Charging for rulebooks

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Thank you for getting this thread back on topic on its own. However, if the thread veers back toward the unpleasantness and disrespect from earlier today, it will be put on ice and locked.

Remember, how something is said is at least as important as what you are actually trying to say.

Thank you,
Paladin of Ice
 
Lurin said:
Interestingly enough, while I actually agree that the fact that it's universally searchable is probably not a major factor, I have at least seen this happen. There was a gaming club down in St.Olaf here in Minnesota that desired to try this 'larping thing' and did a search, found our book which appeared 'better' compared to the freebies out there, bought a few copies and ran games. (Granted they played for free in their own club, and leveled rather quickly playing twice a week). This led them to come try out what was then the Minnesota Alliance game (this was before there was 2 Minnesota Games,and well before there was one again) We had about a dozen folks come out to play, they were college kids with all the cash restrictions that come from it.

In the end we netted a small number of long term players (Including that Crazy Guy that Plays Eldarion/Quyri) that still play to this day. Would this still be the case without the boosted search engine? Who knows, clearly they would have picked some system to use and in fact the majority of those players continued to play only locally in the college and developed their own modified system to play.
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As one of those St. Olaf players, I'm afraid I have to disagree/correct this anecdote. Our college LARP club was founded by a long time NERO Alliance player from California, who wanted to bring LARPing to college with him in Minnesota. He based our club game rules heavily on that rules set, so much so that it was worth it for most of us to buy the rulebook (I still have my copy). We became decently familiar with the rules, however, due to the restrictions of a college campus, we only played short 5-6 hour games on Saturday afternoons. Dave and another Minnesota player even came to the college and played with us one Saturday. We attempted one semester of two games per week but that quickly fizzled out due to competing schedules of busy college kids (I ran the second weekly game). The desire and curiosity to try "the real thing" grew more and more for many of us, especially after Dave's visit, so we got a group together and played a one-day event in the old Minnesota chapter. After that, some of us returned for a full weekend game, and following that, a few of us have stuck around for the long haul.

The change to a different system in the college club after that was completely independent of those events, as the club leader wanted to test out creating different types of LARPs and he now actually works as a professional LARP game designer in California. I'm not sure if he still plays Alliance or NERO.

I don't mean to get the thread off-track, but as this scenario was brought up, and as I was quite near the center of it, I wanted to make sure the events and reasons were accurately reflected. I also do not in any way mean to say Dave is lying or intentionally misleading, as Dave's knowledge is second hand while mine is first hand, and we have never actually directly spoken about this with each other before, so miscommunication can happen. In the end, it was more a matter of direct recruiting from the club's leader encouraging us to buy the rulebook (which we purchased online through major booksellers such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon) and Dave's outreach to us to try the real game that compelled us to try Alliance out.
 
If the ePub is free but of a lower quality (as it is right now), then you will get people who still want to buy the hard copy as it is easier to flip through and use (for most people at least).

If you could get the rulebook into gaming stores, that would be great, but not sure how realistic that actually is.
 
Would going free on the book solve the main problem with it? Namely, that it's coming up on four years since last update, with several major rules changes/clarifications and fifteen feet of addenda that only really exist here on the forums where no new player who decided to pick up the book to get interested would ever find them.

We have an e-pub version of the rules, which really makes it a hard sell telling someone 'oh, yeah, there's a bunch more rules that aren't in the book you're paying for' if we can't be bothered to even keep the .pdf up to date.
 
Mike Ventrella said:
One of the goals is to get that book available to as many people as possible. In order to do that I have a publisher who puts it on his web page and promotes it. People who may never have heard of a LARP see it and may be interested.

Further, he makes sure it is available through the entire world on every single ebook store out there. Seriously, go to any book store on line and do a search and you will find our Rule Book. Try that with any other LARP.

He's not going to do that for free.

I am actually kind of astounded how people will spend $60 for an event, contribute more for a private room or for food, spend $50 on gas to get to the event, spend another $200 on their costume, and balk at $6 for a book that will help them enjoy the event.
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The rulebook isn't an add-on for most new players. It's the -first thing they'll want to have before even playing-.

I literally can't think of a non-Alliance group locally that charges for their rules- other than NERO - at this point, virtually everyone has their player rulebook as a downloadable document, although some definitely DO sell a printed copy because hey, hard copies are good to have around at events. But the guy checking your website doesn't need or want that purchase. They just want to see how your game works, and having to hand you money for something like that is a turn-off.
 
