Wizards: Hurry up already!

[Ranger REG]

Forgive me, dpdx, but the reason you are needlessly pissed off is you do not have patience.

Look at me, I'm live in Hawaii. I have to have patience. I cannot get all jealous because the folks in the mainland states will get theirs first, while ours is either in air or ship transit across the Pacific Ocean.

Once again, chill. It will reach your store.

 

[dpdx]

I'm not totally devoid of patience, but what little I have when it comes to getting a sourcebook for any RPG on time has worn out over months of stores around here never having enough, or never getting enough.

I'll be checking tomorrow to see if it's at B/N; but I'll bet you that you get yours first, even in the Islands.

Aloha. Regardless, I hope it's worth the wait.

 

[Ranger REG]

Do what I do. Ask the most reliable retailer of your FLGS to reserve a copy for you when it arrives. Leave them your phone number and the best time to call you.

 

[RodneyThompson]

I know that the beautiful people read this board, and if I could make a dent in anyone's consciousness, and get them to think about the thousands of content-starved SW Gamers just raring to get a game going, or like me, write up an adventure, then that's a service to the gaming community

Actually, among all your seeming pissed off-ness, you make a pretty good point. I'm sure many gamers really are wanting more content for the SWRPG. However, it seems as though Hasbro and, by extension, WotC just isn't seeing enough profit from the books. I sincerely wish we could get some interim material, even something small like a 64-page adventure, in the off months between major sourcebooks. That was a nice gap filled by Gamer, but now it's like there's a void between books that fails to keep readers' interest.

In the meantime, fan sites are tryinig to pick up the slack, but there's nothing like Official material for consumers, sadly.

 

[dpdx]

Actually, among all your seeming pissed off-ness, you make a pretty good point. I'm sure many gamers really are wanting more content for the SWRPG. However, it seems as though Hasbro and, by extension, WotC just isn't seeing enough profit from the books. I sincerely wish we could get some interim material, even something small like a 64-page adventure, in the off months between major sourcebooks. That was a nice gap filled by Gamer, but now it's like there's a void between books that fails to keep readers' interest.

In the meantime, fan sites are tryinig to pick up the slack, but there's nothing like Official material for consumers, sadly.

Thank you.

The way I see it, content begets adventures, which beget content, which begets revenue and encouragement for Wizards. You watch - if that Core Worlds book is half as good as you say it is, you're gonna see the genre explode. Few people are DnD geeks, but everybody, their sisters and their dogs are SW geeks.

If I get content, and if others get content, you'll suddenly see a BOATLOAD of adventure modules that are longer and more substantive than the ones they used to publish in Gamer, or on the WotC website.

Most of them you'll be able to play for free, or for a nominal charge, like $3 to download them. And they won't have to be Infinities, so if you're heavy on Canon as a DM, or you don't like someone else's "what if," you can fit them into your EU without heavy tweaking.

But at the bare, absolute minimum, you can play them without only having two different things to shoot at/deal with the whole time, and without being planetbound. (Which is incidentally why you cannot do a good adventure with just the RCRB.)

(Full disclosure: I'm planning to write a series of adventures for public consumption that stay as true as possible to the Extended Universe. If I'm lucky, and encouraged by the speed of usable stuff coming from WotC, they'll eventually be as thick as Tempest Feud, all together. I want them to be meaty.)

So far, my options for where to start the characters are Tatooine, Naboo, Cularin, and, uh... maybe Cerea or Eraydia, since they look promising on Rodney's site.

That's three systems out of the entire universe. I'd much rather have them starting out at any one of the 32 core worlds.

So today I stopped at Barnes and Noble, and where they had the book on their website, the store doesn't have it in the catalog except as 'not published yet.' Yeah, right. Anyway, they reserved me a copy when they get it, and they'll call me when it's in. So maybe I can follow everybody's advice, and relax...

Thanks for bearing with my hissy fit, and I apologize if I annoyed anyone overly.

 

[dpdx]

Today was very interesting.

I got a chance to go by the Wizards store, and I learned some things:

First of all, they're the only official Wizards store in the entire state of Oregon, and not only do the gaping holes in their stock put the entire industry to shame, but they'd get schooled by just about every FLGS I can think of in town when it comes to selection, FOR THEIR OWN PRODUCTS.

Second, the assistant manager was working today, and I got to pick his brain some about what's going on. First question: who decides how much stock you get from Wizards for any given book - you, or them (the home office)? Answer: them, which results in new product being sold out (at the limited quantity) in about the timespan of a solar eclipse, not to return until about the next solar eclipse. Or, they send too much stock, but since the stuff is POPULAR, even that (e.g., 3E PHB) gets sold out in a month or so.

Third, they'd LIKE some control over quantities in their orders from WotC. They can't keep Psionics Handbook, Revolution Era Sourcebook, or RCRB on the shelves. On the other hand, several copies of Secrets of Naboo have been gathering dust since release. They're closing out their GURPS stuff and miniatures, and that should give them a little more room for (hopefully) more 3E and SWRPG content. They're ready to sell Wizards product, and people keep coming to that store because they EXPECT product to be there. They ask everybody who enters or leaves the store: Can/Did you find what you are looking for? When the counter person asked me, she didn't even look surprised when I told her, "no."

I feel like this is an IBM commercial waiting to happen: these Wizards stores (and more so, Game Keeper) need point-of-purchase control over what comes to them in the big brown box every month, which gives us as consumers control over what's in the shop with what we buy from them. The demand problem is solved with such a system (resulting in less guys like me who theoretically get pissed off and just about flick it in), and in turn, not only does Wizards get a much truer read wrt what sells, but it busts that self-fulfilling prophecy of "SW stuff doesn't sell" right in the mouth, resulting in more jobs to the people we want to see doing the content.

Only good can ensue from such a scenario.