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Format of books

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Man Who Walks At Night:
Please - could you go back to the old format of making different types of books with different formats?

What I mean is, don't mix rules, gear and location descriptions in one book (like War!) - I'm sure I'm not alone in preferring being able to buy the books with the information in I need for my campaign, and not feel forced to buy a book which has a lot of information I would never use.

I have always bought a mix of books, but some books (especially location books) are just not interesting to me or my players, but with the new format, I am "forced" to buy a book which is mostly made up of information I don't need - to get a few pages of stuff I would like.

It reminds me far too much of a publisher wanting to milk their customers by putting a little stuff everyone wants into a book only some wants.

I love both types of books (or 3 if you separate it into Locations/Rules/Gear) but don't make all books "mandatory" by mixing the content like you did with War!, if we like the location you pick to write about, we will buy them, but not if we feel like its a cheap attempt to force us to do so.

Crimsondude:

--- Quote from: Man Who Walks At Night on ---I have always bought a mix of books, but some books (especially location books) are just not interesting to me or my players, but with the new format, I am "forced" to buy a book which is mostly made up of information I don't need - to get a few pages of stuff I would like.

It reminds me far too much of a publisher wanting to milk their customers by putting a little stuff everyone wants into a book only some wants.
--- End quote ---

I am not in anyway speaking for Jason, CGL, or anyone who isn't me when I say this:

That's exactly what my goal would be if I was selling gaming supplements.

It may sound horrible, but my primary goal as a businessman is to make a profit. Given what I understand to be the historical sales rankings of Shadowrun books, I'm either going to be selling a shitton of gear books (Pthbbbbbbt) or try to incorporate a bunch of material that can appeal to as many people as possible even if it is at the expense of depth.

Let's be clear: I could and would love to write all of Spy Games as a 200-plus page book just on the field of espionage in Shadowrun, how it affects runners and similar mercenaries, and so forth. However, it would probably sell 100 copies. Maybe 200. That wouldn't even be enough to pay me, let alone the editing/layout staff and the artists. I'm guessing that CGL saw that same breakdown and that's part of the reason why War!, Spy Games, and Conspiracy Theories have this format.

I mean, look at Fields of Fire. It inspired real-life mercenary friends of mine to get into civilian contracting. But it's like 3/5 gear, 1/5 rules, and 1/5 fluff. And that's a really, really well-written and awesome theme/alternative campaign book. It's just economics. Unless the location book is Aztlan or the Seattle books, it's not worth it IMO to try and sell an entire location book (especially new locations). At best people are going to say, "Cool book." A lot of people are going to say, "Eh. Neat, but I'm sticking with Seattle/homebrew setting." And if the Internet is to be believed, most people will say it sucks for X, Y, and Z reasons ranging from "excessive self-awesoming" (London, Germany), too crazy (TT, TNO), too succinct (Shadows of ...), or too old (NAGNA, which has small briefs on nations and writeups of sprawls in each non-NAN state, exactly two of which have been covered in the last twenty years: San Fran in CFS, and Manhattan in an ebook), or just people bitching that it's not realistic for a game set 60+ years in a future with magic, dragons, and people willingly sticking plugs into their brains to surf the web. And God forbid you release that material as an ebook. Holy shit, you'd think that Adobe raped some peoples' parents to death for as much as those are criticized online.

Going back to Spy Games, the location covered in that book will be Denver. Given that FanPro spent an entire Missions season (a year or so) in Denver, I figure they and CGL know better than anyone on Earth what the demand for material on Denver is.

Bull:
The other thing to keep in mind is that CGL has to balance what it releases with what is good for the game line, and what sells.

Plot and Fluff drive the game.  Shadowrun is nothing without the locations, the story that goes on in the background.  Unfortunately, the books containing this information generally sell very poorly.  There's a lot of reason for this, the biggest of which is the fact that you realistically only need 1 copy of the book per gaming group.  Fewer than that, really, because not all plots and locations interest or will impact every gaming group. 

Meanwhile, Crunch and Rulebooks sell much better, because you'll usually end up with several of those per group, if not 1 per player.

