For non-CA/US gamers, opinions on lowering D&D costs?

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Lago PARANOIA
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For non-CA/US gamers, opinions on lowering D&D costs?

Post by Lago PARANOIA »

After reading some blogs from non-American/Canadian D&D gamers, I am totally convinced that D&D as it stands right now is just too damn expensive to be competitive outside of these two markets. The bar should be significantly lowered to get into the hobby in terms of cost.

A) Move away from the glossy hardcover color rulebooks with large print and head back to newsprint books. Think really thick crossword puzzle book.

B) Make with a new SRD/OGL. It should be like 3E's, only slightly more permissive--it should have a few iconic copyrighted materials in it like beholders and mind flayers because that stuff is great.

Not only should you have a bunch of archived files you can download but there's a wiki (or an html document) where you can just look this stuff up.

Finally, you also put sourcebook material in it from a steady trickle. This helps people to come back to your website and get exposed to advertisements.

C) Even though D&D hasn't done Gazetteers in a good long while, I think that D&D should go back to it. But it should be a free service. Since people don't read walls of text, you'll need to put in a lot of B&W art to jazz things up. If you go for a more 80's artstyle you can even claim that it's a nostalgia shift.


So I'm asking you guys, would this be enough to get you hooked on D&D if the edition is good? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by Korwin »

Don't have a glue how much D&D books costs at the moment here in Europe (Austria), but the reason I don't buy them is not the price.

Edit: in fact the presentation is the only thing I like of 4ed.
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Post by Ancient History »

Let's look at two related models.

Games Workshop, which operates around the world, has steadily increased the prices for books related to it's tabletop miniature games, to the point that the latest version of Orcs & Goblins clocks in around US$40. Prices for models have also risen. GW supports their pricing with the statement that games are a luxury product, and people will pay what they charge, even in a global recession. Their game lines are currently fairly successful, although their Black Library spin-off appears to be more popular and profitable. Perhaps to discourage piracy, GW does not publish its books online. Their books are widely pirated.

Posthuman Studios are the creators of the game Eclipse Phase, which they themselves seeded onto bitorrent sites. Their philosophy is that increased exposure to the game drives sales, and so far it appears to work. Of course, EP doesn't move product in the numbers that D&D does.

So there's something to both philosophies. Which is better for D&D? <shrug>
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Post by Juton »

I would actually prefer a move back to black and white art and layout. I like the art better and I'm fine with plain looking pages as long as the print is well written.
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Post by tzor »

There is something to be said for relatively decent pen and ink artwork.
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Post by Wrathzog »

I'm of the opinion that if you think that that D&D is too cost prohibitive to get into, you probably have more important problems to deal with than wonder how you're going to afford another book of rules on how to pretend to be an Elf.
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Post by Starmaker »

As a schoolkid/freshman, I was able to buy the core set, some splats and modules, a fuckton of Wizards' novels (which used to cost 5 times as much as fantasy hardcovers in Russian), and the D&D magazines for $15 each. I had to save, but I didn't go hungry or walk home. Also, people didn't have broadband then and color printers weren't widespread, so printed art was precious, and the books that the Internet-enabled could pirate were plaintext.

Now tabletop roleplaying in Russia is almost dead, so there aren't any other trends in supply and demand for TTRPGs to look at. But we have price points:
hardcover fantasy novel (fantasy is not available in paperbacks) - $10
movie ticket - $7-20
junk food lunch - $5+
actually filling lunch that doesn't make you sick - $10
broadband - upwards of $13/month, people in regions are royally screwed
subway fare - $40/month
Soviet-style rent & conveniences - $100-150/month
market price rent in Moscow - $500-1000/month
Warhammer - add customs fees, shipping, employee salary, etc.

So I think, when there's a will, there's a way. Geeks will always be able to afford the books. Granted, a cheaper book might have the potential to become popular with young kids, but it has to be translated for that to have even a slightest chance of working.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Wrathzog wrote:I'm of the opinion that if you think that that D&D is too cost prohibitive to get into, you probably have more important problems to deal with than wonder how you're going to afford another book of rules on how to pretend to be an Elf.
New players had to gamble around 100 USD to get into D&D at an entry level, and that scenario included sharing the PHB among an entire playgroup. Once all 4 of your players got a PHB, you're looking at over 200 bucks.

