Very Much Agreed here Patrick. I just wish my writing was up to snuff when it comes to getting paid.

Oh, I grok writing for pleasure (and damn the dollars) perfectly fine. While it's never been for publication, I've written small bits and pieces for various RPG campaigns over the years, and of course, got nothing in return (not even bonus XP or what-have-you). Still enjoyed the process, and the result, quite thoroughly.

It just looked like someone had had a brain-fart where the math was concerned, is all.

Since the points are being brought up again ...

Yes, the writers really don't get paid for their work. My (limited) experience has been $200 for about 30 hours of work. That's about $6 an hour. That's less than the kid I pay to mow my lawn. From my understanding, RPGs are not a cash cow. The writer barely gets paid. The artists barely get paid. The layout guy barely gets paid. The editor barely gets paid. These are the people who make the entire product, but the profit margins are so slim that most of these people are doing it because it's fun, and they'd do it anyway. I know about twenty or thirty people who get paid for working in the RPG industry. Of all of them, I'm only aware of one who makes enough to live off of it (I assume; I haven't peeked at his bank statements).

Fans need to understand that everything they wish they had comes with a price. Sometimes the price is driving away other players. Sometimes it's paying the authors more, or accepting worse quality. Sometimes it's less art, or shoddier book bindings. Whatever it is, it adds a cost. And when the production costs go up, so does the price point for the book. Higher cost for the book loses sales, which pushes the price *even higher*.

SO yes, if you want a product which only you and your table will enjoy, that's fine. I know plenty of people who will create that for you. A 30-page adventure with art normally costs about $800. (Adam Jury posted a nice breakdown on his blog: http://adamjury.com/2011/pricing-for-niche...ctronic-titles/ ) Note that for those artists, writer, layout guy, and editor, they are all working cheap. And this isn't including incidentals like the cost of FINDING those people, licensing rights, or paying someone to manage your DNAs, and such.

If anyone wants a 30-page gear book with 12 pieces of art and dates when those guns came into being, PM me. It'll cost about $2,500. If it's being sold on Drive-Thru or Amazon, it's now $3,200. If it's being sold at Barnes & Noble as a physical book it's now around $7,000. It's not free.

THAT SAID ... That specific suggestion isn't that expensive. Each edition had approximately seven core books (main book, magic book, decking book, guns book, cyber book, companion book, maybe a rigging book). The guns are almost exclusively in the main book, the guns book, the rigger book, and the cyber book (the exception being SR3 with the SOTA books). And it's always listed in the last few pages of said book, in the equipment list. Four editions, you're looking at around 24 books, three pages in each, 72 pages to flip through.

It's not a huge hassle. I could do it for you in two hours, tops.

It'll cost about $15.

Everyone who agrees that strength is as useful as agility instead of being a go-to dump stat for characters who aren't specifically melee characters. Although if the stats are rebalanced, racial costs would also need to be rebalanced.

I've got $15 if you're really offering...

Strength is often used as a dumpstat even for melee characters that I can see, and in my experience, these days as well. Agility is far, far, the 'better' stat that I've seen. Yes, there's the whole '1 DV is worth 3 dice', but when that DV can come from other means very easily, it stops mattering. From a pure point for point perspective: I have a Strength 3(5) human whom I want to be a martial artist. He's an adept(I grabbed 2 levels of Muscle Aug and Toner, since this goes back to a lightly cybered adept just being better). I can:

-Buy two more points of strength for 5(7). This will cost me 20 BP and add 1 more DV.
-Buy 3 levels of a martial art for 15 BP. This can net me up to +3DV. Use the last 5 BP for some more maneuvers, another level to a martial art for more possible maneuvers/bonuses in other places, a skill point, two specializations(which give +2 dice each), 25k more nuyen, a positive quality, etc, or use that +5 other BP to add another point to Agility or something and give me 1 more die for every single one of my combat skills.

