Chief Technical Officer
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And if you want to know how we did it with the Beginner Box, the answer is that product has a very small profit margin. Our goals for that product are more about introducing new players to the game and our setting, and less about making money. (This is why when you do see a box set in our industry, it's usually an intro product.)
And if you want to know how TSR did it back in the day... see here.
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**Looks at the Spelljammer, War of the Lance, Dragon Mountain box-sets**
Ah the memories. ^_^
I liked those old TSR boxed sets, at the time.
There was stuff in them I didn't or hardly used though.
Box sets make sense for Campaign Settings.
Box sets make sense for Super Dungeons. (Though admittedly I'm comparing the Awesome Ruins of Undermountain to the not Awesome Return to Undermountain hardback).
Boxed sets for rules not so much. BECMI, was neat but all I ever picked up was BEC. My brother did get MI though. I like the single CORE rulebook approach more than anything else ever done in RPGs, rulewise.
I've found I don't need big maps of towns and dungeons, unless they are 1inch battle maps. I do like poster sized "regional maps".
Cards are cool, but they get lost and they may not be as useful as index cards for space reasons (index cards can squeeze more info in).
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For ease of reference, the previous example is:
Boxed sets are hard to create and—because the costs are really high—hard to make money on.Let's look at the Greyhawk "From the Ashes" box set, which contains:
- Two 96-page books (a setting book and an adventure book, more or less)
- Three 32x21 maps
- Five monster sheets
- 20 reference cards
- A box
Now, let's model a Pathfinder equivalent.
- 96-page books are the size of an AP volume. We sell those for $22.99.
- Our Map Folios that contain 3 33x22 maps sell for $19.99.
- The best equivalent for "monster sheets" and "reference cards" would be our Campaign Cards, which sell for $10.99.
- We sold our Treasure Chest empty box directly from paizo.com for $2. (That actually has very little markup from cost—boxes are expensive; if we had to cover our costs on that through the distribution chain, it would be higher; for this exercise, let's call it $3.03 because it gets us to a retail price that we could actually use.)
Would you pay $79.99 for that?
It's a great comparison. Thank you.
The major difference is one of quality. The books in the old 2e boxed sets were black and white with less slick paper and much less glossy covers. With the box, the covers can be slightly less durable.
That's bound to reduce the costs of printing, and I suspect B&W art costs less.
TSR boxed sets were fairly pricey. Likely not as pricey as they should have been, but not as cheap as people remember. Looking at a couple in my collection, they run $20 to $30; adjusting for inflation that's roughly $30 to $45.
One I saw had two 32 pages books and a 96 page book plus poster maps. Which is akin to two Player Companions and an AP, or $48 plus the cost of a map and a box.
The cost of the Campaign Cards and Map Packs also includes packaging of its own, so including them in a boxed set *should* be cheaper than packaged separately.
And the print run could arguably be higher, as there are likely a large number of people who buy adventures but not the accompanying maps and cards.
I've seen the "boxed sets are expensive" argument so often - and frequently used it myself - that I really just want to get all the information.
The major difference is one of quality. The books in the old 2e boxed sets were black and white with less slick paper and much less glossy covers. With the box, the covers can be slightly less durable.
That's bound to reduce the costs of printing, and I suspect B&W art costs less.
See, I'd hate to lose that lovely glossy color format with a durable hard cover just to get a cardboard box wrapped around it all ;)
The other thing that needs adding is that putting it in a box has an added cost for the European market - currently books can be imported into Europe tax-free if you go via the correct route, while boxed sets are likely to get taxed as merchandise. I suspect the same is true of some other export markets. While I don't know the precise breakdown of export sales for Paizo, I suspect it's significant enough to play a factor in this sort of decision.
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Chief Technical Officer
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See, I'd hate to lose that lovely glossy color format with a durable hard cover just to get a cardboard box wrapped around it all ;)
The major difference is one of quality. The books in the old 2e boxed sets were black and white with less slick paper and much less glossy covers. With the box, the covers can be slightly less durable.
That's bound to reduce the costs of printing, and I suspect B&W art costs less.
Card stock covers are really not much more expensive than self-covers (that is, using the same paper stock for the cover that you use throughout). We're talking pennies here.
You might also be surprised to learn the cost between black-and-white and color printing is actually pretty negligible, as long as you select the right printer for the right job. (We're maybe talking a few dimes, depending on the content ratio.)
Eliminating the tuckbox from the deck of cards would also just be a tiny difference—pennies again.
Even when marked up to go through the retail channel, we're talking about a saving just a few bucks—maybe that box set I described above could be priced at $74.99 instead of $79.99. $69.99 if we think the volume were really high.
You are correct that black-and-white art costs a fair bit less, though.
But one tends to think of box sets as a premium product, and b&w art and self-covered books is pretty much in direct opposition to the notion of premium. Making a box set deliberately lower quality than all of our other products is not a thing we'd actually consider doing.
As for B&W vs Color cost being different, back in the 90's and earlier, B&W was the norm, by far. Not just TSR products, but WW and pretty much everything else I remember. TSR books usually had 1 page every 20-30 that was a full page, full color spread.
These days, full color is kind of the industry standard for high production value books.
I do think that layout design of RPG books has come a long ways. Not everything is better, but books like the PF Core book, or L5R's books are miles ahead of TSR books IMO.
From a collector perspective, I appreciate hard covers the most. When they're the same size as the soft covers, they actually help preserve and protect the more vulnerable books IMO, like when you have to box them for a move. I loved my boxed sets back in the day, but they've all suffered quite a bit of damage over the years.
Side note: I've seen some licensed translations of RPG's that are better than the original. For example the Ars Magica 5th Edition French version looks a LOT nicer than the English version. Since it was licensed out, the licensee basically got the content at a discount, but they're selling the book at the same MSRP. They ended up spending more of their budget on layout/design/art, using whoever does the AEG L5R books (the design choices were immediately obvious IMO).
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I still have my From the Ashes books even though they're held together with tape and hope (and even though most of the information inside was provided in a superior format in 3.0's Living Greyhawk softcover. Which I recommend to any fellow fossils who harbor a fondness for the Olde Worlde.)
Have you read Oerth Journal?
You may see some familiar names among the creators...
...Dragon Mountain...
that is probably my favorite rpg product ever. i still have the poster framed in my library. "WOW!"
I've often wondered how Alderac are able to produce this. It's really high quality, in my view and a good example of a modern boxed set "done right". The cardboard in particular is higher quality than the TSR boxes, as well as the included components being to the modern standard.
Note the price, it started at $80, which is spot on with Vic's estimation of a boxed set price.
It needs to be fairly shockproof. I'd probably say "cedar panels for the sides, but walnut for the edges," and ideally it should have a perfectly smooth top so it can be used as an impromptu desk. Inlaid designs are pretty but they play havoc when you're trying to take notes.
If I were a woodworker, I'll bet I could set up a booth at conventions and make a tidy profit selling "Deluxe Pathfinder Holders" complete with velour-lined rulebook, pencil, and dice pockets. Brass0plated carrying grip. The deluxe model would have to have a slide-out cup holder, of course.
Zapp Brannigan: Mmmmm... velour.
It needs to be stronger than the OD&D Collector's Set box that WotC put out last year. Two of the side panels of the lid of the first set I got broke off when I took off the shrink wrap. I have a replacement but decided to keep it in the shrink and use the damaged original as a reading copy (maybe play some day) along with the included dice. I'd have rather they done the set with a sturdy cardboard board game style box personally.
Note the price, it started at $80, which is spot on with Vic's estimation of a boxed set price.
I thought it was cheap.