Posted on December 24, 2010
A Goblin State of Mind.
These are the Condition cards that Paizo is bringing out sometime next year. Your character gets deafened? Boom, there’s your Condition Card, you just keep that on your sheet until it wears off.
I said YOU KEEP IT ON YOUR SHEE-… never mind.
Are there other ways of doing this? Gosh yes, none of which will cost whatever this pack will cost. I really do have to express my admiration for the way Paizo makes money from a game whose rules you can have for free from the internet. I’d far rather see people pour their creativity into these kinds of conveniences than meddle with rules or write umpteen similar scenarios.
Except the coins they made. That was stupid.
Totally agree. Privateer Press, Spartan Games and Gale Force 9 are all doing this kind of thing too, where you charge what you charge for the game (30-50 for a book and whatever the market will bear for the minis), but then you charge $10 bucks or so at a time for the little convenience boosters like cards that have rules on them or little counters to use with minis.
As far as $10 investments go, I feel like we get an awful lot from those little convenience purchases as compared to even the books and minis.
This kind of business model actually reminds me of how the music industry has responded to lost CD revenue. Give the main product away from free or next to nothing, then focus on merchandise. Given, these cards are there to help you in a way a Mastodon t-shirt simply can’t (Crack the Skye will sound just as good without it), but other products like Deluxe Limited CD releases and 180gram Vinyl remastered releases seem to have a bit in common with people willing to buy the hardcover version of Pathfinder’s rules as opposed to bookmarking it on Firefox. And really, part of the reason we buy the cards or the tokens is that they look better than same kind of game aid we could create with some note cards and a little bit of effort. Which I guess does make these play aids as non-essential as band t-shirts, as anyone could make their own Mastodon shirt with a Sharpie and a Hanes tee. Of course, they’d look like a cheap bastard unless they were really good at it. But just because Kurt Cobain made his own Flipper shirt, doesn’t necessarily mean you should too.
Anyway, I think that free rules are awesome, and any new toys to streamline my game play are always welcomed with open arms.
I’m glad to see games companies do this and I think aiming at the poor impulse control of hobbyists who keep Cheetos in business is a sound idea.
Not everyone is doing this though. Fantasy Flight, an outfit for whom I have nothing but respect published the latest Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay iteration in a colossal and spendy boxed set with proprietary dice.
Now I know what you are thinking – normal people don’t have d12s and d20s lying around their house, so the dice have always been kind of a barrier… No the point is, for $100, they are packaging all those gaming peripherals (crazy unreadable dice, skill cards so that you don’t have to look stuff up) and selling them as the default set, with nothing for free. Their product is good, but damn…
I kind of prefer Paizo’s approach; we could be playing this game for free, after all. They just make it convenient for us not to.