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Hi,
i would have bought this Box ... but seriously ... why do the Standups have white Backgrounds ?
It looks cheap.
If they had a Background like Antique Paper or whatever they would
look much much better.
And it would not make them more expensive , i work in printing.Or rather than Standups use Token ... cardboard token look better than those Standups you use.
Dont get me wrong , i LOVE Pathfinder ... but this is a serious flaw in
the Box.Hope you change that in the new Edition ...
Oh , just as an Idea , make the Floor Plans and Stand Ups / Tokens
(a BETTER version please) for the normal Players as seperate
Box ... Tabletop Addition for Pathfinder =)
Maybe even the Heroes from your Adventures as Plastic Miniatures ...Best Regards
André "Azzitay" Deffland
1) Paizo has separate pawn packages from the Bestiary and many of the Adventure Paths.
2) There are plastic minis of the iconics and many of the monsters & encounters from various Adventure Paths.
3) The flip mats are not meant to be "stand up". Not everyone likes those. There are other companies that make those, so you can buy from them - or you can make your own.
Your complaints are a bit on the harsh side, IMHO. There are no "serious flaws" with the Beginner Box. You just need to check out the things that Paizo sells a bit more thoroughly.
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Beginner Box is one of the best intro RPG products I have ever come across.
Separate rule books for Players and GMs. Sample character sheets that explain everything, both premade and blank. Pawns printed on high quality card stock with fantastic art. Pre-made starter adventure and dungeon map that flips over to a generic grid. Dice.
This product is perfect for its target audience, and the value of what you get far exceeds it's price.
As Adelwulf said, there are products out there that will give you what you are after.
You want Tokens? There is always that other fantasy gaming system, but you are getting a superior product with Paizo. (I also cant see how tokens look better, but to each their own).
You can get pawns, maps, plastic minis, adventures, etc. all separately, however the idea here is that it is a BEGINNER box. A bundle to get you started. And with the low price point on this item, yes Paizo is trying to get you to buy more, but i hardly think that is an offense as all their products live up to the same quality.
You can even get the 4 iconics as plastic minis in a pack, though it is out of production so you may need to get it from after-market suppliers.
Also, this is not that other fantasy gaming product, so don't hold your breath for a new edition. (A boon in most eyes!)
And honestly, you cannot give a serious critique of a product you didn't even purchase on the basis of "pawns have a white background"
Agreed with the responses above.
Paizo apparently are taking a small loss on these boxed sets, gambling that an inexpensive but complete gaming experience in a box will whet the appetites of new players and GMs to branch out from there and buy things like the plastic miniatures, hard-back books, maps, adventure paths, and other Pathfinder products that do make the money.
Paizo does sell a set of plastic miniatures of the main characters from the Beginner Box set, but separately - they're a bit pricy (not fabulously expensive, but not cheap) - if you're looking for something really nice to represent the PCs with, it's hard to go wrong with these minis, as they really are some of the nicest pre-painted plastic minis I've seen, and I think they're worth the price. There are also themed plastic miniatures sets already produced and in the works which match to a greater or lesser degree the Pathfinder adventure paths and so on, if you prefer the miniatures and have the money to spare; what I've seen of the Pathfinder miniatures in general looks pretty exciting.
The cardboard pawns are a fair compromise between miniatures and tokens: they're nearly as cost-effective as tokens, but, as semi-3D stand-ups they still fit in reasonably well among 3D miniatures. I don't notice the white backgrounds, and they don't really distract from the character art.
However, the Other Guys do sell sets of inexpensive cardboard tokens for their 4th Edition of the game, if you prefer tokens. I personally find them murky and a bit hard to see, but they're not a bad alternative to the pawns, in any case.
As for the floor plans... there are lots and lots of excellent Paizo map products out there, at least a few of which were designed with Paizo Adventures in mind, and most (if not all) of them could be useful in one way or another for Pathfinder campaigns. If you aren't crazy about those (or even if you are), then the Other Guys sell thick cardboard dungeon tile products which are a fine product in their own right, but appeal to a different style of DMing than the pre-set Flip Mats and Map Packs do.
In the end, I really really like the Pathfinder Beginner Box set - I collect these boxed sets, and this one is one of the better ones out there... the Other Guys had their versions of starter sets, currently out of print, which included a few pre-painted plastic miniatures, some nice heavy cardboard terrain tiles, and other goodies; they looked great and were cool products, but ultimately gave less bang-for-the-buck than the Beginner Box does.
How on earth are Paizo taking a small loss with the Beginner Boxes??
Because it's like $30 or so when the CRB alone is $50.
While it's a shortened version, it's got a simple version of the CRB and GMG, which I'd price at around $20 apiece going off the normal, a mat (which is also worth $20 depending on where you buy it), a pair of short adventures, and some cardboard pawns.
It's definitely worth more than $30 ($35?) when adding up all the components.
But since it draws people in and their main income is from APs anyway...it's likely to balance out.
How on earth are Paizo taking a small loss with the Beginner Boxes??
I'm not convinced they are selling for a loss (I'd guess a microscopic but positive margin, personally). But box sets are expensive for all kinds of reasons. This one has a flipmat, some sheets of tokens a set of dice and a couple of glossy books. All of which were printed, assembled (remember that dice producers and book producers are not generally the same, so any 'combination' product has a whole extra internal postage/handling step that a simple book doesnt) and then shipped from China to the US, then they go through distribution to the retailer who sells it to the consumer for thirty bucks. When you deduct the cost of paying people to produce it and then take out the profit for the printers, freight companies, distributor and retailer there isnt much less for the producer.
The Beginner Box is intended to be a low-price, high-value product, so the profit margin is, by design, very slim... but it's not designed to lose money.
Glad to hear you're not subscribing to the Tony Wilson approach to business.
The Beginner Box is intended to be a low-price, high-value product, so the profit margin is, by design, very slim... but it's not designed to lose money.
This is what I meant - not sure why it came out as "take a small loss" (I've got my mind on too many things at once) :)
In any case, what I see in these boxed sets is a lot of very different components, with a lot of extra labor involved in designing, managing, organizing, assembling, and quality-checking them all. Some of the contents are things that Paizo already does (books, flip-maps), but others would have been things that were new to Paizo, such as the pawns, with their own research and development costs. The finished product needed to have a low enough cost to make it attractive for people who've never touched a pen-and-paper RPG before to take a chance on, but the product itself needs to be able to provide everything a new gamer needs in one box while still being both inexpensive enough but high-quality and attractive enough to attract and keep new gamers.
So, what I'd meant to say was that I could see no way that Paizo could have improved on the Beginner Box at this price point, as the real value of boxed starter sets like this for businesses like Paizo would, I'm sure, be in their role as an investment in attracting new customers to spend money the sorts of products that provide Paizo with a better profit margin.
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