Had a look on Amazon uk at the price of the three core books. £80 not including postage.

Ouch!

100$ for me in the as pre-ordered. I think around 30-35$ a book. Wasnt bad really for the page count and being hardback.

Compared to some other RPGs and especially some single board games, thats not a bad price.

I suppose it's cheaper than the d100 San loss that is the new edition of Unknown Armies.

It's just a bit sad they have to make this hobby so dear.

Quick googling suggests that inflation is 3x(US)-4x(UK) since 1980, and I'm pretty sure I was paying $20 a pop for the 1E hardbacks back in the 1980s. So not out of line with what we should expect, but our price sensitivity is set by the standards of long-long-ago?

D&D is free online.

As are many other RPGs.

If you want to pay nothing and own an awesome fantasy RPG, check out Mazes & Minotaurs.
http://storygame.free.fr/MAZES.htm

Quote from: Spinachcat;972768D&D is free online.

As are many other RPGs.

If you want to pay nothing and own an awesome fantasy RPG, check out Mazes & Minotaurs.
http://storygame.free.fr/MAZES.htm

Free in what sense I wonder?

Effectively the core stuff. WotC put out the core material as pdf's in a sort of SRD without art so you could just get that if you didn't want all the extras that come with the full printed material (extra classes for example).

Quote from: Biscuitician;972766I suppose it's cheaper than the d100 San loss that is the new edition of Unknown Armies.

It's just a bit sad they have to make this hobby so dear.

Hah! Yeah, I noticed that price too! Jeebus... I bought the pdfs and they were still pretty expensive.

Some of the indie or OSR stuff is still good value for money. But what really pisses me off, is when some 'unknown' releases a 'complete' game that has 100-page count and charges 17e for a pdf. That's freaking scandalous!

Quote from: Hermes Serpent;972770Effectively the core stuff. WotC put out the core material as pdf's in a sort of SRD without art so you could just get that if you didn't want all the extras that come with the full printed material (extra classes for example).

Yeah, you can get the Basic rules for free from their website. Comes with the four core classes (fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue) and one build option for each, mostly to reflect the "standard" character from previous editions. The hardback Player's Handbook adds in more options for those four classes and adds in several other classes (barbarian, druid, sorcerer, etc) but none of those are needed for play.

I used to think that D&D was expensive, but then I compared it to other similar products out there. It's really not that bad. I dislike paying $40 or $50 for a hardback module, but you get a LOT of play time out of a single hardback, so they really are a decent deal as well.

When it was time to get my nephews their first game books, I just got them Basic Fantasy and three adventures at a cost I could shrug at. It wasn't any attempt at instilling OSR purity in them. If they get into 5E on their own, I have no problem with it at all. I just wanted to get a bunch of ready-to-use material that also gave them a simple adventure model to emulate.

Price is a big reason I haven't tried 5E. It sounds good. It's just I have all my old D&D stuff, and it doesn't sound $100 better than what I can do already.

Quote from: Biscuitician;972749Had a look on Amazon uk at the price of the three core books. £80 not including postage.

Ouch!

Alright. Today's currency #s says $1.0 US=£0.77, so that £80 is $104. Converting that to 1974 dollars, it is the same as $20.95. Bringing that back to 2 significant digits, that's $21. The original White box D&D set had a printed-on-box price of $10. I believe Greyhawk and Blackmoor were either $5 or $10.

So, minus shipping, you're looking at the either the same as The original plus one supplement, or original plus two.  Let's skip the whole rigamarole of which edition is better and just say that based on page count, the three modern core books are significantly more material than what you would get in 1974. Even if a lot of that is bloat, you are still getting roughly the same amount of gaming material.  

So, it's mostly inflation's fault, is I guess what I am saying.

I don't know, maybe it's because I have a store in a less affluent area and with the drop in the Canadian Dollar (which is still high compared to what it was in the nineties) I feel many things are just too expensive for my customer base.  Dice aren't one of them, dice are about half what they were in 1982 when they were $6 for even a very basic set and if we apply the x3-4 on that we've got $18 - $24 while they're really $3 - $6 now.

I don't think the core rulebooks are that expensive. I especially don't think they are expensive when compared to comparable entertainment such as video games which are about $60 a pop. A player really only needs the Player's Handbook.

If you're willing to play table top role-playing games and not just play D&D, a lot of OSR products are very cheap or free on PDF. Have you looked at Palladium Fantasy? It's rulebook is like $25 on Amazon.com.

I wasn't looking to shop around.

Most other fantasy games don't really interest me anyway, or I own them.

Video games are also something that is grossly overpriced.

You could play something else. Do you already own a version of D&D? If so, just use that and keep playing for free as long as you like. I have seen no reason to buy new D&D products for almost 30 years.