Yeah, and +3 DV isn't even that unreasonable from qualities IMO we had always houseruled that cap in before it went into the books(while we actually play an incredibly open and lax game, this one rule sorta nagged at us that you could stack +7 DV from this.) Then you get into Critical Strike(which an adept will probably take anyway) tacking onto the DV in the case of an adept. Bone lacing helps mundanes here.

Now here's the funny thing-I actually LIKE how you can get DV from other places; for me, it lets the classic 'Old Wise Man' martial artist(for an example) hang-he might not be that strong anymore, but he knows *just* where to hit, and I think this should be able to exist. But yeah, I guess this can boil down to me wishing that the stats were more balanced overall-don't get me wrong, I think it's fine that *concepts* have preferred 'dump stats', but when melee people get more bang for their buck stuffing bare minimums into a physical stat because it's just better(Agility helps ALL combat skills among others, Body keeps you going and actually helps your lifting, Reaction helps your survival in a big way thanks to defensive rolls and also initiative which is important. Strength does help your DV, but that's literally ALL it does, and you need 2 points per 1 DV when there's more mechanically optimal ways to get it.)

I mean I still play my big strong guys because I grew up/am slightly obsessed with Hokuto no Ken(Fist of the North Star) and love my big ol' beefcakes that hit hard, but the optimizing part of my brain that I can never get rid of is always shouting at me when I do it.

Not for that. I don't own any of the SR4 books, and I've got lawns to mow.

(More seriously, this falls into the 'do you love it' category. I don't love SR4. And my love for SR3 is not nearly as strong as it was in times past. I'm on to more exciting projects hopefully But I'm sure you could find plenty of fans who would, since it's just flipping through the books.)

.. and full-color hardbound books brimming over with art, takes a huge chunk of the development/production budget, right there.

Look at the price of a typical "coffee table book" - big, full-color, lots-of-picturs hardcovers and softcovers alike. Look at what they cost - sixty, eighty, a hundred dollars.

Look at university textbooks (whose layout and design most closely matches an RPG book),and their prices: a hundred, a hundred and fifty, two hundred dollars. (Even if you halve those, to account for the "captive market" effect, you're back to the sixty-to-a-hundred price range of the coffee-table books.)

Now look at the price of the SR4A core book. What, forty-five or fifty dollars?

For the print and production quality we as gamers demand, we should be paying at least sixy or seventy dollars for a corebook the size and quality of SR4A. But we refuse to. So the price has to be cut down ... and that has a knok-on effect all the way up the line, and straight into the wallets of the writers, artists, and editors.

And also, not so incidentally, straight into the overall quality of writng, editing, and errata-maintenance. Three of what have been characterised as CGL's greatest weaknesses.

...

We reap what we sow, folks. And we've been sowing "cheap bastard" for decades.

Sorry, Pax, I don't think it's exactly that easy. I've bought the limited edition back when, and I gladly paid the price. I even pre-ordered it, giving them money up-front. I'm not the only one to do this.
There are a lot smaller companies putting out high-quality products for a similar price. I don't know about their circulation numbers, but apparently it usually works out.
And then you forgot to consider this huge thing where someone built a house from company funds, after which a LOT of quality employees jumped ship.

I'm not pretending that I know a lot about economics, I just see the overall quality of products wane, which is frankly very sad.
And mistakes have been made, so no, it's not just gamers being overentitled brats. It's not that easy, unfortunately. And even if it were ... them's the rules of a free market. Adapt and give them what they want. Worked fine with gearporn books, and I do not grudge them their success in this field at all.

I'm not saying that our collective demand for lower prices is the only factor for CGL and SR.

But it is a factor, and it is industry-wide.

And no, I didn't say anything about gamers being over-entitled anything. Just ... we are as a group awfully unwilling to pay the kind of prices, that the quality we sayw want should command.

And it's great that you bought a more-expensive edition. But, it was a limited edition, rather than the only edition, for a reason: not everyone would want to pay that kind of money. Think about it: if CGL thought they culd get the same number of sales if [b]all[/b they offered was that LE edition ... don't you think they'd've done just that?

Though a lot of gamers are over-entitled brats. Most of those are mainly playing MMOs though. Power levelling to max level the first few days after the game is released and then whining about a "lack of content" for max level characters.

