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Biomute posted:Yet people do this all the time. They buy guitars they will never really play, or action figures that will never leave their boxes. Hell, even people who do play Call of Cthulhu have no "good" reason to pick up every nearly identical edition, yet they do. I might play my latest purchase, but even if I don't just owning it, reading it, feeling good about supporting a product I believe in and enjoying having it on my shelf gives it far more worth than some data in a server park somewhere. Plenty of people buy PDFs of games they never really play. PS: you're a loving idiot.
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Nov 6, 2018 12:56
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Nah, I am not making a gatekeepers argument; all forms of gaming have value I am sure. I made the argument that gaming online is a different experience than gaming around the table, and probably would be better served by different tools and even different games; to make most of the medium. Playing a game from memory, or playing a game that requires no books to begin with are also gaming, but they are different types of experiences than what I think most people have in mind when they think of pen and paper rpgs. Of course, different rpgs also provide also provide different experiences, but I believe there is enough similarities to define a community around these games and that this community is less served by PDFs than adjacent, equally cool and awesome communities such as the Roll20 crowd. The specific quote you mention is more about the joy of interacting with the object, communally, which can be reduced to the same argument booklovers have about ebooks vs physical media, except I feel like the added production value and, for lack of a better word, gameiness make this difference even more acute.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:14
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Serf posted:for those of us who play online pdfs are far more useful I agree with this, I don't play online though. By that theory, which I also subscribe to, only the first PDF has value. With the economics of data that value quickly approaches zero. I understand why this argument is upsetting to creators, especially those who don't have the means to produce physical representations of their labor, but that does not make it any less true. Luckily for them (and me, seeing as I am a software developer) our society does not work like that. thotsky fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 13:18
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Most PDFs are considerably underpriced.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:20
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Kai Tave posted:actually the physical games you buy mostly wind up going unused which suggests that they don't really have a lot of value either except that of conspicuous consumption. If you're not actually playing the game owning a physical copy doesn't somehow make it more meaningful or valuable, it's like fetishizing a set of stereo instructions when you don't listen to music. Hey now let’s not drag most of the wargaming world into this.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:21
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Biomute posted:I agree with this, I don't play online though. Same metric, your life has no value.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:21
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Biomute posted:Nah, I am not making a gatekeepers argument; all forms of gaming have value I am sure. I made the argument that gaming online is a different experience than gaming around the table, and probably would be better served by different tools and even different games; to make most of the medium. Playing a game from memory, or playing a game that requires no books to begin with are also gaming, but they are different types of experiences than what I think most people have in mind when they think of pen and paper rpgs. Of course, different rpgs also provide also provide different experiences, but I believe there is enough similarities to define a community around these games and that this community is less served by PDFs than adjacent, equally cool and awesome communities such as the Roll20 crowd. Liar. I release plenty of PDF-only RPGs. According to your own loving words in this thread, the time and effort that I put in to their creation has no value because I didn't waste time wrapping them in dead trees and hastening the death of the planet by burning fuel to carry them across the planet to your hands. Except in the world that exists outside of your head, labour has value and I am not unreasonable for wanting to be compensated in some fashion for the work I have done. You're a loving idiot, and I'm glad you'll never play most of my games.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:22
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Meinberg posted:Vampire LARPs also tend to be or become incredibly toxic, due to the high level of PvP in the games, the systems rewarding players for paying more, power structures that can give people with in game and out of game power a sense of megalomania, and general vampire themes being a bit rapey. Still, they've become the standard for parlor LARPs in the USA and abroad, that other parlor LARPs have evolved from. I have no idea what the bit I've bolded is about- that's a feature of several boffer LARPs I'm aware of (and part of why I'm utterly uninterested in playing any LARP that's run as a business) but I've been playing live-action Vampire for almost twenty years and I've never seen any payment that wasn't for site fees, organization membership, or like convention fees. It's the for-profit boffer games like Dystopia Rising that want to sell you extra XP.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:25
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Biomute posted:I agree with this, I don't play online though. I honestly don't understand wtf you are saying now? you're saying that only the first PDF has value because it can be indefinitely pirated so, like, if the rules were $50,000 hours of labor's worth or whatever then when there's one copy of the PDF it's worth $50k, two copies they're worth $25k each and because people can make like as many copies as they want pretty quickly each copy ends up worth close to nothing? but then you say that our society doesn't work like that (because of... i don't know, copyright restrictions or something?) So... therefore PDFs do have value and you're wrong?