Gaining web presence doesn't take a publisher. It's fairly easy. Getting on Amazon and other retailers is no great feat either (I have a lot of experience in this area). And to be fair, most of those Amazon purchasers are probably players that don't want to go through Double Dragon (I know myself and all my buds did that and we were established player). I don't mean to badmouth your publisher, since I obviously don't know everything they do but from what I see, it could be circumvented.

Every recent player I have met has found Alliance Seattle through word of mouth, conventions, or our Facebook. I will continue to research this, if you would like. I am happy to help.

Services like drive-thru rpg will host print on-demand versions of our book which removes any and all publisher costs and still feeds cash to the writer. The physical book could than be cheaper, if you wanted (you set the price after printing costs). Hosting a PDF is insanely cheap or free, if you use the right services (done that before too). Then we could have our professional physical copies if we wanted them and have the game 100% accessible out of the gate.

To use Oregon and Seattle as a model, a person could come to their first game and NPC for less than $20 (including food and travel). Most of our players are more than happy to give a new person a ride (check our many web presences if you need proof). NPCing is free and food for the whole weekend is $15. Throw in $5 for gas and boom $20 for an event. Most of our NPCs show up not knowing the rules because they didn't want to pay for the book. Now I am sure there are plenty of folk who wouldn't have read the rulebook either way but our NPC population has been BOOMING lately and the pay for the rule book model has been a constant complaint.

As a note, I am glad we could all get civil. I was sad that it seemed my friendly thread was turning into an argument. Props for the understanding on all sides. :thumbsup:
 
evi1r0n said:
Gaining web presence doesn't take a publisher. It's fairly easy. Getting on Amazon and other retailers is no great feat either (I have a lot of experience in this area). And to be fair, most of those Amazon purchasers are probably players that don't want to go through Double Dragon (I know myself and all my buds did that and we were established player). I don't mean to badmouth your publisher, since I obviously don't know everything they do but from what I see, it could be circumvented.

Every recent player I have met has found Alliance Seattle through word of mouth, conventions, or our Facebook. I will continue to research this, if you would like. I am happy to help.

Services like drive-thru rpg will host print on-demand versions of our book which removes any and all publisher costs and still feeds cash to the writer. The physical book could than be cheaper, if you wanted (you set the price after printing costs). Hosting a PDF is insanely cheap or free, if you use the right services (done that before too). Then we could have our professional physical copies if we wanted them and have the game 100% accessible out of the gate.

To use Oregon and Seattle as a model, a person could come to their first game and NPC for less than $20 (including food and travel). Most of our players are more than happy to give a new person a ride (check our many web presences if you need proof). NPCing is free and food for the whole weekend is $15. Throw in $5 for gas and boom $20 for an event. Most of our NPCs show up not knowing the rules because they didn't want to pay for the book. Now I am sure there are plenty of folk who wouldn't have read the rulebook either way but our NPC population has been BOOMING lately and the pay for the rule book model has been a constant complaint.

As a note, I am glad we could all get civil. I was sad that it seemed my friendly thread was turning into an argument. Props for the understanding on all sides. :thumbsup:
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And to cap it off. Most of the NPCs are more than happy to buy the physical rulebook once they know they are committed to playing.
 
This past weekend several of us attended Seattle Crypticon where we were advertising Alliance. We set out rule books on the tables along with our props and whatnot.

The physical rulebooks, obviously of production quality binding, made us look professional and we received many compliments from other LARPers saying as such. Regardless of how we think the rule book flows, merely having a bound copy for people to flip through that looks like it was made by someone that produces books helped us advertise. As such, I think having an option for physical rule books of production quality is a good thing for our image.

Do we need a contract with a publisher to do that? I don't know. I believe there were some links provided in this thread that support a print-on-demand service that supposedly looks good, so if their manufacturing quality is similar to our current quality then it sounds groovy to me.

However, at the convention I felt terrible saying "The rulebook costs $20 or you can get a pdf copy for $6." I really wish I had cheapo flash drives with a copy of the pdf on them to hand out and tell interested parties where they can get a quality print copy similar to what we had on the table.


I could have done that under the table with the pdf copy I have, but that would have been dishonest.
 
My brother is an indie tabletop RPG developer and he's had good results with print on demand from both Drive Thru RPG and Amazon.com. You can definitely get professional, high quality books through services like that and you don't really need a publisher to do that. I think the game would be better off with a free PDF rulebook, and if the publisher is the only thing holding that back...

