freeAgent's page

Hello freeAgent,

I don't have much to do with the PDFs or the pricing of our products so I don't have much insight to give you. I did find a post that may be helpful though in a similar discussion for Inner Sea Gods.

Good to know. The Inner Sea Gods PDF was around the same price as the book, but this one is about $4.50 more than the book. I guess the retail price is higher, but its price on Amazon is the same as the rest of Paizo's hardcovers. Oh well. You may want to consider your pricing strategy, since if the 70% rule stays around and retail prices go up faster than wholesale, this is going to happen again.

I am aware that Amazon has sometimes sold items below cost. However, even given that, I've never seen Paizo sell a PDF at a higher price than Amazon has sold the equivalent book. If a Paizo employee actually confirmed that Amazon is selling this book below wholesale, it would help explain this. However, I'm not going to assume that Amazon is doing that. Maybe there's another explanation, too. Maybe Paizo is raising their prices at wholesale and Amazon still has stock that they purchased at lower prices. Who knows. So far nobody from Paizo has addressed my question, so it's all speculation.

I didn't study Economics at school, but my tiny brain tells me that given the sheer volume of things they sell, Amazon can afford to keep a chunk of their catalog sold at a pricing that tiny companies like Paizo can't afford. Not to mention that Amazon's primary income comes from Kindle, AWS, subscriptions and allowing third party to run their business via Amazon. THAT is abuse of a near-monopoly status, just so you know. They CAN and DO sell things at near-loss, because they can afford it, which can and will drive some retail outlets into ground.

So factoring that in, you need to set the prices of both the physical book and the PDF so that you will actually earn some money, after Amazon and LGSs take their bite. Speaking of which, LGSs are another factor you need to take into the account with PDF pricing, because they're already mightily peed at you for offering subscriptions and even making PDFs in the first place, because both cut heavily into their sales. Set your PDFs too low and Joe the Anger Management Challenged LGS Owner will go into a fit of rage, stop stocking your books, throw PFS out and erect a shrine to WotC, who doesn't do such bad things to his little business.

I am not asking Paizo to sell hardcovers at Amazon's price. This, however, is the only product I've seen where the price of the physical book is actually lower than the price of the PDF. It goes against Paizo's previous pricing strategies and doesn't make sense. I would hope that Paizo makes money from the wholesale sales of their books. If they don't we should all be worried. If Paizo sold PDFs for the same amount as their wholesale print books, the PDFs should theoretically have a higher margin already because their production costs are lower. However, in this case it is clear that the PDFs are being sold high enough that Amazon is still able to make money (or at least not lose money...most likely) selling a hardcover book for a lower price than Paizo sells its PDFs.

I totally get that FLGS owners don't like seeing low-priced PDFs cut into their sales, but Paizo's pricing model for PDFs has been "low cost" since they came out with Pathfinder. Given that Paizo sells a ton of books to Amazon, it doesn't seem to jive with the explanation for the high PDF price on this product being out of concern for the FLGSes. This is the first product I've seen (and I've purchase a lot of Pathfinder products) where the pricing is obviously out of whack. The bottom line is that the price of the PDF for this specific product does not make sense, and I hope it's not a trend.

Maybe Jessica Price would like to weigh in.

freeAgent, it seems like you haven't thought through how book pricing works;

Many sellers of physical books will reduce the cost over time. Even if that means they sell it for less than they paid... they are then still taking less of a loss than if they never sold it at all & lost display / storage space retaining it indefinitely.

Paizo doesn't have to 'buy' the books they produce from themselves and doesn't have to worry about display space for their stores. Thus, they generally keep the price fixed at the original level until a book gets really old - at which point they include it in one of their inventory clearance sales.

PDFs, of course, don't have display space OR inventory storage requirements, and thus can be maintained indefinitely at no additional cost. Ergo, they lack the primary factors which force down the price of physical books over time. Paizo still might include old PDFs in a discount sale seeking to generate more sales at a lower price point, but unlike physical books they aren't losing money keeping the PDF around unsold for a long time.