That's a *steep* initial investment. Period.
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Post by Wrathzog »

TheFlatline wrote:New players had to gamble around 100 USD to get into D&D at an entry level, and that scenario included sharing the PHB among an entire playgroup. Once all 4 of your players got a PHB, you're looking at over 200 bucks.

That's a *steep* initial investment. Period.
As opposed to what? I don't understand how you can consider 25-50 dollars per person a "Steep" investment. People can seriously throw that kind of money away with one night of watching a movie with friends, on a single Video Game, or on individual Magic Cards (TARMAGOOOOYYFFFF).

A Car is a Steep investment. D&D is a Hobby Activity, and most definitely one of the cheaper ones.
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Post by Sashi »

Seriously. I have spent more on gas driving to where the game is being held than I have on books for playing the games.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

I think Lago's criticism isn't of overall cost, it's of initial entry cost for any given RPG.

Lemme first talk about movies:

If I want to see a movie, I can see it on release night, buy popcorn and soda at the theatre, and when adding in transit costs I can pay $20-$25 just for myself.

Or I can wait for a second-run theatre / bargain night, sneak-in or forgo snacks and see it for $7-$10

Or I can wait six months and see it on pay-per view for $5 for the whole family

Or I can wait nine months and rent it from Redbox for $1 for the whole family.

Or I can be a commie, wait even longer for the library (or other legitimate information sharing source) to maybe get a copy of it and watch it totally free.


Now currently, the only equivalent options for most RPGs are to pay the opening night full price, or to wait until it can maybe be had for free. This setup means that only those willing to pay full price, or already want the game enough to stalk libraries and torrent sites are going to see the game. There's no sale point for the curious or impulse buyer. And I think it's a cause for concern that such limits the future expansion of the hobby.
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Post by virgil »

You might spend comparable money on other activities, but they provide entertainment without hours/days of prep work. Though that's probably parallel to the issue of sticker shock that you bring up.
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Wrathzog wrote: As opposed to what? I don't understand how you can consider 25-50 dollars per person a "Steep" investment. People can seriously throw that kind of money away with one night of watching a movie with friends, on a single Video Game, or on individual Magic Cards (TARMAGOOOOYYFFFF).
First of all, outside the US/CA it's going to be more like 40-60 dollars per person if we're talking about these glossy rulebooks. 25-50 dollars is not a steep investment if you're already into the hobby. But almost everyone under the age of 30 has played a video game or at least seen one being played, everyone has seen a movie in the cinema, etc.. They know how video games and movies work and they already like it.

25-50 dollars per person is too steep of a price to ask for anyone to try out an unknown hobby. And it doesn't matter that if over the long run it's a cheap hobby, if someone ends up not liking it they're not going to play it and it's a waste of 25-50 dollars.


Now the reason why I directed this thread at non-CA/US peoples is because I read on a blog that in other countries gaming tends to be a working class/lower-middle class hobby (I'm willing to be corrected on this) as opposed to a college/middle class hobby here. If I can get what would be an acceptable price for a boxed set and/or core rulebooks we'd get somewhere. That question is for attracting new players.

Now, the reason why I brought up the SRD and Gazetteer stuff was to lure in players who already played RPGs but found them too expensive. I agree that they'd need translations in order to be useful, but I was wondering how much of that would attract players even if it was translated. Pathfinder finding a Czech and Japanese audience was quite a surprise to me.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by icyshadowlord »

Forty euros per book around here in Finland. GOOD GOD IT'S TOO MUCH. Even the rather dedicated group I am in is favoring online shopping to buying from the actual stores around here...oh, and before any moron goes saying "that ain't so bad, so stop whining", take a moment to convert forty euros into dollars. THEN you are free to whine if you have any reason to.
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Post by Juton »

