Wizards of the Coasts are overcharging us and "TSR"

[WizarDru]

A D&D 30 year nostalgia/history book sitting on the shelf near the gaming materials, shrinkwrapped.

"Oh" I thought, "That might make a good christmas gift".

Then i read the price tag

$50.00

A 320 page hardback book that's a custom 10"x10" form factor weighing 8 pounds with color and quality paper is not overpriced at $50. Plus, you can get it from Amazon for only $30. That's pretty good for a coffee-table book with a potentially limited audience.

 

[RFisher]

OK, I should've included a smiley.

I really don't think today's books are overpriced. I was just trying to point out that there has been lots of good stuff published that's still available at a steal of a price.

Despite the good points made about why, it's still amazing that the classic Traveller reprints are as inexpensive as they are & seem to be selling just fine.

& I'm not the only one who believes classic Traveller is still one of the best games ever published. Heck, I recently learned that one of the other guys in my about-a-dozen employees company not only thinks similarly, but actually uses the big floppy books in play rather than his old LBBs.

In the long run, who knows, but after two sessions my current group seems to be enjoying the old game an awful lot, despite that I'm trying to play things pretty close to the books for now. Indeed, the cases in which I deviate from the books seems to have a bigger chance of lessening enjoyment than when I stick to the books.

 

[Orius]

Shall I be the one to point out the annoyingly obvious: TSR's business plan put them out of business. There's pretty good odds that Wizards business plan is trying to avoid that.

It's going to come up sooner or later, just thought I'd get it out of the way early

Yeah, but it's been a while since we've had a "Game books are too damn expensive!" thread, or a "WotC sucks! I miss T$R!" thread. Look on the bright side, the original poster conflated them into a single thread so it takes up less space on the boards.

 

[Orius]

Very good observation, but if that is true: WoTC is only interested in the their sales. While TSR was only concern was to provide gaming material fo us. And that's why TSR was bought out but WoTC (well, thats the story around the campfire anyway).

Bwahahaha! Is this the same T$R that was run by the infamous Lorraine?

 

[Orius]

Why am I not surprised that there are people out there who prefer kits and specialty priests (i.e., ways to make your character much more powerful within the rules compared to a core character) to the more balanced method of (well-designed) prestige classes?

Well, to each his own, I say. But I too will take a PrC over a 2e kit with major bonuses balanced by little more than role-playing or reaction check penalties. One of the chief complaints about 2e was how the suppliments constantly ramped PC power in a campaign with no real penalties. Now, while 3e ramps PC as much as or even more than 2e did, there at least was a conscious design effort to make sure the challences faced by the PCs also increased in power.

To put it another way, rather than focusing on what this really neat NPC can do, why not use those pages to give you more options for what your PCs can do? You know, the PCs, who are on-screen all the time, the people actually doing the heroic deeds you're running in your game, rather than some enigmatic NPC who if you're lucky only steals the spotlight at most once in any particular adventure?

That's the difference between 2e and 3E, and a specific change we decided on for 3E FR: Focus on the PCs and what the PCs can do, don't dwell so much on the uber-characters and characters/events of the novels.

This was another huge complaint about 2e, particularly about the campaign settings. I remember a rant last week sometime about the Time of Troubles adventures published in the 1e/2e transition. The poster basically described them as a railroad where the PCs got dragged around and had the privilege of watching the NPC heroes do all the "cool stuff" and become gods at the end. Who wants to play something like that? Or take the example given, the Magister. Why bother with stats for something that's: a) so powerful it'll beat the snot out of the PCs without breaking a sweat, and b) that it's too powerful to to give the powers to a PC to begin with? This might be a major campaign figure, but is it something that's going to be fun for the average gaming group? My initial impression would be no.