What’s the margin on the books at Beyond? I imagine that they make significantly more profit from those sales than from physical copies. With that, they can definitely afford to reduce price of physical core books. Pricing is never done in a vacuum.
Who knows what the margin is (no printing, but plenty of server and manpower costs), but they sell Beyond books fir more than Amazon sells print books...so that means the direct to customer digital books are selling fir more than they sell physical books to distributors.
No they are not terrible. I don't want them to sell them too cheap, because it eventually forces them to have too high prices on other books later. But I misremembered 2014 bools to be 50 dollars too. They were only 40 dollars. So all is good.Wait ... so now WotC is terrible because they're selling the books too cheap? Is there so little to complain about that this has to be an issue?
As long as you don’t mind waiting up to two weeks at this point.looking forward to more replies in the near future then
You seem to be using the rule as a source of potential fiction. I.e. an in-world "physics engine". It wasn’t designed for that purpose. Thus the user error you’re experiencing. There’s no reason to think the rule creates fiction on its own when not being used by the player in-game to actually establish fiction at the table.
So again, when you're evaluating what's "realistic / probable", you seem to be taking into account a range of potential fiction, but that's not how the rule works. If you look at the actual fiction created when using the rule in-game versus your "knowing them everywhere", you can see it isn't the same at all. In one, you know the local messengers in certain places where it makes sense for you to have that knowledge, and in the other, you know them everywhere you go. One of those fictions is clearly more realistic and more probable than the other, and interpreting "local messengers" to mean the messengers inhabiting just your home territory doesn't solve this problem. Your home territory could be a city of tens of thousands. Personally knowing every single messenger in a smallish city might be manageable, but for a larger city it becomes unrealistic to think you would personally know roughly a hundred or so messengers, so the solution (that's been offered in this thread) is to geographically restrict the area in which the feature can be used to the point where it contradicts the "even over great distances" the feature specifies. This is all a result of treating the rule as a source of potential fiction.
Well, I have an existing background feature published by WotC that says I know this person. Is that good enough for you?
WotC is really quite good at that business side of things, at least. No doubt they are pricing correctly for their own profit margin, ut also to maximize sales.
no, i did specify a Back*story* Event for a reason, rather than Back*ground* Feature, they are nowhere near equivilant in purpose or value.
Well, the feature (Criminal Contact) doesn't say "100% of the time, 24-7". It says you know people who can deliver messages for you with everything knowing people entails, including sometimes you might have to look around to find them depending on circumstance. I don't think there'd be anything wrong with asking the player for a Charisma check to see if they can find the people for whom they're asking around, but the permission given by the feature is these people exist in the fiction and the player can rely on that and say they look for them. Of course, if the table finds that resembles their real lives too much, they're free to skip over such mundanities and get to the good stuff.
But do you? Does this weirdness happen in your actual games? If not, then why are you complaining about it?