One thing they should really consider is bringing back a 'basic' set. Only include rules for maybe the first 3 levels of play. Maybe only go to press with 6 or 8 classes, really shrink the size of the rules down. I'm thinking of something akin to the classic red box of yore, I don't know if you can sell a product that minimal now a day, but it was a great gateway into the hobby.
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Post by Chamomile »

icyshadowlord wrote:oh, and before any moron goes saying "that ain't so bad, so stop whining", take a moment to convert forty euros into dollars. THEN you are free to whine if you have any reason to.
Roughly $57.34 according to Google.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Wrathzog wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:New players had to gamble around 100 USD to get into D&D at an entry level, and that scenario included sharing the PHB among an entire playgroup. Once all 4 of your players got a PHB, you're looking at over 200 bucks.

That's a *steep* initial investment. Period.
As opposed to what? I don't understand how you can consider 25-50 dollars per person a "Steep" investment. People can seriously throw that kind of money away with one night of watching a movie with friends, on a single Video Game, or on individual Magic Cards (TARMAGOOOOYYFFFF).

A Car is a Steep investment. D&D is a Hobby Activity, and most definitely one of the cheaper ones.
You *sound* like you're single and don't have a family. But anyway, I can still profit here.

Hey dude, I have this new hobby that you're totally going to love. Just give me, and have each of your friends give me, a 50 dollar bill and you'll find out how awesome it is. After all, 50 bucks is nothing to risk on a new exciting hobby, right?

But here's an analogy for you. Board games usually run for 30-70 bucks depending on the game. If you're willing to shop online you almost always see the games in the 30-40 dollar range. And that's a one time expenditure for multiple people, and you're done. You also have the benefit of not having to invest significant amounts of time from your life routinely, and you aren't beholden to a single group of people trying to make their schedule mesh up. If you get 4 or 6 or 8 people to show up, you play the game, you have fun, and you're done at the end of the night. Next time you don't need the same 4 or 6 or 8 people to show up, with copies of their own, in order to play again.

In almost every way measurable it's a more efficient and inexpensive hobby than TTRPGs.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

One thing you may need to be aware of is that it isn't just D&D that is more expensive in other countries.

In some cases, like Australia, it's books in general.

Australia has for a VERY long time been dominated by an alliance of book importers that import the left overs and seconds of books from the USA and UK and do so late, and then charge premium extra high prices.

To the degree that recently two of our largest book retail chains basically declared bankruptcy because of it. Apparently they had been begging their suppliers to get their act together for years... and they just flat out refused to bother.

Then the Internet ate them.

Because here in Australia I can go on Amazon, which while reasonably priced is hardly the absolute bargain bin of the internet, find ANY book I want, find it SOONER, and INCLUDING postage cost AND postage time get it sooner AND cheaper than if I go to ANY bookstore, not just my local one just ANY in Australia (barring shady second hand bookstores and they won't have the book you are looking for, and it will be second hand).

International Internet retailers and the weakness of the US dollar (and in our case somewhat over inflated strength of the Australian one) is finally driving down prices for a lot of hobby products.

But you need to understand, we pay more for ALL this shit. Hell, for instance we pay MORE THAN TWICE AS MUCH per title for PC games than you do. And we get them late. And some of them are banned. And even if they aren't banned there are a bunch that just never turn up here for no reason at all.

D&D is still RELATIVELY cheap.
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Post by Wrathzog »

Flatline wrote:You *sound* like you're single and don't have a family. But anyway, I can still profit here.
Yep, I'm pretty much the target demographic. My car is paid off, I have a solid job, and I'm stuck with more disposable income than I know what to do with. It's fucking terrible.
But here's an analogy for you. Board games usually run for 30-70 bucks depending on the game.
I put boardgames in the same boat as TTRPG's. They're both very price efficient as far as hours of entertainment per dollar. But don't act like D&D doesn't have the flexibility to do things like One-Shot adventures. With a little bit of work, You can pass D&D off as any number of board games and you can do it with the things presented in the PHB alone.
Which is actually a direction that Wizards seems to be experimenting with.
Lago wrote:5-50 dollars per person is too steep of a price to ask for anyone to try out an unknown hobby. And it doesn't matter that if over the long run it's a cheap hobby, if someone ends up not liking it they're not going to play it and it's a waste of 25-50 dollars.
Flatline wrote:Hey dude, I have this new hobby that you're totally going to love. Just give me, and have each of your friends give me, a 50 dollar bill and you'll find out how awesome it is. After all, 50 bucks is nothing to risk on a new exciting hobby, right?
I don't understand this scenario that people are going to consider getting into D&D and have absolutely no idea about how to educate themselves on the thing that they're going to buy. Ignoring THE INTERNET, if you're the type of person who's considering playing D&D, then you probably have friends who already own all of the books anyways. Alternatively, you can go to a Hobby Store or a book store and you can probably just flip through the book itself to get an idea about what you're getting into.

