[HOE] Combined Format

[Kirt Dankmyer aka Loki <xiombarg@earthlink.net>]

> Our sales on individual books are low, so we're going to the new combined
> format "Deadlands" that we discussed at the summer shows. I'll ask John to
> repeat the new format change here so that the rest of you will know.

This is a fantastically bad idea.

I cannot express in words how much I loathe this idea. I play Hell on Earth
more or less exclusively, which means that I *am* buying Wierd West stuff,
but only to support Hell on Earth, and therefore very selectively.

This is an especially bad idea if the combined books are going to contain
adventure material, because I don't use canned adventures, and I rarely buy
them, plus any Wierd-West oriented adventures are doubly a waste of space
as far as I'm concerned. It sounds like we're talking about something like
the Epitath here, and, frankly, the Epitath was not the sort of bang for my
buck or the level of quality I usually expect from Pinnacle. Basically,
anyone who likes one of the games more than the other is going to get all
sorts of stuff they don't want/need for their game, thus greatly diluting
its value for everyone but a select few (the completists). This is
especially true if we're talking about a random collection of stuff for
each line: I can't even guarantee *any* of it is useful to me without going
through the whole thing, and then, is it worth it for the few pages of
material that I want?

There's a reason there aren't that many print gaming magazines out there.
It's because people don't like to buy random collections of stuff, even if
it's mostly oriented toward one company's games. 

I'm not just talking in a vaccuum here. Previous experience in other
companies' game lines has shown that except for people who already buy
everything, such an approach is a bad idea. A big combined
adventures/sourcebook/everything all over the place is very similiar to the
Revelations Cycle that was put out for In Nomine, and the fans really hated
that format. You'll notice all recent In Nomine stuff has been standard
sourcebooks; this is because Steve Jackson Games realized their mistake and
fixed it. I'm not sure Pinnacle can afford to make the same mistake. As
another example, take the "Rifter" magazine for the Palladium system, which
is a very similiar idea to what is being proposed here, especially the way
all of Palladium's stuff tends to get squished together in with Rifts
anyway. Not only would following any of Palladium's business practices be
very... disappointing... to say the least, but even within the context of
Palladium fans, in my experience they buy the focused supplements outlining
the bits of the Palladium Megaverse that interest them, and they don't buy
the Rifter. (I can show you Palladium fans with piles of books taller than
I am... and not one of them owns any issue of the Rifter.)

Right now I am very, very satisfied with the amount of good material I get
in a Hell on Earth supplement, especially since they started cutting the
adventures out of the sourcebooks. I feel my gaming dollar is really well
spent when I buy a Hell on Earth sourcebook. I am impressed with the amount
of material I get, and its general quality. I would rather Hell on Earth
material come out less often, and be $10 more expensive per supplement,
than go with this combined format. So long as the quality remained the
same, I would feel that my gaming dollar was still well spent, as opposed
to these combined supplements, which would mean I would have to pay for
pages and pages of stuff I will never use.

And I feel that way even if these combined supplements followed what I
would consider to be an ideal format for such a thing. That is, even if
each issue had no adventures and a strong theme so it's less random (like a
"Science!" issue, which might have material on Mad Scientists, Junkers, and
Hellstromme's people from Lost Colony), I would *still* feel I would be
wasting money, and would not buy the supplements. Again, I repeat: I would
rather Hell on Earth material come out less often, and be $10 more
expensive per supplement, than go with this combined format.

I urge the people at Pinnacle to please, please reconsider this action. The
completists will buy everything anyway, and the people like me who are
willing to pay for quality will do so, but making this move may make things
cheaper to produce, but sales will suffer because of it.
	-Kirt "Loki" Dankmyer