The Tao of Gaming Unplayed Parity and other mysteries

So last night's session let me mark off an unplayed game: Attribut. It's cute enough. Reminiscent of Apples to Apples, but everyone judges. We also played a few games of You Must be an Idiot. Both are reasonable games, although it seems like evey YmbI card has a question about baseball.

But my unplayed number didn't budge, because I got Vikingatid. This is apparently a Grail of collecting (hey, Geeklists are never wrong!). I've sold more of that list than I've kept. I expect this latest one to be a 'rental,' too. I'll try to walk through this at some point ...

While I was at the store, I saw a copy of Ptolus, the latest by Monte Cook. I rather enjoyed reading Arcana Evolved, so I picked up his latest tome. It's a nice book, with hardcover, three ribbonned bookmarks built it, and probably 800 pages. The MSRP, you ask?

One Hundred and Twenty Dollars. So you could buy this, or buy a monstrous game by Fantasy Flight, and still have a hefty Rio Grande Box in change. It may be a great investment (after all, for that you probably get years worth of weekly sessions for a group), but ... damn.

And we also got in the mandatory game of Indonesia. I'm upping my rating to a nine. Last night saw no city ever expand, and no shipping company with hull above one before era C. A great game.

(link)

Lou Wainwright:

I was sucked into Ptolus a year ago. Very sensibly Monte offered the ability to prepay for the book $10/month. I knew myself well enough to know that there was no way I wasn't going to buy the book after seeing it, just as you did, so I agreed to prepay and traded off a small amout of NPV for not ever having to feel like I'd just spent $120 for a RPG supplement.

Also, the ribboned bookmarks? They contributed $30 to my perceived value of the book. I'm easy. I hope I like it, I haven't started reading it yet.

8.15.2006 6:11pm

Brian (www):

Oh, I'm not dissing the bookmarks. You normally have to flip around several places in even a standard sized (200 page) book, so it completely makes sense. The issue is that I'd rather pay $120 for 3-4 books, because then I can have them open at once. In any case, my buying Ptolus was probably not going to happen, even if it was $50. I have plenty of unused RPG stuff.

8.15.2006 7:46pm

Chris Farrell (mail) (www):

I'm somthing of a Monte Cook groupie these days, and even I couldn't pull the trigger on Ptolus. I probably will eventually, just because his stuff is so good and I'll probably need D&D material again, but geez, that's one expensive book (for reference, The Banewarrens is a Malhavoc Press adventure that takes place in the Ptolus setting that might be a, ah, more modest look at Ptolus).

I don't know if you saw the news, but I gather Monte Cook is getting out of the RPG design business. Malhavoc will keep going, and he'll do stuff from time to time, but he's shifting his main focus to writing fiction and other projects. It's probably a better use of his talents ultimately, but IMHO he's significantly the brightest guy working in pencil-n-paper RPGs today so he'll definitely be missed. Malhavoc's latest game, Iron Heroes, was cool, but from the level and severity of eratta you can tell that Mike Mearls is no Monte Cook.

8.15.2006 8:22pm

Yeah, I saw the note on his blog. As for his credentials, I really can't say (since I purchase RPGs infrequently for over a decade), but I imagine the rewards are fairly modest, even if you 'own the company.' (Behemoths like D&D 3.0 being the exception). I picked up Iron Heroes, but it wasn't to my tastes.

8.15.2006 8:29pm

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