Nobody is 'ripping you off'... you just have unreasonable expectations of electronic media costs depreciating the same way that print media costs do.

No, that's not it. This is a new book and Amazon (easier to say than "not Paizo") has priced it in the same band as all other Paizo releases...which also do not actually drop in price over time. Amazon has not, so far as I can tell, dropped the price of this book from its initial offering. They're not selling it for a loss unless they sell all of Paizo's hardcovers for a loss.

Someone from Paizo can feel free to come in here and say that the wholesale price of the book is higher than the price of the PDF. Paizo has a monopoly on PDF distribution for their work, which is what I think is more of a factor here. They have competition for retail book sales, but no competition for retail PDF sales. The pricing for this product shows, to me, an abuse of that monopoly status.

I studied Economics in school, and thinking about how things are priced is something I do all the time.

This is not a Product Price thread, though. It is to discuss the content, not the price. I would greatly appreciate it if you would take it elsewhere.

This thread is titled "Product Discussion", which does not specify content. I thought I would be doing Paizo a favor by not leaving a poor review of this product due to its price. I'm trying to actually get an answer and/or justification rather than simply leaving a bad review (I have already purchased the PDF).

If you don't like the price, find another retailer or don't buy it. I'm rather weary of seeing the price complaints in a Product Discussion thread. How about you take it up with Customer Service or someone else who can actually do something about it?!

At least one Paizo employee favorited a comment responding to me but has chosen to remain silent on the matter. I know Paizo employees have seen these posts, and they frequently respond in these threads. This is not a customer service issue. This is a product pricing issue.

I also wouldn't complain here if there were other outlets selling Paizo PDFs, but Paizo retains a monopoly on PDF distribution for their content. That's fine, but it means that when their pricing is out of line, I have no options other than to suck it up and buy it or to do without material for a game that I enjoy. I like PDFs and I don't pirate material. I've given Paizo a lot of business, but if pricing like this continues, it will stop.

freeAgent wrote:

TriOmegaZero wrote:

freeAgent wrote:

That doesn't seem right to me since the production costs for PDFs are lower.

Print costs are actually the smallest part of publishing costs, according to Paizo.

I would never deny that, but they are much greater than the cost of a PDF. That's my point. The book costs less than the PDF.

I don't see how. The PDF still requires everything else and more to be published. The production costs really aren't that much lower, so the slight discount on PDF pricing actually matches reality.

You don't see how what? There is no discount on the PDF. It's actually priced higher than the book (from a particular source other than Paizo.com). Assuming that source is not taking a loss on every book sold, that means that the wholesale cost of the physical book is lower than the retail cost of the PDF here (there is no wholesale PDF price because Paizo is the only retailer). For all other books I have purchased, the book has been more expensive than the PDF. That is not the case for Inner Sea Races, and it bothers me. I still see no justification for why the PDF is priced as it is.

If someone can demonstrate how the average cost of production of a PDF is actually higher than the average cost of production of a physical copy of this book, then I will change my opinion. Nobody has done that, and I doubt anyone will.

Book costs factors, in descending order: art, art, art, words, more art, editing, layout, misc. art (trade dress/fonts/etc), printing. Except for the very last, PDFs and print editions share every of them, not to mention PDFs having the whole "compile the file, add bookmarks, check for hiccups, make sure it works on Win/iOS/'droid/Amiga" step print books don't have.

All of those extra steps for a PDF must be done roughly once by a human. PDFs don't have "check to make sure the printer, cutter, binder, etc. didn't mess up" issues, which are ongoing. Given how many PDFs Paizo sells, the cost of adding bookmarks is negligible on a per-PDF basis. You do NOT have to check for compatibility on Win/iOS/Android. It's a PDF. A PDF is a PDF is a PDF. If it's properly formed, any proper PDF reader will handle it on any platform. I can almost guarantee you that Paizo does not check for PDF compatibility on every single possible reader.

freeAgent wrote:

That doesn't seem right to me since the production costs for PDFs are lower.