A game like ours has a pretty huge barrier to entry as it is; removing the $6 fee to even see how the game works would help alleviate that at least a little bit. It's not a matter of people being unable to afford it - if I hadn't already played NERO and known roughly how Alliance works anyway, I probably would have looked for a game that doesn't charge just to read the rules.
 
I'm new to Alliance, looking forward to the new game opening up in Denver. I think there's something of a high barrier to entry for this game. The $6 charge for the rulebook PDF is annoying; certainly I'd rather have it available to me for free. The process for buying it with the registration for the Double Dragon publishing site was the greater irritation for me. It simply took more time than I would have liked.

Combine that with the necessity of emailing someone to get a password to register for this site -- and some question as to whether new registrants' posts are moderated before they appear, or if I've just had bad luck with posting so far and my posts have been eaten by the interwebz -- it's just a high barrier to entry that seems a little unfriendly.

I'm SUPER PSYCHED about the new game opening in Denver, so these minor hurdles won't deter me from playing -- but I'm also the target audience of a dedicated life-long LARPer who already knows that I'll love this game before I even attend. For someone who is a first-time LARPer, or a more casual gamer wanting to check this out, every hurdle is another chance for them to ask how much they're really interested in moving forward. Hard to grow a new game in a new city like Denver that way.

Trace
 
Alavatar said:
Do we need a contract with a publisher to do that? I don't know. I believe there were some links provided in this thread that support a print-on-demand service that supposedly looks good, so if their manufacturing quality is similar to our current quality then it sounds groovy to me.
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I have several print on demand books. Their quality is fine. They are more expensive per unit than if you drop $20,000 on a Canadian printing service and have someplace to store 10,000 books (I looked into this back in 2006, I'm sure the numbers have changed since then). But you've just tied up $20 grand. There's a lot of pros and cons. If you want more information, the guys at The Forge talk about this stuff all the time. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php
 
Actually, the printed rulebook is something that makes the Alliance look more professional than most games out there. Despite other's thoughts, I think that it looks rather professional (by miles and miles if comparing to other LARP books out there) and gives you a good glimpse of what is actually happening at the games. Sure, you can really stage things, hire models, get professional lighting and so on but IMO, that'd be false advertising. Show the game with the actual players, in their actual costumes and what they're actually doing.

With that said though, I do believe that the pdf version for the book should be a free download. People will still buy the hard bound book - it is all but a necessity to many while on site.
 
I don't know of any other LARP besides International that has a printed rulebook. I do think that having a physical, polished product (not a binder that anybody can print at Staples) makes us look a lot more professional.

Putting together a professional product (both the game itself and the tools required to play it) takes a bit of money. People routinely drop almost $30 on DnD books (which, last I checked, required a bare minimum of three of those books to play). So why is $6 an impediment? That's not a big investment; that's less than a value meal at a burger joint.
 
I love the printed rulebook, that's never been the issue. It would be silly to say that the printed rulebooks should be free but Amazon (or whatever print on demand service you preffer) can do the same for cheaper and without having to charge for PDFs.
 
Ezri said:
I don't know of any other LARP besides International that has a printed rulebook. I do think that having a physical, polished product (not a binder that anybody can print at Staples) makes us look a lot more professional.
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Last I checked IFGS, Prophecy III, Mind's Eye Theatre, Chuthulu Live 3rd Edition and Dark Ages Netrunner are all games that offer bound books in addition to free pdf downloads (in the case of Prophecy III and Netrunner). Granted, it's been a while for me so maybe they're now out of print.

Doing a quick search on Amazon, I also get quite a few. The Alliance Rulebook shows up 9th with a search of 'LARP' but first for 'LARP Rules'
 
Chaos: Not everybody is as cool as I am. :shades:

Everyone else:

You may notice some of the posts from this thread are gone. Full post removal is a job that is only reserved for when things get especially out of hand or heated. The thread has been slightly pruned to attempt to keep negativity out, and discussion in.

To those who may have made a point in a post which has been removed, please feel free to rework your thoughts and bring them back to the thread.

However remember... Phrasing is key. As some saw today, feelings can get hurt.

Thank you for your patience. This thread will be unlocked in the future once people have had a chance to calm down.

Paladin of Ice
 
I have unlocked this topic.

If it reverts back into the type of "discussion" that got it locked, it will be pruned again and permanently closed.

- :zonks:
 
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