost certainly. Word-of-mouth and social networking are surely important, but gateway products are important.Verdict: Bad(4) Is there any upside to this scenario? Not really. There's plenty of labor-of-love material available for free over the Internet at this very moment. There might be a slight uptick in that type of material if the commercial market were to completely disappear, but in the long-run I'm guessing the amount of material being produced would actually decrease (see #3).So I can't even really see the potential upside of "more material I don't have to pay money for". There's already more free material available online than I could hope to read or play in a dozen lifetimes. So even if there was a long-term increase (which seems doubtful), I don't see any personal advantage in it.Verdict: Bad</blockquote>

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