Frankly, if you want to attract more people to D&D, you need to actually make it attractive. I'm talking about a whole culture shift where people don't think that D&D Gamers are neck bearded losers who live in their parent's basement. We need more Vin Diesels and we need people to not be neck bearded losers who live with their parents.
The other thing is what Virgil brought up. D&D is actually a lot of work and especially for the DM. Ideally, we'd have an entire tool set of things right out of the box to alleviate some of those things...
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Post by Chamomile »

Question: Can a game built around ongoing stories be made appealing to the masses? Nerds love continuity, but continuity doesn't appeal to the mainstream. Does this problem go away once the mainstream are developing their own individual continuity, thus removing the problem of being locked out of that continuity, or is continuity inherently unappealing to non-nerds?
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Post by TheFlatline »

Wrathzog wrote:
Flatline wrote:You *sound* like you're single and don't have a family. But anyway, I can still profit here.
Yep, I'm pretty much the target demographic. My car is paid off, I have a solid job, and I'm stuck with more disposable income than I know what to do with. It's fucking terrible.
But here's an analogy for you. Board games usually run for 30-70 bucks depending on the game.
I put boardgames in the same boat as TTRPG's. They're both very price efficient as far as hours of entertainment per dollar. But don't act like D&D doesn't have the flexibility to do things like One-Shot adventures. With a little bit of work, You can pass D&D off as any number of board games and you can do it with the things presented in the PHB alone.
Which is actually a direction that Wizards seems to be experimenting with.
Lago wrote:5-50 dollars per person is too steep of a price to ask for anyone to try out an unknown hobby. And it doesn't matter that if over the long run it's a cheap hobby, if someone ends up not liking it they're not going to play it and it's a waste of 25-50 dollars.
Flatline wrote:Hey dude, I have this new hobby that you're totally going to love. Just give me, and have each of your friends give me, a 50 dollar bill and you'll find out how awesome it is. After all, 50 bucks is nothing to risk on a new exciting hobby, right?
I don't understand this scenario that people are going to consider getting into D&D and have absolutely no idea about how to educate themselves on the thing that they're going to buy. Ignoring THE INTERNET, if you're the type of person who's considering playing D&D, then you probably have friends who already own all of the books anyways. Alternatively, you can go to a Hobby Store or a book store and you can probably just flip through the book itself to get an idea about what you're getting into.

Frankly, if you want to attract more people to D&D, you need to actually make it attractive. I'm talking about a whole culture shift where people don't think that D&D Gamers are neck bearded losers who live in their parent's basement. We need more Vin Diesels and we need people to not be neck bearded losers who live with their parents.
The other thing is what Virgil brought up. D&D is actually a lot of work and especially for the DM. Ideally, we'd have an entire tool set of things right out of the box to alleviate some of those things...
See here's the problem with your arguments. You're making them from the target demographic's point of view.

The majority of the world still doesn't access the internet (29% projection from the 2010 census), so "just look it up on the internet" is an arrogant, almost elitist response.

But let's set that aside. Once you introduce the internet, you're fighting with digital forms of entertainment that offer orders of magnitude more spectacle than anything D&D can offer, at times even cheaper than what D&D can offer. I know people who have put hundreds of hours into a 60 dollar computer game.

Not only that, but D&D makes its money by selling you incomplete product and goosing you for 30-40 bucks several times a year, so in reality a real customer isn't only spending 120 bucks for 3 core books, they're spending that yearly to keep up with the power creep and cult of the new that everyone else is buying.