This leads to a problem though, because Shadowrun can;t survive as a viable game on just crunch and rules.  the toys and the rules are great, and we all love them, but at the end of the day we're (mostly) all here for the story.

A book format like War! is a good compromise.  It lets CGL mix in elements to appeal to the broadest number of players.  It won;t sell as well as a pure rule or pure crunch book, but will likely sell better than a pure location or fluff book.

In a perfect world, sales wouldn't matter, and we could just release whatever we wanted as often as we wanted.  If I ever become a billionaire, I'll personally fund Shadowrun so this will be the case.  Till then though, sales matter.  A lot.  If you want the books separated better, find a way to encourage a few thousand additional sales of the next pure fluff/location book.  And the one after that.  And after that.  Because until the sales numbers are there, they're impossible to justify.  And until then, they have to be mixed with the crunchy and the rules.

Bull

savaze:
As much as I see the business reasons for what they're doing in formatting the new books this way... Please separate fluff, gear, and rules a little more or SR's books are going to be as bad as White Wolf's product line.  I'm not particular how it's done, whether it's columns on the side, creative use of bold and italic lettering, thematic separation (new casts, flash bulletins, random web surfing, etc), or even go so far to novelize with rules footnotes and appendices (or is that too 80's).  I liked some of the earlier editions formats and wouldn't mind that coming back into play.

I'm a highlighter and sticky note'er if key info is not visibly separated, and that process becomes tiresome.  Don't get me wrong I love extra info, I just want rules/gear marketed to faster visual searching.  A little better balance on content ratios would probably help with sales (no more than half on location guides), I also would have liked more fluff in the pdf-only releases too (note for future releases). 

Pdf-only releases could probably be tacked onto the next print book (as debriefs, commercials, or whatever) or consolidated at some point for print.  I think the cost/page ratio is a bit high on the pdf-only releases: the printed core book has a listed MSRP at ~$0.13 per page and the pdf is being sold for ~$0.04 a page, whereas the pdf-only stuff is going for ~$0.21-0.28 a page.  I'm planning on holding off on purchasing future non-print books until I see more worth coming out of them. Not that the content isn't good, but how many people buy a novella for the same price as a novel?

Other than that I love SR and have been a big supporter, if buying everything since 1st edition counts...  I hope these are all lessons learned and not a representation of a continuing financial crisis. I know there's been some turmoil in the last fifteen years and I'm hoping for better in the future.

Crimsondude:
There were three books before War! that are nothing but fluff (Vice, Corp Guide, Sixth World Almanac) and a series of connected modules, and I'm honestly amazed that Feral Cities was ever released while Cities of Intrigue and Awakened Haunts were banished to development Hell during the transition from FanPro to CGL. So it's not that big of a deal to me. A friend and I tried to work on a proposal for a military book formatted almost exactly like War! in the mid-90s before it fell apart because it's actually a pretty strong format for material that verges on alternative campaigns like military/merc, espionage, etc.

I like the current format, and it's not entirely set in stone, but my biggest problem as I've been writing a book proposal is the likely main draw for most people because of what Bull said, and that is the rules and gear. It's not that there isn't room for either, but I just have very little interest in stuff and before becoming a freelancer I always dealt with people who are far smarter and better at constructing and destroying rules and mechanics than me.

A lot of people seemed to like the SOTA books, and AFAIK they did pretty well for being diverse ideas and some location info with crunch at the end of each section. They were a mix of fluff and crunch. So was Sprawl Survival Guide and Year of the Comet. Like I mentioned, so was Fields of Fire. All of the core supplements also mix fluff and crunch (no locations, though), and I have no doubt it was in part because of people on Dumpshock bitching about the lack of fluff and shadowtalk in the SR3 core supplements (Remember, the core if not most of FanPro's writing pool came from DS). So it's not like this is a new format or concept. CGL is playing with the arrangements and distribution of types of material and actually incorporating settings in which to actually use this stuff without just defaulting to Seattle as usual.

I am very confident in future products that I am actually working on to really focus the books' themes into the settings more than War!, which I know has been raised as an issue. Different locations should emphasize different subject and theme materials from the subject matter fluff, and are prone to using different types of rules/gear than others which are also presented.

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