Low prices are not only beneficiary to the consumer. You have to bear in mind that once the product is done, the only restriction to making more of the product is reproduction cost and printing books is not a very expensive process. By offering a lower base price you lower the barrier of entry and can incrementally increase your sales.

Yes....no.

Hey, that's exactly what a lot of MMO players do.

Only the loud obnoxious ones, which as it turns out... Is a very vocal minority.

The same minority we could generally call "munchkins", in fact - the ones concerend primarily, if not only, with displaying their prowess and "leet skillz, yo".

*shrug*

I remember being a young muchkin bud...

So do I. But then, I finished puberty, and grew out of munchkindom (except as an occasional, brief, and openly declared bout of intentional silliness).

#862 of 1500.</brag>

I still munchkin, but it's because that toolset is relegated to exactly what it is:

A tool

But it is not the only tool I have, nor the only tool I use.

If I have an awesome concept I shape it, then work it into the system, then use the Munchkin tool to make it mechanically viable. Not obscene, just viable. Such as my drake infiltrator. I munchkined the hell out of that concept, and still only ended up with something like 14 dice to stealth, because any more and I've have been sacrificing concept (i.e. not a drake).

Munchkin by definition does not know moderation or common sense. What you're doing is number crunching.

Same thing. One is a tool, the other is the malicious use of that tool.

Draco, I think you're wrongly conflating "powergaming" with "munchkin".

All munchkins are power gamers, but the converse is not true. Kind of like squares and rectangles, you know?

...

Munchkindom is specifically "powergamingto excess". Often with a strong dose of malicious rules-lawyering thrown in.

Words will give people associations and assumptions. Munchkin is a word with a lot of associations, most of them bad.
The actual game is great with drinks although.

I wasn't aware that this thread ("5E Wish List") is about MMOs?

Which Shadowrun MMO? The one coming out soon, or the one in-universe?

Which Shadowrun MMO? The over-ambitious one with the energy-bridges or the comic-persiflage retro one?

Blabla. Still not topic of this thread.

Ok - let me rephrase that to better fit the topic of the thread:

What I DON'T wish for is a 5th edition with an over-emphasized link to either one of the half-baked MMOs. It was hinted that at least Shadowrun Online will have a strong influence on the 2074 timeline in that they will make one of the Big 10 fall...

I really don't like that.
It's ok to have these facettes of the Pen&Paper forged into videogames to cater to an audience that is ok with not having the whole package/the full experience. For me it is not - especially if they throw things like energy-bridges at me in the very first trailer that have never existed in that form anywhere in the Shadowrun Universe. Thats not beeing "true to the game". What I fear now is a kind of interactive relationship between the MMOs and the two SR timelines - kinda like AEG is doing it with the 'Legend of the Five Rings' CCG and the corresponding Pen&Paper (which for them works as those two games have grown together since their humble beginnings).

There's only one MMO.

The other game is single player.

i know im late to the party. and im certain plenty will disagree with this.
what i would want to see out of 5th ed is for it to be a revised sr3 without variable target numbers. instead of that have variable hits to succeed.

personally i want technos gone, and otaku and old school deckers back.

either way ill probably stop being a dinosaur and play 5th when it releases.

I'm going to take a look at it, as I'm itching to GM again, but if the fluff is as bad as the 4e fluff (Bogota Is Not A Port City) I'll pass.

Bogota! was not CGL's finest hour for a lot of reasons.

But all of the real problems are in the "fluff" sections.

The MRSI software system, and the Slow spell is not quite the best written "crunch" material, either.

Pffffffft. There's Ares Bravo! Instead of a grenade launcher it has... hold on to your helmet!.. a stun baton!


I agree with your general logic, but this is not how the market works.
Also, as far as pricing goes, let's take a conservative estimate of 80 working hours at 6$ an hour. That's some 500$ cost to be shared among thousands of buyers. Not exactly a luxury. Full-color full-page illustrations can cost as much, and the new books have those aplenty.

