mark logan's page

Please cancel my Adventure Path subscription.

It's been several decades since I read John Carter of Mars. I'll grant that Skeleton Men of Jupiter probably isn't awful, but John Carter and the Giant of Mars is the first story in the book.

One is tainted by the presence of the other. Opening the book is just too risky.

I think you're selling Skeleton Men of Jupiter short; it's not that bad. John Carter and the Giant of Mars, on the other hand, is horrendous, but it was mostly, if not wholly, written by ERB's son, not the Master of Adventure himself.

mark logan wrote:

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I thought the first three formed a terrific story. The rest of the series was quite good, but please for the love of all that's holy... stop at book 10.

The first few books are in the public domain and are thus available in a variety of formats, including free online from Project Gutenberg, and in several print editions including from Barnes & Noble books. That means that B&N is VERY unlikely to pick up an edition from us, which means that said book would probably not be profitable.

Also, we can't get the Burroughs estate to return our calls, so there's that too.

I AM personally rereading/reading for the first time this series at the moment. I'm about halfway through the second book, Gods of Mars, which is pretty damn good.

I thought the first three formed a terrific story. The rest of the series was quite good, but please for the love of all that's holy... stop at book 10.

I just glanced at Necro's "Upcoming Product" page. The first few entries have an assigned release date of Sep 2006 (Shades of Grey, Mother of All Treasure Tables, and Tower of Jhedovar). I thought the last was released already?

The next set includes a bunch of "To be announced" and others from 2006-2007. Nothing with a release date from 2008 forward.

Is Necro still an operating company? The forums still appear to be in use.

mark logan wrote:

Hello

Please combine order #1157879 with my next adventure path subscription delivery.

We do not currently offer the option to combine non-subscription products with subscription shipments. This is a feature that we are planning on offering in the future, but it is not yet available. Furthermore, this order is set to wait for the release of all preorders before shipping, and the "Pathfinder Chronicles: The Great Beyond—A Guide to the Multiverse" is not scheduled to be released until June. If you would like to receive the Mutants & Masterminds book before then, let me know and I will set them to ship separately (this will incur a separate shipping and handling fee for each shipment).

Thanks,
cos

Thank you for the information. I was hoping to reduce the delivery costs a bit. I'll take the two products together in June.

VagrantWhisper wrote:

As I've said about a half-dozen times now in this thread, there's a plethora of studies out there, from industries of all types, that show why WotC's move was an uneducated attempt to combat a business problem they haven't taken the time to understand effectively.

Thanks for posting this, was a really interesting analysis.

Agreed, I don't think anyone has actually defended WotC decision to pull OPP pdfs as an intelligent move.

Actually, the analysis was for in-print product.

Out-of-print has even less justification.

<snip>

As I've pointed out elsewhere, the number of people who bought the books and don't play is probably dwarfed by the number of people who didn't by the books but who play anyway - whether by using communally available books (the DM's, their friend's, a library's) or by using illegal digital copies of the books.

Peer-reviewed studies of downloader behaviour really don't support that supposition though. I believe it was one of Harvard's studies that found a 5000:1 ratio between song download count and lost sales. 5000 downloads cost 1 sale. That's on a file format that needs no additional work to use -- no printing, no mad laptop scrolling, nothing.

The price point between albums and books is a bit higher, not by much, but it may act as a small incentive. The extra work for useability should act as a small disincentive.

For this thought exercise let's assume the population of gamers is inherently ten times more likely to engage in copyright violation than music listeners. I don't think it is a fair assumption, but let's see if it makes a difference in the end. So we'll set the download : lost sale ratio to 500 : 1.

We've been told the pdf download legal : illegal ratio is 1 : 10. So WotC lost 1 / 500 * 10 / 1 = 2% of the legal pdf downloads in sales. We also know the books sales outstripped pdf sales. Unfortunately we don't know figures so let's assume the ratio of book : pdf sales is 2 : 1 (almost certainly too high by an order of magnitude). That means WotC total sales are 150% of book sales and the loss to piracy is about 0.67% of total sales. So at 10x the discovered rate of violation in an easier format, piracy would still have no discernable effect on total number of sales.