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Nov 6, 2018 13:32
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Oh no, I did not realize all those retroclone authors I passed on were actually entitled to my purchases, what have I done?
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Nov 6, 2018 13:32
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Biomute posted:Oh no, I did not realize all those retroclone authors I passed on were actually entitled to my purchases, what have I done? dude they're not entitled to your money but the fact that you personally don't want to buy something doesn't make it literally worth nothing, to anyone, if someone spent any money at all on it they overpaid even if they had a use for it like how are you not comprehending this
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Nov 6, 2018 13:36
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Well, you started by declaring your support for a metric by which your own life has no value, so that's probably a good place to look.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:37
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a computing pun posted:I honestly don't understand wtf you are saying now? you're saying that only the first PDF has value because it can be indefinitely pirated so, like, if the rules were $50,000 hours of labor's worth or whatever then when there's one copy of the PDF it's worth $50k, two copies they're worth $25k each and because people can make like as many copies as they want pretty quickly each copy ends up worth close to nothing? I am basically saying the first thing, but the second is also kind of true because dumb world confuses price and value.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:38
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Biomute posted:Oh no, I did not realize all those retroclone authors I passed on were actually entitled to my purchases, what have I done? 'That PDF is worth nothing to me' and 'That PDF is worth nothing period' are two different arguments. I hate gaming from PDFs and love physical books and you are coming off like a real rear end in a top hat in this thread right now.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:38
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Lemon-Lime posted:Plenty of people buy PDFs of games they never really play. I have a huge physical RPG collection, but since the PDF has taken over the industry (and at a lower price point) I am actually buying more rpgs now than ever before. The move to digital has been hugely liberating as I can carry my whole collection on my Amazon Fire (perfect PDF machine, and cheap) and look at any book anytime. Now that the Ars Magica line is done I only buy notebooks in PDF. I would love to be able to trade my old physical books for OEF pdfs. Sourcebooks are a waste of trees.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:44
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HopperUK posted:'That PDF is worth nothing to me' and 'That PDF is worth nothing period' are two different arguments. I hate gaming from PDFs and love physical books and you are coming off like a real rear end in a top hat in this thread right now. Can't you see you are wrong to hate playing from PDFs? They are clearly more practical, books just gather dust, you're taking away the livelihood of struggling artists and you are also killing the rainforest.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:48
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No one here actually gives a poo poo about you preferring books.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:50
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Biomute posted:By that theory, which I also subscribe to, only the first PDF has value. With the economics of data that value quickly approaches zero. I understand why this argument is upsetting to creators, especially those who don't have the means to produce physical representations of their labor, but that does not make it any less true. its actually not true at all. the product has value because labor was put into producing it. the form that the product takes is included in its value, yes, but there's a reason why pdfs cost less than physical books (another reason they are attractive since most people are poor). and even then pdfs are dirt cheap for the labor used to produce them, and the amount of value is significantly lower than what the creator needs in order to sustain themselves
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Nov 6, 2018 13:50
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"My personal preference is objective truth" will never fail to cause this.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:53
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Man, you swap premises and arguments so quick it’s like none of them matter.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:54
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Biomute posted:I am basically saying the first thing, but the second is also kind of true because dumb world confuses price and value. Hmm. Okay, well, honestly, based on the argument you're making, it seems like you're saying that it's inherently impossible for any sort of information - data - to be worth any amount of money because it can always exist in a format that can be copied with close to no effort? like: any song, any piece of writing, any video, any piece of software etc, all of these can only possibly be worth the amount of labor they cost to produce divided among the number of copies there are? and that the only way to ever appraise a creative work's value is to look at the value of the materials and ignore almost any value added by the actual content. this is... well, it's a self-consistent but also a fairly lovely theory of value? it's fundamentally disparate from the actual value of things! When someone buys a book, they're mainly not paying for the cost of its physical materials, they're paying for the information contained within. The physical components may have some value - they let you touch it, put it on your shelf, flick through it, loan it to a friend, own it when your computer dies, etc - but if the information contained within had literally no value (as your theory suggests), surely a book of random keyboard mashing would have just as much value as a book someone put $100,000 of labor into?
