Dorastor & suicidal tendancies

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

From: Steve Gilham Entropy requires no maintenance (STEVEG@ARC.UG.EDS.COM)
Date: Fri 17 Sep 1993 - 02:02:40 EEST


I just saw the Dorastor pack in the new stuff arrived at the local games shop here in Cambridge. Very pretty it looks too. Apart from the 20-quid price tag.

I tend to buy gaming stuff fairly omnivorously, even if I'm not likely actually to use it "in anger", finding it in many case more cost effective in time spent reading per unit expenditure than most books, and I've enough spending money, but that sort of price makes it non-cost effective.

 I might just be prepared to spring that sort of money for a Gloranthan sourcebook (no scenarios, few, if any RQ2 retreads) were it as thick a volume as, say Mage:the Ascension (another recent arrival at an asking price of 18 pounds for 256pp).

Sun County bombed being priced less than this.

Someone at AH has totally screwed up the marketing, and especially the market positioning. For the same price one can buy 3 AD&D card-wallet sourcebooks(6-50), or two of their softbound sourcebooks(9-99), or 4 short modules(4-50) - and have change left over. Even fairly substantial supplement sourcebooks like the Werewolf Players' Guide (a trifle thicker than Dorastor; produced by a comparatively small publisher, rather than the T$R megacorporation), retails at 14 pounds.

Or is the pricing a deliberate ploy to kill the game off?

So where do we go from here? I might personally use AD&D2 as a Glorantha system as that makes PCs a bit less brittle (as someone commented recently, Glorantha has an ecology fit for heroes - in that case I'd also like it to have a mechanic that allows it).

But that, of course, is darkest heresy on this list. Similarly, scrub out Earthdawn (Shadowrun meets AD&D with a 25 quid pricetag).

But, hey, what about Ars Magica? That's politically correct enough, surely, although it does cover the relatively high-tech (compared with Sartar & Prax) 12th and 13th centuries, has cheaper supplements, reputedly has the brittle PCs that many folk seem to thing a good thing, and sorcerers no more powerful than those of RQ3. The Shaman supplement looks like it has many of the things recently discussed here. All that'd be neeed would be to bolt on the cult/rune-magic mechanics

Date view Thread view Subject view Author view

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Fri 10 Oct 2003 - 01:31:40 EEST