Print costs are actually the smallest part of publishing costs, according to Paizo.

I would never deny that, but they are much greater than the cost of a PDF. That's my point. The book costs less than the PDF.

David knott 242 wrote:

blackbloodtroll wrote:

Is it just me, or is PDF more expensive than usual?

It is a hardback book that is not in the main Pathfinder RPG line. Inner Sea Gods was similarly expensive.

To iterate more on this, the price for Inner Sea Races PDF is industry-standard. The Core Rules PDFs get a heavy discount (aka the $10 price tag) because Paizo wants to assure that you have a cheap way to pick up their core rules. (Plus charging $30 for the rules doesn't make sense when you personally host all of their contents online for free). The Inner Sea World Guide is likewise reduced in price because its the core rulebook for the Inner Sea campaign setting. Inner Sea Gods and Inner Sea Races, on the other hand, aren't core rulebooks for anything.

Its better to think of the Core Rulebook line as having a special, discounted PDF (which it does) rather than think of Inner Sea Races as being more expensive.

What doesn't make sense to me, though, is that you can buy the actual hardcover for less than the PDF if you venture outside paizo.com. I'd imagine that means that Paizo has priced the PDF higher on their website than the wholesale price of the hardcover book. That doesn't seem right to me since the production costs for PDFs are lower.

I'd also love to see Paizo start offering Realm Works and Hero Lab files for their APs.

I just bought this and the PDF is definitely a little wonky. Page 2 (Front Inside Cover) has extremely messed up formatting with the background image being incomplete. I'm using Nitro Pro 8 as my PDF reader, but it doesn't seem have be a problem with other Paizo PDFs.

Kyle,

I've got a bit of an emergency here, and I'm going to be emailing you a file. Hero Lab just updated their files, and any portfolio I've resaved under the new software can't open in Combat Manager. The error says Combat Manager can't read the file...

Help! I've got two sessions this Saturday, and it will be a lot more difficult for me to run without your handy software.

Thanks,
Mended

I was worried about what that change would do :(

For everyone with a Mac, have you tried Parallels? I haven't used it for years (I'm a Windows user and was only using Macs at work), but it was pretty awesome: http://www.parallels.com/products/desktop/

This is awesome! Will it be released as a .PDF as well so I can print out goblin hordes?

The product description says that pre-orders for subscribers will get a PDF free, so I'd imagine that there will also be a PDF available. Great!

I'm currently on Android, but I'll likely switch to Windows Phone (8) with my next phone. I may also get a Microsoft Surface or another Windows 8 tablet once that's out. Make some Metro apps!

I'm chatting with Amazon's customer service right now. They say they canceled my order "because the item is not available" and "because we don't want our customers to wait".

...The item wasn't available when I ordered it. Nothing changed. And canceling my order doesn't make me wait less.

WTF?

I wouldn't be too concerned. Assuming Amazon gets it at the same time as other online retailers do (early July), I doubt they'll let them undercut Amazon's prices. See here: http://www.booksamillion.com/p/Pathfinder-Roleplaying-Game/Jason-Bulmahn/97 81601253903 You can still preorder from them if you want, and their price matches Amazon's if I remember correctly.

I think I read somewhere that the issue is that Paizo's printer/distributor is not very reliable about filling wholesale orders from places like Amazon. I checked around other bookstores and I think Wal-Mart and Books-a-Million are projecting they won't get it in stock until July 3 now. It is frustrating, but it looks like Paizo is the only place (online) that has the book for the next three weeks.