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Nov 6, 2018 13:56
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since data has no value i would like a refund for my steam library pls
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Nov 6, 2018 13:57
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Mors Rattus posted:Man, you swap premises and arguments so quick it’s like none of them matter. Their value is quickly approaching zero.
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Nov 6, 2018 13:57
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LatwPIAT posted:Tablets are expensive. Not everyone has that kind of money to spend on luxuries. I'm sympathetic, but I'm not sure who the person is who'd prefer to spend around £50-100 on glossy hardback books but not £50 plus the (admittedly undervalued) amount on a cheap tablet and PDFs, which are easier to transport and use, generally. I wouldn't claim to be rolling in it, but physical RPGs absolutely look like more of a sting cost-wise than PDFs even considering tablet costs (which aren't that high in comparison). Maybe the tablet market is hugely different in the US and it looks like more of a gulf?
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Nov 6, 2018 14:00
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moths posted:"My personal preference is objective truth" will never fail to cause this. he's a Marauder, and all Marauders must die join the Banishers
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Nov 6, 2018 14:04
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like if you're seperating the concepts of value and price the way you seem to be and saying that, like, a copy of the 5th Ed PHB which costs $50 and has a value of iunno $25, $10 of which covers the paper and cover and ink and electricity to run the printing press or whatever and $15 worth of labor, then surely the PDF version is still worth $15 of labor? if the PDF version is only worth $0.0001 of labor, surely the print version is only worth $10.0001? $10 for the paper and ink etc and $0.0001 for the writer's labor? it's literally the same labor either way? if objects have value equal to how much was put into their creation, how can the writer's labor itself change in value because the other ingredients are worth more or less?
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Nov 6, 2018 14:05
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I hate using PDFs at the table, if I'm forced to use one because a book's not available I literally print it out and staple it together. I use paper character sheets for motherfucking Shadowrun. I don't think you're wrong for preferring physical books, I prefer physical books. I think you're wrong because you think content is worth nothing. maybe try looking at content that isn't your own posts? a computing pun fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Nov 6, 2018 |
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Nov 6, 2018 14:10
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HopperUK posted:'That PDF is worth nothing to me' and 'That PDF is worth nothing period' are two different arguments. I hate gaming from PDFs and love physical books and you are coming off like a real rear end in a top hat in this thread right now. I started on RPGs back in the early 80's so all of my instincts and habits for learning and (to a lesser extent) playing games involve flipping through actual, physical books. Even if I have a PDF, I will end up printing out key sections because it's just way better for my flow. I can use PDF for reference, and once I know how the game works, but I need that page-flipping to get the rules into my old geezer head. But arguing that PDFs actually have zero value? Come on, dude.
