Cloak of Steel is an OGL game that isn’t a clone of D&D. It’s not even its bastard cousin. Rather it has the feel of being more a fusion of equal parts anime, high fantasy, and action adventure plugged into a console arcade world of slipstream science fiction.
Post originally by Dasmen at 2004-04-23 11:29:37
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I'm a bit confused by your explination of the 'age' based class system. You make it sound like you grow more powerful with age instead of exprience (which, dispite some peoples clams to the contrery, aren't the same thing).
Post originally by 2097 at 2004-04-24 05:16:51
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PDFs are an ok way to distribute RPG materials if you are very indie, but the price should reflect that. Eleven dollars? The price should be a fifth or a tenth that since you're not paying for the printing. This problem is not unique to Cloaks of Steel, it's a disturbing trend to most RPG PDFs.
I'd say you're way off on your expectations. A good price for PDFs is about 1/2 the cost of a printed product of the same size.
64-page Print = $15
64-page PDF = $7.50
128-page Print = 23.00
128-page PDF = $11.50
You seem to be thinking that the price of printing a product is the largest cost. Often, writing, development, art, and production are equal to or greater than the printing cost.
Post originally by 2097 at 2004-04-24 09:47:37
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I'm thinking that there might be a lot of costs involved with a printed book that goes away with a PDF. Writing, development and art - sure, all those things stay, as well as some (but not all) of the risks involved with printing.
I'm also thinking that the competition in the non-print world is a lot harsher since there's a lot of high-quality fan work going around these days. I'm guessing that this would affect supply/demand. I figure that back in the print-only days, there was a lot of difference between a beautiful, full-color hardback and a pile of b/w-xeroxes, so the "free" fanworks was seen as "out of the league" of professional stuff. These days, a group of amateurs can produce beautiful, full-color work as easy as printing via ghostscript or acrobat.
I'm also thinking of "value provided", and (perhaps more importantly) "perceived value provided". A printed book is a printed book. If the market can accept prices that are roughly half of what the same book would be in print, so be it. We'll see how it works out, and you may well be proven right.
(Ease of copying, in some cases illegal, is also a factor in perceived value.)
There's also the meta-argument of various economical systems - the manifacturing cost for a specific copy of a PDF is essentially zero, while it's a lot higher for books (especially if you have to print more than you can sell). In the current incarnation of the monetary market economy, preparation cost (which includes art, writing and developement) is usually factored in to the product price, as you posit, but there are theoretical alternatives including the street performer protocol (http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/ )or even experimenting with non-market economies (such as gift economies). This paragraph may be excused as geeky or irrelevant to the present day situation, though, but I'm interested in experimenting with these things.
I know much of the above consists of "thinking", "guessing", "figure" and similar hypothesizing. I also know that I won't be spending $11 on a PDF anytime soon (with a few possible exceptions).
Post originally by Darklord at 2004-04-24 12:07:31
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You mentioned no TOC. Did this product have a bookmark set instead. That would serve about 90%+ of the functions of a TOC and in some ways is better. A product with a bookmark set doesn't really need a TOC.
Post originally by Kester Pelagius at 2004-04-24 13:18:45
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Greetings,
In my zeal to get the review finished that I might move on to read and review the "Live System" (I made a conscious decision to read CoS before the SRD document.) I probably should have pointed out that bookmarks are there. The long and the short of it:
The bookmarks in "Cloak of Steel" do and can help in navigating the document. However, had a TOC been included, I would have said this document, as presented, was perfect for anyone wishing to have a POD copy made. As it stands the document has its faults, but faults that are overshadowed by the content provided and the enthusiasm of the author for the project.
>>You mentioned no TOC. Did this product have a bookmark set instead. That would serve about 90%+ of the functions of a TOC and in some ways is better. A product with a bookmark set doesn't really need a TOC.<<
Cloak of Steel has bookmarks, yes.
In fact it provides a very extensive set of bookmarks. Sometimes too extensive as there are multiple bookmarks that try to point to section of the same page, but given the nature of bookmarks only go to that page. Which is all the more reason, IMO, given the inclusion of an index, that a proper TOC should have been included.
Bookmarks are fine. But they detract from the reading experience. If every time I want to look something up I have to hit the bookmark tab, have the document scrunched down to the "Fit in Window" size, then click where I want to go, close the tab, and RESIZE the page so I can actually read _and_ have to do this EVERY TIME I want to turn to a specific page to look for something. . .
I'd rather use search. But since search doesn't work, and I already mentioned that issue, I saw no reason to add what might have come across as sounding like more negative Nancy complaining, and thus detracting from the content of "Cloak of Steel".
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