3 hours ago, Tom Cruise said:

So many RPGs do this though. New content in splatbooks is pretty commonly provided in a themed book with multiple kinds of content, rather than a utilitarian shopping list book. If that's grounds for you to dump an RPG, you're cutting yourself out of a LOT of RPGs. Most, I'd say.

I'd be hard pressed to think of any successful RPG over the last 30 years that didn't do this in some form. I've yet to hear anyone decrying this practice to present a better solution.

You can't have everything. Sometimes things are just going to be in a book you don't have and don't want to buy. You could always find someone who has the book and ask them about the stats or use OggDude's generator in combination with the RLogue177's talent trees to get the nitty gritty mechanics and find the fluff on Wookiepedia.

Like others have said, games evolve as they grow and sometimes plans change. I think we here are only a small handful of the people who play the game, and I'm sure people only buy one line, just as I'm sure some people buy all three, or two, or they mix and match depending on what they want.

I don't think FFG is gonna change their methods any time soon. It's obviously working for them after so many years. It's your prerogative, of course, but dumping an RPG because of that when you can easily get the mechanics from other sources in the resources folks here have compiled seems odd to me, but to each their own!

1 hour ago, Harlock999 said:

+1

I am one of those supposed "mythic creatures" (and I'm sure there are many, many more of us out there) who's only buying into one line per FFG's original manifesto . And it frustrates me to no end that the company's position has apparently changed midstream ... while continuing to pump out books with horrible layouts. (I've worked in advertising/publishing. Just fyi.) Are the books pretty? Oh, sure! They all look great. But I find myself always thinking, "Geezus, there's so much room wasted that could have gone toward giving us a bit more"...

Especially as someone who never plans on spending even more money for "Friends Like These" or that F&D book with the armor crafting rules or the Ace book with all of the stats for mounts or another core rule book for the Mon Cal, etc.

I understand, as a business, it's FFG's "responsibility" to gouge its customer base by spreading out all of these species, weapons, starships, vehicles, specs, and all other crunch across multiple books. But I think there comes a time when the fanbase needs to speak up.

Like Mr. Jazz, I'm now finding some of these practices to truly be "atrocious."

And, c'mon, can they not at least try to match images of spacecraft with the stats for said spacecraft?

What specifically is bad about the layout? I'm curious, I've seen others complain about this as well.

If they included Mando Humans and Armor Crafting rules in this book others would complain that they were being gouged for buying into multiple lines - having to pay multiple times for the same content =).

I find it frustrating having things spread out because it becomes a much bigger effort to look over available gear/ships/species but I don't know of a better viable option. FFG is using a standard old school splat book model. Some games eventually release a "comprehensive" book of some sort but most do not and I'm not sure how viable that is for FFG (whether it wouldn't sell well enough to warrant it or if it would cut into sales of the splat books) but I'd buy such books.