Let's assume hundreds of thousands core books really means hundreds of thousands player handbooks. If we limit the range to 200,000-900,000 (thereby excluding "just over 100,000" and "nearly a million"), we end up with 302,000 - 1,356,000 book equivalents in use.

Some individuals acquire multiple copies either for replacement, alternate format use, or other reasons. Other individuals acquire the books, but do not play. Let's assume 10% of acquisitions are negated. The range is now 271,800 - 1,220,400.

Most games have more than one copy of the book. Let's set the average number of books per table at 2. That provides 135,900 - 610,200 games. WotC survey of games found the mode size of a game was 4 players and the DM. That's why the expected party size fell from 6 to 4 in 3e.

That places the number of gamers playing 4e between 679,500 and 3,051,000.

I think the assumptions made at all steps were quite conservative.

Hello

Please combine order #1157879 with my next adventure path subscription delivery.

<snip>
,,, On an unrelated note:
Last night I dreamed that we started a Web site that collected money from donors to "BUY WIZARDS." I believe they are a public company... at least we could get enough to have a say on the board - if not a majority share. Thoughts?

Hasbro, WotC parent has a market cap > 3.75 billion U.S.

You'll probably need > 10% to get a seat on the board. so, you're looking to collect $400,000,000 for a seat and $2,500,000,000 for anything approaching majority share.

So, you'll need 4,000,000 people to donate an average of $100 each. We know that up to 6,000,000 play the game worldwide of which less than a million probably play 4e.

I don't like the chances.

Pax Veritas wrote:

I just got back from my favorite game store and can share that what has happened with these .pdfs seems to be part of a much wider action - something big is happening because wotc has made some, possibly many, game stores re-sign contractual agreements with respect to agreeing to NOT sell overseas!

That sounds seriously weird. Not selling overseas? What would they gain from that?

Depends if WotC does exclusive market sales. Many manufacturers sign exclusive regional distribution arrangements based on country -- they can charge more for the exclusivity.

If they do, then they have to make sure that their other customers respect those regional boundaries. Sales into territories that are outside your available region are termed grey-market.

It happens between the U.S. and Canada a lot.

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Second, I'd be very interested in reading the posts. The posts by the guy you say is now one of the defendants in the lawsuit and I would love if you could point me in the direction of those posts. I hope this doesn't violate Vic's caution about not talking about people on other messageboards.

Here is a link to his post on Enworld. http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/254035-my-name-defendan t-radzikowski.html

I'd like to subscribe to the Adventure Path starting with the first installment of Legacy of Fire in March.

When I put the subscription in my shopping cart, it appears with Descent in Midnight.

(and now for the stupid-user questions)
Is there a different subscription entry that I missed? Should I wait until March to subscribe?

SillyRobot wrote:

1,000,000 / 50 = 20,000 lbs = just over 9 metric tonnes

Density of gold = 19 therefore 1 cubic metre of gold would weigh 19 tonnes.

So the volume of gold on would be 9/19 cubic metres 474,000 cubic centimetres.

This assumes the gold is pure and that no space is lost when stacked (the coins are square or hexogonal). For round coins, you'd probably need to round the volume up to around 600,000 cubic centrimetres.

So using a quick metric converter, it looks like 600,000 cubic centimeters converts to around 21.2 cubic feet.

I'm feeling kind of mean and am deciding to give the PCs some of their treasure in copper pieces. They have a portable hole, but was wondering if it would fit. By my quick calculation, the portable hole is 282.6 cubic feet so that gives me some idea as to how much would fit.

Thanks for the help.

Density of copper is a bit below 9. A million copper pieces would take a bit more than twice the volume.

Rockheimr wrote:

...case in point the 4e character sheet supplement.

BTW -- what character sheet supplement?

This one!

Vance mentioned that Clark has posted some on the WotC boards and I found a few comments. I thought I would post a few of the things he said (in context, as much as possible without driving myself crazy) (all emphasis mine):

<snip>

Clark's quotes are from June, about the same time he went 'dark'. You haven't found evidence of life -- just archeological nuggets in the wasteland of the Internet. :/