"Are Wargames Rules too Cheap?" Topic

Take this only as a personal view, but as a mainly solo player on a limited budget, I get to see few rules. I play Ancients, SYW and ACW, but would like to try other periods like Colonial. I know, however that I would probably need to play and disgard 3 or 4 sets of rules before settling on a standard. I am certainly not going to spend around £50.00 GBP in doing so, especially when at 10mm, that cost equates to 300 odd figures. If rules were cheaper I might be tempted. They could be, if the pretty pictures, lavish binding artwork and graphics were reduced. I would prefer workmanlike rules to eye candy.

Depends

An author charges what he thinks it's worth. The buyer wants it for free. The real question is "Are War Gamers too cheap?"

grahambeyrout, might I suggest looking more closely at free rules? I bet you can go through 3 or 4 sets and find one you like without spending anything.

I do like that there are commercial sets out there and some of them are among my favorites. To answer the question about rules being too cheap, I say no. For many players they are competing with freely available rules. It's hard to be too cheap when your potential competition is at zero.

On the flip side, people tend to value things they sacrificed for. Oddly enough, people will be more likely to play a game with problems that they paid $30 USD for than a free game that doesn't have those problems. People can give themselves a sense of not having wasted their money by subconsciously preferring something they paid for, even if it is worse. Though in many cases, the commercial rules are actually better as they have often seen more development and testing. The truth is though, that there's a continuum of quality among both free and commercial rules.

For example, I'd stack up Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame rules against The Sword and the Flame any day of the week. They accomplish very different things (one's a battle game, one's a skirmish game), but in terms of quality of game play and enjoyment, both are excellent. One is free, one is not.

"Pride & Prejudice and Gone with the Wind took YEARS to write, after all, and even adjusting for inflation, sold new in hard covers for less than Black Powder."

Those novels have sold millions of copies and been made into movies. Also, they do not have lots of color pictures.

Rules without supplements are priced about right. Those with mandatory supplements are way too expensive. Current business models focus more on profits rather than providing intangibles to the gaming community.