Reply To: Why do all our wargames rules have to cost the bomb?

[limburger 22427xp 4]

@phaidknott

“… Instead gamers would buy different books for different task …”

which effectively turns those ‘cheap’ 15 pound rules into 60+ monstrosities that you were ‘complaining’ about.
Yes, you can mix and match all of the books until you get your perfect combination of fluff and rules, but cheap it’s not.

To be honest … I do agree that those gigantic books with ‘everything’ aren’t as useful as they could be.
A few more options that would allow folks to buy the pure rules and fluff as separate books would be cool and could offer the best of both worlds.

However … we still need to remember that these guys aren’t in it to promote a specific hobby.
They want to make money … all of the money … and with as little effort as possible.
Creating various SKUs to cover all types of players sounds cool, but it is risky … and companies don’t like risks.

Yes … some went back to ‘small format’ rules, but I’d argue that was out of necessity and not by design.
Osprey sells tiny A5 booklets. It is their default format for most things. So as a result they’ll find writers that can work with that format and they won’t hire ones that don’t

And as @grabnutz said … companies can’t afford to be different from the mainstream, because they’d have to work twice as hard for very little potential extra profit. You’d need someone with serious passion and a ton of money to burn to do that.

Looking at that Osprey catalog tells me one thing : you’d be lucky if one of them makes it big …
I didn’t get into historicals … until Flames of war and Bolt-action did their thing.

Yes, I could have done the research and bought the same ol’ boring as fuck expensive hard to find real history books.
Or I could buy the one thing that could get me playing within minutes of opening the box (and that’s ignoring all the other plug&play hobbies out there like videogames … ).

My time is a precious resource. I can’t afford to waste it on reinventing the wheel and waste money on books that I’ll only be using a few pages or chapters of. I’ve had too much of that at school where we barely one chapter out of an entire book if we were lucky.