Are "bullet-stoppers" the answer?

Have you seen The World's Largest Dungeon, The Shackled City and Ptolus? They're campaign setting books (of one sort or another)... but not just any kind of book. They're all big and expensive.

• The World's Largest Dungeon - $100. 840 page hardback with color maps.
• The Shackled City - $60. 416 page hardback.
• Ptolus - $119 pre-order. 672 page hardback with a CD-ROM containing another 350+ pages of material. Over 1100 pages total.

AEG has, in addition to The Shackled City, several other $50 hardbacks of campaign material for various settings. Just three books for "Warlords of the Accordlands" can set you back $140.

What's weird about Ptolus is that you'll be able to buy it all as eight separate PDFs, divided logically. (All told, the PDFs cost $70.) What I don't get here is, if they've got the material all partitioned up into eight books, why sell it in one huge cost-prohibitive chunk, that's physically unwieldy?

The thing that's bugging me here, about all of these books, and the general trend toward huge $40 and $50 game books, is that I think such high-priced items cater directly to the stalwart core, and they exclude anyone who isn't really serious about it. I'll admit, I'm a cheapskate and I still think $25 is a lot of money to drop on a book. And I live in a low cost-of-living area, so that a $50 game book is a more significant percentage of my income compared to someone living in a big city. For comparison, I can get a ticket to the nicest movie houses in town on a Friday night for $8.00. And that reflects a fairly recent price increase. So where a $50 book might represent a night at the movies (with popcorn and all) with a spouse for some people, that fifty bucks represents two such outings to me.

Considering that you can get TWLD on eBay for less than half of its cover price right now, I'm thinking maybe I'm right about the "driving customers away" thing.

Think about this... you buy Ptolus, and you have over 1,100 pages to absorb. Plus the free 96 page adventure if you pre-ordered soon enough. Plus all of the freebies on the website. I think there is literally more information here than a single gamemaster can realistically absorb and use effectively. I remember buying a bunch of used Forgotten Realms 2nd edition stuff all at once and being rather overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information available about the world.

I think big worlds need to be absorbed in small chunks. There's certainly more Forgotten Realms stuff available in just one edition than there is in the Ptolus initial release. But that stuff was developed over years. Gamemasters started with a small chunk and learned it as it came out, in relative bits and pieces.

I know there are people who will buy Ptolus "just because". I'm almost tempted to myself, just to see it. But if TWLD is any indication, I'll wait until I can get it for $60 on eBay.

But this rant isn't about what I can and can't afford. It's about what I perceive as an industry driving fans away by making their products bigger and more expensive until only the most dedicated can afford them, or are willing to risk that much of an investment in one go. And don't think I want companies to charge less for these same books. I think the books they're making are too freakin' huge!

This is why I've spent a lot more money on PDFs in the past three years than I have paper books... there isn't a lot of risk in a $5 product. And I can't find many paper books that I'm willing to risk the money on. Overall, I've gotten my money's worth and spent quite a bit of money at RPGNow in the last three years.

It's an interesting dichotomy, watching the paper publishers get bigger and more expensive, while the PDF end of things has gotten into some really small and inexpensive products. (And I'm not talking about PDF versions of paper books, which in some cases are more expensive than the discounted books on Amazon.com!)

I can understand that there are economic factors that favor larger books over smaller. I remember years ago when Iron Crown Enterprises said they wouldn't publish a book smaller than 128 pages, because it was too hard to make money on books smaller than that. And I can grok that... but I'm trying to figure out why all books now need to be full-color hardbacks at the 250 pages and up mark. Is the profit break-point really that large? Or are the game companies thinking that they can just make bigger and more expensive books and not lose any customers. I know most of them have lost me. And they've lost me on material that they probably could have gotten me to buy if they'd broken it up in to two or three smaller books and sold them individually, spread out over a reasonable length of time.