Why are RPG rulebooks so expensive? Do publishers seriously expect us not to just pirate them all?
Why are RPG rulebooks so expensive? Do publishers seriously expect us not to just pirate them all?
Why are RPG rulebooks so expensive? Do publishers seriously expect us not to just pirate them all?
Print media is always expensive if it's low-volume bespoke stuff with color illustrations and a hard cover. You also pay the oy-veyers a 'THINGS I KNOW!' tax for shit like Lord of the Rings.
Most devs expect piracy to be a thing, which is part of why .pdfs tend to be much cheaper, especially from indie devs. They (the small guys) just hope you'll actually buy the system if you like it. There's not much you can do to fight piracy; watermarked .pdfs are a joke and techniques like FFG's 'include as many stupid proprietary elements as possible' tactic tend to backfire in an era where more and more people play online.
Listen to Anon, Anon is wise
You're paying for the book itself, not the words, and as it turns out printing books is heavy on the finances in a world where we can create infinite copies of infinite literature from the comfort of our own homes. If you want the rules you go online to take them, or purchase them for a small fee, most of which is purely to sustain the company putting the rules out. If you want the book, accept that you are paying for something that is valued not for its utility, but for its aesthetic values.
>You also pay the oy-veyers a 'THINGS I KNOW!' tax
I like the way you talk.
Expensive, huh?
This. I bought five BFRPG corebooks and all of the splats and adventures and it was roughly the cost of only one D&D 5e book.
That's one new COD. How poor are you?
They obviously meant expensive for what it is, not expensive in absolute terms
In absolute terms, TTRPGs have no monetary value.
“What it is” is weird to try and quantify. You can argue it’s just a book of words if you don’t care about the illustrations or displaying it on your bookshelf or anything but the rules text, but even then it’s theoretically infinite entertainment, akin to a video game at about the same price point but more open-ended. On the other hand, you have to make the fun while a video game basically exists to do just that. So, what is “what it is”?
Poorer than you, fricking bougie
Several things all at once.
Production costs for small runs are higher.
Consumer expectations have grown, the industry around production and marketing bloats costs further.
But really, pirate everything first. Go back and pay for the things you like and use. Pay for it in a way that gets the money as directly as possible to the people who made it, avoid as many of the middle man storefronts as possible.
But also, get better skills and a job. If that's more than an hour of your day's wage you're fricking up.
Don't shell out for slop or hype, pay attention to what you buy and how you'll use it.
>Do publishers seriously expect us not to just pirate them all?
Publishers don't expect anything of the /tg/ audience because overall we're a den of thieves that are never happy. Why would you cater to a group does does nothing but complain that TRVE SOVL ART is dead while doing nothing to actually support said art.
>hesitant to spend $71.05 on a hobby product that brings him joy
>unflinchingly spends $125+ each on textbooks for a course they're already paying $25,000+ a year for
The duality of Chan
>implying anyone here made it into uni
hey, board games are legit topic for master thesis
I pirated half my college textbooks because technical information should be free.
What do you do for work so I can go to your work and demand your labour for free you fricking whiney homosexual.
Where exactly did anyone demand anything be free, you fricking illiterate homosexual
It's not called a grift for nothing.
But pointing out that the TTRPG business is a scam hurts people's feelings here.
Mostly the grifters and those who support the grift.
>$65.00
>Expensive
It's in pounds, not dollars, so it's more like $85 or so. And yeah, it is expensive for a book.
>65 bongs
>expensive
Why do so many around here work minimum wage?
>expensive for a book
Hardback is expensive, full color is even more expensive. You're mostly paying for the ink and cover in this case, the deluxe Berserk volumes are about half of that despite being 700 pages.
That's money laundering.
Because grifting is real.
Anons who said stuff about production runs are correct. If you want a full color hard cover books, buy at least 10000 copies, then it will be cheap. If you only buy 1000, you'll pay for it and your customers will pay for it. If it's some niche shit, you're gonna get print on demand at a high price and you're going to thank us for it because we'd rather spend our print time on something else in most cases. If we're talking commercial books here, we'd rather get an easy return on investments by some company buying the entirety of the big print run and then distributing it by themselves than dealing with shitty RPGs that we're not even sure that we're gonna sell. Depending on the country, paper industry was also majorly fricked for many publishers because of corona bullshit (and for some because of ukraine/russia bullshit). Also, fun fact, some publishers have their own resources for printing books, some don't and have to use subcontractors with all that it entails. We have our own typographical equipment but we'd rather hire a subcontractor for full color books with limited runs because our Riso printers are great for many runs of one b/w book but for multiple ones in quick succession you'd need offset printers (industrial ones at the cost of a small African country).
This is also correct. If a clueless billionaire wants to publish a book, we'll tell him it's super expensive and scam the frick out of him (reasonable-like, of course). That's how mafia works.
t. publisher
Pirate them. Buy the ones you really like. Hoard the rest and forget where you buried them. Yarr har into the sunset.
Are we just going to gloss over the fact that someone in this thread tried to claim that you’re doing something wrong and don’t deserve RPGs if you’re not making literally $80 an hour? I mean, certainly don’t give him (You)s, but frick.