Mercenary Field Catalogue
- Thread starter tytalan
- Start date
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
He's currently working on the Rules Compendium, and I hope he does his colonization/pocket empires/goodness only knows what book next. You're right that this one needs to be redone, though.
Rules compendium is going to be a weird book. It’s obvious not going to include the rules in the following books: CRB, HG, VH, RH, and WB. So the question is how effective is a rule compendium since as soon as something new gets released it’s out of date.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Updatable compilation.
Terry Mixon
Emperor Mongoose
Yup.
Perkanis83
Banded Mongoose
would love a re write of the field catalogue from the ground up
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
You know it will work, when you can reverse engineer the advanced combat rifle.
Perkanis83
Banded Mongoose
While true they should be in the same general area of performance. Also the weapon building system in itself needs some rewriting for clarity
Anstett
Emperor Mongoose
Still have them all.
Updatable compilation.
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
Now, it's had the "A Call to Arms" treatment. More streamlined.
I still screw it up trying to use the '80's rules for stuff.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Cured with P(TS)DF.
The monster compendium which I also some will not work for a printed book. And no character creation, spells and about 80% of the rules were not in it and it required you constantly buying all new products to keep it updated. Mongoose need to sell the new products if you take away all the new rules in new products they are going to lose money.
Updatable compilation.
The modern way is to update the .pdf you get as part of the hard copy purchase.
Adventures sell, not rulebooks. That's been standard of the industry all along; while it's nice that you may get some extra rules for the situations in the adventure, people are buying them for the story, the location and the characters.
Adventures sell, not rulebooks. That's been standard of the industry all along; while it's nice that you may get some extra rules for the situations in the adventure, people are buying them for the story, the location and the characters.
Actually the standard is the reverse rule books sell not adventures. This is mostly because adventures have a lot smaller audience. Adventures are targeted to GMs while most rule books target the entire fan base. Just like rule books that specifically target the GM also don’t sell well, the DMG in its various editions sell less than a fifth the number of copies of the PH that have sold. In pathfinder the adventure paths have some of the smallest print runs while the Rule expansions have the largest it’s a matter of the audience GMs want campaigns the general players want new toys to play with and the players outnumber the GMs about 5 or more to 1.
Even in Traveller you see this HG far out sells mystery of the ancients. Some adventurers do sell rather well but these are not the normal.
In fact none of the reasons that the big campaigns, Pirates of Drinax, Singularity for example are KS is to ensure that the costs of these books are paid for in advance since they target a smaller audience.
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Again a continues updating PDF to keeps all the rules will kill product sells. Shoot look at the FFW which is a setting for multiple adventures over half the line is rule supplements if you invalidated those books the minute they came out you’ve just costed mongoose a large amount of money.
It stings me to say, but the lad here is, on this one, very specific occasion, correct: rulebooks are the big moneyspinners and adventures smooth out the gaps in-between core rulebook refreshes. TSR were the first to demonstrate this, and unfortunately they did it by destructive testing*.
Obviously, not all rulebooks are created equal: for Traveller one imagines that the CRB is the biggie, High Guard, Robots and now Vehicles make good money, while Bounty Hunter, Mercenary and Naval Campaigns are increasingly niche.
*The thing they destroyed was TSR.