I let my players control their animal companions and familiars because it's easier for me and I have very little interest in doing it myself with all the other stuff I have going on. I also don't want to be accused of nerfing an animal companion for no reason, etc. That said, I don't let PCs do ridiculous things with animal companions or familiars, particularly when they make decisions for them that would require intelligence higher than those creatures would rightfully possess.

freeAgent wrote:

I would like to see you go to a magical land called Kindle in the great Amazon forest. I've heard tales that the wizards there are able to use a single scroll to store all their spells, freeing space in their towers for ant farms and the like.

Me too! The only thing holding us back from Kindle at this point is an overly restrictive contract. We're all hoping that they'll loosen up as time goes on, but for now it's a waiting game...

I hear ya :)

I would like to see you go to a magical land called Kindle in the great Amazon forest. I've heard tales that the wizards there are able to use a single scroll to store all their spells, freeing space in their towers for ant farms and the like.

BEST. THING. EVER!

Thank you, Paizo!!!

That's an excellent concept.

I noticed that the new PDF is significantly smaller than the original. There was almost a 10 MB difference if I remember correctly. Hopefully that's a trend.

I use Hero Lab and own all the sheets for my players. All leveling up and changes go through me. I print out new sheets for everyone before each session and do all the XP, gold, and treasure additions after each session. It works out pretty well for everyone and I've had no complaints. That said, it's a lot of work for the GM (and printing costs can add up).

I also have a private Google website (free) for our campaign where I post up PDFs of the current character sheets as well as the Hero Lab portfolio file for anyone who wants to look at them between sessions. d20pfsrd.com has a template you can use to easily get a site for your group up and running.

I also noticed that the PC who owns all the shops may be charging normal citizens reasonable prices? That seems impossible to do discretely, but in that case, the PC could also hire a villager NPC to buy gear for him.

It doesn't make sense from a tactical perspective to coupe de grace if it will provoke an AoO. It also makes little sense in most cases if there are any enemies left on the field. You would waste time and therefore allow your enemies an additional attack against you. However, if you just fight until all your enemies are on the ground dying, you can easily go through them all and coup de grace after the battle is essentially over. The only time I think it makes sense to coup de grace in combat is if you're using some sort of spell or ability that requires it. Otherwise, you're making yourself less effective.

I know there's probably no time to work on this idea now, but it would be great if Combat Manager had networking capabilities so you could run in client mode (players) or host mode (GM) over a network. Obviously the GM mode would have all information for the GM to see, but the client/player mode would only show the party and any monsters (not including hit points and other stats) that the GM chooses to reveal to the players. The GM would control all effects and things applied to the monsters or characters, but the players would be able to see them.

I say this because it would be really great if I was able to share portions of Combat Manager easily with my players, but I obviously don't want them to see the whole window ;)

I always get perplexed when gamers approach a problem like this as with in game responses like "take some crafting feats and set up a competing trading system..."

Look, first of all, I don't want to take feats to combat other PCs, either violently or through manipulating imaginary markets.

Second, if the GM is favoring some PCs over others, the problem has nothing to do with the in game economy. There's a much more critical dynamic at work here, and it's entirely outside of the game system.

Finally, I don't play Pathfinder to become a trader or merchant. Perhaps some people do, but if I wanted to do that, I'd play Monopoly.

Talk to the GM, if the GM doesn't immediately apologize and crush the PC mafia, then find another group that actually wants to play a cooperative fantasy adventure role playing game.

I agree that getting the GM involved is the only way to resolve this situation. If everything in town became unaffordable, I think you'd see quite a few people resorting to theft AND/OR you'd see competing merchants starting to enter because they would be able to easily undercut the inflated prices that the d--khead PC is charging. The GM should also factor in that businesses always have costs (paying employees, maintenance, etc), but don't always have profits (selling goods and services). Once the competition moves in, the PC who owns the shops will have to drop his prices to normal levels or simply start losing money as everyone in town goes elsewhere.