You're going to have to actually provide some evidence (or at least an argument) if you disagree.

There are certain price points beyond which most buyers are less likely to buy your product. Most people are willing to buy a book which looks interesting if it's $5 or less, even if they don't necessarily plan to even play it (PS+ used this very aggressively low pricing to their advantage with Eclipse Phase). $20 is an easy sell. $40 is average (for core books). $60 is a tough sell, and the buying market is limited to people who know they'll play. Not many people impulse buy at the $60 range. Above that, you get into collectors and die-hard fans.

If you increase your book from $40 to $60 (50% increase in gross income), but your sales drop by 50%, that's ultimately a gross loss.



I'm not sure where you got those numbers from (or even what you're referring to). You have to be talking about some specific activity that should be incorporated into the book, not the actual writing of the book itself, right? Are you talking about creation dates for weapons still? Review of canon conflicts?

That's simple smithsonian economics on self-regulating markets, what is there to prove. If you're selling a good that's too expensive for the majority of the clientelle to buy, which is limiting your gross income, raising the price further is further limiting your profits, not improving them. See "market equilibrium", etc.

Creation dates for gear, naturally.
And frankly, choosing between a book with a lot of (expensive) large color illustrations and one with good fluff and crunch but b/w interior illustrations like the previous editions had, why would anyone choose the former?

(female voice) But it is more beautiful! (/female voice)
SCNR XD

What was it called, style over substance? There has to be some reason why apple products sell so well.

Because it means they can show off how much money they have.
Paying more for less because you have more money than brains.

Same with rolex watches.
"Look at my Rolex! It shows me the time and the date and it cost me 2500 bucks!"
"Look at my Swatch! It shows me the time for several capitals and date and has a stop watch and alarm and is water proof up to 200m depth! and it cost me 250 bucks!"

Timex, the watch that's Bruce Willis in comparison to all others.

Regarding the illustrations; each has a place. The color illustrations in the core book are really inspirational. An image is worth a thousand words (and doesn't take as much work for the reader). Good illustrations include that fluff.



Yes. Are we agreeing?



For that specifically yes, I agree. I posted such myself, that the list of books to review isn't that long. 80 hours is crazy long for that. Researching would be probably 2-4 hours, to establish which edition the gun came up during. I don't think there are any significant complications which would affect 'making up the month and year'. Editing is minor (I'm imagining this as a single line). Layout is negligible, assuming this is a new book, not an update to a previous one.

Maybe not perfect (nothing written/created by a human being will be), but not as bad as some would have people believe. Just because something CAN be abused doesn't mean it WILL be abused on a common basis. If you refuse to create something just because it CAN be abused, then you are limiting yourself needlessly. Just smack the rare ones that do with a phone book and it's all good.

Some fluff text on equipment mentions that it's something recently introduced, or even specify a year. One would have to check through every book that a piece of gear is in to be sure, and if it mentions it being recent or just having gotten on the market, there's some extra time checking what year the book is set in. I suppose it's not too long if you limit it to just guns, but when you have to go through it for every piece of gear? That adds up.

For things on my wishlist :

Someone in the writing department to take fifteen seconds to consider that RF signals propagate through air exponentially slower than light travels through fiber optic cable or electrical pulses travel through copper.

Then apply the resulting lag to the difference in reaction times between IC and commlink hackers.

It's called elasticity.

The cool thing about it is that you can figure out what the best price point is based on similar products. If you know that core rules books sell optimally at $40, then sell it at $40 regardless of how much it should cost. Because otherwise you're loosing money (it doesn't matter how much you spent making it, you're optimizing the income from sales, which while related to product quality, functions independently*).

*There's no way to predict how the quality will effect the elasticity of the good, and there's no way to alter the quality later...

Why? How would this make playing a hacker more fun?

Because you have a motivation to infiltrate the facility and use an optical tap or so to directly jack into their network.

You don't need to add anything to the game for that. It's called wi-fi inhibiting materials, and those are already available, try again.

Get a micro-drone with a microwave link inside. Wi-fi inhabiting materials defeated.