D&D is an *expensive* RPG. I'd really say it's the most expensive RPG to be into out there. For a while WoD probably held that record with their 40 dollar splat books, but their publishing schedule has dropped off to nearly non-existent, so we're back to D&D being the biggest money sucker of them all. Plus, as a customer ages, the cost becomes more prohibitive as the ability to play becomes less likely. Work, family, social life, economic considerations, and just life in general all make it difficult to arrange 5 people to set aside the same window of time, routinely, for extended periods of time. Considering that difficulty, the premium paid by D&D makes it even more risky.

PS: Your fallacy of equating a one-off D&D session with a boardgame breaks down quickly. First, unless I'm trying to run Advanced Squad Leader or something like that, it *might* take 30 minutes to explain the rules and set a board game up. A one-shot D&D game on the other hand will probably spend most of the night generating characters, or explaining the rules. To have *any* chance of it running quickly, you have to rely on your gaming group being familiar with the rules, which essentially puts you back to your D&D gaming group. Not to mention that D&D is a very, very specific experience. Board games in general cover such a drastically wide swath of gameplay experience that you can probably find something that would interest almost anyone, whereas if someone doesn't like D&D, they don't like D&D, and no amount of one-shots are going to change that.

Not to mention you're still stuck with the optimal route of multiple copies of the book for players, so you're still looking at a 200 dollar investment for a one-shot, as opposed to a 30-60 dollar board game offering.
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Post by Fuchs »

I have been playing D&D and Shadowrun since 20 years, and I have gone through several years without buying anything new for either. You don't have to buy new stuff each year.
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Post by hogarth »

Juton wrote:One thing they should really consider is bringing back a 'basic' set. Only include rules for maybe the first 3 levels of play. Maybe only go to press with 6 or 8 classes, really shrink the size of the rules down. I'm thinking of something akin to the classic red box of yore, I don't know if you can sell a product that minimal now a day, but it was a great gateway into the hobby.
Interestingly enough, there have been a number of complaints from Europeans about the Pathfinder "Basic Box" set. Namely, if they put in counters and dry-erase maps and whatnot, then it counts as a toy/game instead of a book under EU rules and it costs disproportionately more to import.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Chamomile wrote:Question:..... or is continuity inherently unappealing to non-nerds?
Well Soap Operas, Professional Wrestling, and Movies with ongoing sequels are all pretty big in the non-nerd demographic. Looking at the growth of Anime and the expansion of comic-book based big-budget pictures since the 1990s, I'm tempted to say that those aren't as nerd-exclusive as they used to be.

So personally, I doubt that "continuity" by itself is an issue in making RPGs more mainstream.
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Post by Chamomile »

Ongoing movie sequels don't really have the level of continuity that a D&D game would, but the others are a fair enough point. I still think TTRPGs have two major weaknesses compared to other board games I've got in my house, though.

1) Time per session. An hour is the average time taken for most good board games (meaning: not Monopoly). It's the minimum for D&D. The only board game I know that runs as long as an average D&D session without getting really, really dull is Risk. And the length involved is the reason why Risk is typically only played on holidays.

2) Sessions per month. A game of D&D isn't fun unless you're playing at least semi-regularly. Once every two weeks is pretty much the minimum if you want to get anywhere with a campaign, once or twice per week is more preferable. You combine this with the monstrous time needed per session and you get a game that meshes really poorly with people who already have a job and an active social life (replace "job" with "part-time job plus classes" if in college).

I can see two ways to alleviate this. The first would be to rework D&D so that combat is resolved much faster. Combat is by far the most time consuming aspect of the game, so if you find a way to get each combat done more quickly, the time per session goes downward, which makes it easier to fit in more sessions per month.

The other way is to make D&D a game that is explicitly meant to be played over the internet via chat, forum, facebook, or twitter. Most people check the latter two several times a day already, so if you could make a way to play a TTRPG through them that required no more than one or two lines of input at a time, and was capable of resolving individual combats in less than a week, that might work. I'm more a fan of the first suggestion, though.
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