If the d--khead PC tries to prevent the merchants from coming in and competing with him, he should find those merchants have hired some extremely well-trained guards (they could even reach out to the new PCs for guard duty), not to mention that this would be an unlawful and evil action on the PC's part. Roleplay from there...

See the bottom of page 4 (of the PDF) under the credits:

"“Children of the Void” is a Pathfinder Adventure Path scenario designed for four 4th-level characters. By the end of this adventure, characters should reach 6th level."

This is some really amazing work! I can't wait to try it out.

If it was me, I'd stay with only a preview for free. If you want to test the freebie waters, you'd probably be better of starting out with a lower priced product so your potential loss of sales doesn't impact you as much as it would for an $11 product.

I've got 7 sets of dice. All of them are Chessex. I've got a bunch of varieties. Two are flecked various shades of grey (one with white numbers, the other with yellow), one is a sparkly purplish color, and the rest are various swirls: jade green & gold, steel & copper, crimson/brown/purple (my memory is a little hazy on that exact mixture), and red & gold. I've also got a random collection of solid Chessex d20s and a set of small, turquoise flecked d6's which I use for enemy pawns and counters.

I like all my dice and am not particularly attached to any of them more than others. Since the rest of my group are bums, they use my dice when we play :)

You wouldn't need a lot of skill in order to be a cook or a deckhand. A lot of sailing for a deckhand is simply listening to instructions given to you by more experienced crew. The skills involved are mostly along the lines of, "help pull this rope until I tell you to stop." You could also serve as a lookout and/or keep watch at night. All of this stuff is fairly unskilled.

I do not think you have generally railroaded your PCs any more than is necessary for there to be some sort of story unfolding in your campaign.

You played an enemy character with intelligence and tactics. That's not railroading.

You declared that a fire left only one path to approach the enemy via land. That's the environment, not railroading.

Your players for some reason used OOC knowledge to choose their characters' behavior instead of doing what the characters would do. You did railroad them a bit there, but your players are partially at fault due to their metagaming.

You again set up a scenario and your players didn't like the way it played out. That's not railroading. I assume that had your players wanted to they could have hurt their reputations and/or faced repercussions by refusing to start searching for the children immediately.

You can download Joey Virtue's Hero Lab files for Second Darkness here. If you want to print them out from Hero Lab format, you'd have to open them using Hero Lab.

You can also open most of the portfolio files as-is in Combat Manager and skip the need for a printed sheet or stat block for running combat. That's what I do. I did have trouble opening some of the portfolios in Joey's file without first updating them in Hero Lab, presumably because they were created with an older version of Hero Lab.

Both those things have been on the todo list for a pretty long time.

Excellent. I'd love to see them at some point in the future :)

We either find someone to fill in or I (the GM) will play the character with full XP and loot either way. We're all friends and responsible, so we don't have problems with people not communicating when they can and can't make it. If I was playing with people I didn't know and/or who weren't very reliable, I'd probably have to change the way we handle it.

Sincubus wrote:

Cool, there can never be enough AP's for me!

But first the (to me better sounding) pirates AP!

My question is: The pirates have mostly water-based monsters in them, what will be the theme of monsters for this one?

There really isn't a "theme" for Shattered Star. It's really a "back to the basics" type AP, to help celebrate the fact that it's the 10 year anniversary of Paizo and the 5 year one for Pathfinder. So... I guess the theme could be:

"Varisian stuff"

or

"Classic Fantasy RPG stuff."

After doing so many heavily themed APs (horror, jungle, Asia, pirates), I suspect folks will be happy to see a "back to basics" AP.

Yes! I'm a big fan of "classic fantasy RPG stuff". Bring it on!

Finally! I can't wait to see this in August :)

I do not think you have to read the whole AP before running it. However, you should read the entire chapter of the AP before you run that chapter. As others pointed out and you've already noticed, the APs are not written so they can just be run on the fly. It would be nice if Paizo could find a way to change that, but it is what it is.

