dvang said:
Erik:
With 3e we are going to have a costy basic kit (60€/100$) that contains, for what I've seen: 4 small booklets, a handful of custom dies, a deck of small cards, some cardboards
You're minimizing what comes in the core set. It comes with: "4 Rulebooks, 36 custom dice, 154 action cards (which include spells and blessings, as well as special combat and social actions), 70 wound cards, 45 talent cards, 30 condition cards, 30 insanity cards, 30 career ability cards, 19 miscast cards, 12 location cards, 1 item card, 30 career sheets, 5 party sheets, 1 pad of character sheets, 3 character keeper boxes, 48 tracking tokens, 6 stance rings, 6 activation tokens, 2 large standups, 47 medium standups, 12 plastic bases, 39 fatigue & stress tokens, 40 puzzle-fit stance pieces, and 5 puzzle-fit centre pieces". So:
1) 36 is more than a handful of dice. Maybe 2 hands, if your hands are really big. I'm pretty sure my hands are too small to hold even 18 dice per without spilling.
2) The cards come in two sizes (not just a "deck of small cards"); large and small sizes. You also get a whopping total of 391 cards, really more than "a deck". (Consider "a deck" of playing cards is 52).
3) "some cardboards" actually translates to: 193 pieces (I totaled tokens plus the standups plus stance pieces, but didn't include the plastic bases)
4) You did not include the 30 career and 5 party sheets, the 3 character keeper boxes, nor the pad of character sheets.
If you individually priced out the contents of the boxed set, you will find it worth more than the $100 being charged. Heck, the dice alone are worth at least $20-$30. Yes, $100 is a lot to spend in one go. However, $100 is actually cheaper than the cost of the D&D 4e core box (by a few bucks). Sure, D&D has 3 books that are bigger than the 4x WFRP 3e books, but the WFRP 3e box comes will lots more stuff, including dice. Also speaking about the books and their size ... rememeber that all the careers, talents, actions, criticals, spells, etc are not contained in the books but on cards. Jay Little has already said (somewhere) that if they put that information in the books, the books would be more than twice their current size. They seem small, because there is less data, comparatively, that needs to be in them. Imagine if D&D took all the classes out of the PHB (and put them on separate card sheets), plus all the feats, spells, etc. How big would the PHB really be then? Not very big. It's just a matter of perspective that the WFRP 3e books appear small. So, when you say "4 small rulebooks are not worth the $100" ... to get comparable with other RPGs you have to also include all the career sheets and cards, as those have the rules for careers, talents, spells, etc. So "are 4 small rulebooks and a couple hundred cards and a couple dozen sheets, worth $100?" is the question you should be asking (assuming you don't buy from Amazon at the $62 price).
I do agree, if you don't want to use the entire package contents, buying the Core Set becomes less of a financial good deal. This has been discussed before. Given that you can buy the Set on Amazon for $62, I think it's still a good bargain. If it doesn't, then wait a few months for people (or perhaps even FFG) to sell individual pieces, such as the rulebooks. It has absolutely no bearing on whether the game itself is good, though, only whether buying the Core Set is worth it to you.
Back to original topic then... well, very well...
First of all, 4 Rulebooks ... that's 50% of my concern about this product's physical quality/convenience. They seemed booklets to me, same thickness as Death Upon The Reik and slightly better exterior quality. I wasn't able to count their overall pages as I could not touch them, but they were more or less the same as the main rulebook of V2.
The numbers of cards/tokens/dies you are telling me are surely larger than those I sow in the exposition, maybe they did not exposed everything. Still the overall quality of the cardboards, cards and dies was average.
Your argument about dies cost is right... but see my point of view: I've plenty of dies at home, D6, D10, D100, D20, D12, D8, lots of each of them. Why do I need to pay for custom dies? As I see it, that new custom ruleset could as well have been created in order to make me buy new dies in order to play WFRP V3.
Same thing for cards, cardboards and checkmarks: why I have to use additional material for an RPG when usually I do need a dies set, a pencil and some paper?
Character sheets... they come with already drawn portraits of the characters. I've seen a Fire Wizard one. What if one wish to play a Jade Sorceress? Are there THAT many character sheets to cover every career/subcareer possibilities? I'm telling this because having the wrong picture on your character sheets can be very distracting. Oh yes, I can do my own character sheets... but then, why the hell do I have to pay for them?!?
Moreover, are we sure that this new, innovative gameplay style that involves all this external material is so much better and worth spending extra money for it? Reading the diaries I can see some potentials but at the same time I can see flaws or timeconsuming/distracting resource management/tracking steps.