I'm running Second Darkness right now and the way I do it is to first read through the chapter to familiarize myself with everything (BTW, they repeated an area on the Gold Goblin map...you can find more info in the Second Darkness subforum). After that, I go through the fluff parts of the AP and re-summarize what's going on in my own notes. This allows me to combine elements spread throughout the AP into a document that I can go through more linearly during the session. The APs' combat is actually easy to run straight from the AP, so when I get to those parts, I put a page reference in my notes, so I can just jump to that section of the AP for the combat. I also calculate party XP and treasure for each encounter and put it next to the page number.

I also use Hero Lab and the data sets for the APs available for it along with Combat Manager for actually managing combat itself.

When I was younger, numerous people mistook me for Prince William (including a group of girls from Scotland whom I met in Italy). Anyway, in my junior year of high school two of my teachers had us write up a short biography and attach a photo of ourselves. I got the bio done but forgot my photo at home. Instead of turning the assignment in late, I found a photo of Prince William online, printed it out in the school library, and used it. They never figured it out. I look less like Prince William now, though, so that probably wouldn't fly.

True story.

I'm not a big fan of Golarion's resemblance of some sort of anachronistic Earth. Golarion has dinosaurs. It also has steampunk...and don't forget the 18th century Earth-like cultures. All of this coexists with some standard high fantasy.

Golarion in general also seems to be dominated by humans, with very little real estate (in books or in the world) given to demihumans.

Obviously these fluff elements are all personal opinions and you can't make one setting that will please everyone. I'm fine with that. If I ever get around to running my own homebrew campaign, I may take it back to Forgotten Realms, or I may just use a subset of Golarion or use the maps and such, but change the cultures that occupy those regions/cities.

Some links to specific feats from the feat index on the mobile version are not working/formed correctly. For example, this is the link from the mobile site's "Improved Stonecunning": http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advanced/advancedFeats.html#_improved-st onecunning

This is the one that actually works: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advanced/advancedFeats.html#improved-sto necunnin

It also seems to happen with all feats that have a comma in them. For example, "Impact Critical Shot (Combat, Critical)" goes here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCombat/ultimateCombatFeats.html# _impact-critical-shot-%28combat,-critical%29

It needs to go here: http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCombat/ultimateCombatFeats.html# impact-critical-shot-%28combat,-critical%29

I'm not sure why these specific feats have differently-formed URLS, but they do.

Yes, please make this happen!

Combat Manager?

Didn't know about this program, I'll give it a try, although I usually prefer to DM with good ol'pen, brain and paper.

FYI, you may experience an issue with version 1.3.8 (which JUST came out). Kyle (the creator) is working on it and you can use 1.3.7 in the meantime.

As the GM, I only tell the players what they found and help with any math they want to use to divide the loot. They figure the rest out between themselves, and I think that's how it should be.

They don't do a whole lot of roleplaying in that respect. I have never gone into telling PCs individually/privately what their character finds and having them roleplay either being truthful or dishonest about bringing what they've found to the group. I can see how that might be fun, but it could also use up a lot of time and create friction in the group (such as everyone demanding a Perception, Sense Motive, etc check during loot distribution), so I'm not going to mess with a good thing. It would also create a TON more work for me as a GM :)

To me the most wasted time is rolling for initiative, so combat manager solves that problem, plus it makes it super easy for dm to keep track of other bonuses and can add monsters on a whim, or look at rules using the same program, oh it can also throw lots of dice making those 10d6 fireballs not a hassle anymore! really awesome program!

I second, third, and fourth this. Combat Manager is free and awesome. Rolling initiative automatically, plus easy tracking of HP, stats, and just about everything else, PLUS access to d20pfsrd's beastiary and other content all in one place is amazing. If I didn't use it, I think my combat would run at least a 30% longer than it does now. It eliminates a LOT of paper and junk that I'd otherwise have to carry around and flip through.

Also, all spell casters should either have their spells in memory or printed out for quick reference.