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Nov 6, 2018 14:56
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Liquid Communism posted:I would go to a boffer LARP any day and deal with their silly resolution system before I would ever in my life touch a Vampire LARP again. Jesus gently caress I have never encountered a single thing in my life more toxic than White Wolf LARPs. Like 'following the GM into the shitter to talk about your character' levels of obsession, on top of the endemic sexual harassment if not assault of nigh every female player and a fair number of dudes as well. It's becoming increasingly difficult to escape from the influence and culture of the old White Wolf LARPs. Only the most insular of boffer communities don't have some staff members that were originally Vamp Larpers, at least in my experience. Dystopia Rising, the largest boffer larp that I know of, was created by someone heavily engaged in the Vamp Larp community. That may also be a largely a thing in the USA. From what I've heard, the boffer larps in like England have their own, more deeply entrenched, traditions that are more resistant to the Vamp Larp influence. Pope Guilty posted:I have no idea what the bit I've bolded is about- that's a feature of several boffer LARPs I'm aware of (and part of why I'm utterly uninterested in playing any LARP that's run as a business) but I've been playing live-action Vampire for almost twenty years and I've never seen any payment that wasn't for site fees, organization membership, or like convention fees. It's the for-profit boffer games like Dystopia Rising that want to sell you extra XP. It's less directly paying the organization money, and more donating supplies and time in exchange for access to higher tiers of rarity for clans and Thuamaturgy paths and the like. I'm also going entirely off of second-hand anecdotes, so it might A) be entirely wrong and B) not be universal across all of the Vamp Larp organizations. And for sure, for-profit boffer games also run into a lot of toxic community problems, though they tend to express in different ways, and paying for bonus xp is a big issue there.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:21
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Biomute posted:I agree with this, I don't play online though. Your math is real bad, actually. The price for the consumer should take into the amount of product expected to be sold, even if there aren't any per units costs. That's just basic economics. And if the product turns out to be an unexpected success, well, that's the only good part about living under capitalism. Deciding that, once a pdf breaks even, the rest should be free ignore the fact that people have to eat and pay rent, and is ultimately a reflection of a world view driven purely by greed and fygm. Just because you don't like PDFs doesn't mean they don't have value you solipsistic twit.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:25
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Biomute posted:Luckily for them (and me, seeing as I am a software developer) our society does not work like that. By your own logic your work has no value and you should be paid nothing since it's infinitely reproducible off of the first copy and exists only in digital form. What makes your livelihood different than a PDF?
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Nov 6, 2018 15:31
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Meinberg posted:Your math is real bad, actually. The price for the consumer should take into the amount of product expected to be sold, even if there aren't any per units costs. That's just basic economics. And if the product turns out to be an unexpected success, well, that's the only good part about living under capitalism. Deciding that, once a pdf breaks even, the rest should be free ignore the fact that people have to eat and pay rent, and is ultimately a reflection of a world view driven purely by greed and fygm. Just because you don't like PDFs doesn't mean they don't have value you solipsistic twit. Don't confuse price with value. A good is only worth the average amount of labor necessary to produce it, or the socially-necessary labor-time to produce it. Only by happenstance does price align with value; things are sold above or below their value all the time. Still, it is easy to see that as production costs trend towards zero with digital goods, so does their value.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:46
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Kurieg posted:By your own logic your work has no value and you should be paid nothing since it's infinitely reproducible off of the first copy and exists only in digital form. Absolutely nothing.
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Nov 6, 2018 15:47
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This thread’s true purpose is as a honey trap for people who don’t understand basic concepts of economics, labor, and/or production and refuse to do even minimal research to learn about them.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:06
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Biomute posted:Don't confuse price with value. A good is only worth the average amount of labor necessary to produce it, or the socially-necessary labor-time to produce it. Only by happenstance does price align with value; things are sold above or below their value all the time. Still, it is easy to see that as production costs trend towards zero with digital goods, so does their value. this, incidentally, is why the value of a piece of poo poo is based on the expensiveness of the food you eat
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Nov 6, 2018 16:14
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Meinberg posted:It's becoming increasingly difficult to escape from the influence and culture of the old White Wolf LARPs. Only the most insular of boffer communities don't have some staff members that were originally Vamp Larpers, at least in my experience Mostly, we went off into the woods and hit each other hard with padded weapons. It had nothing whatsoever to do with WW. It was basically the antithesis of all of that.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:16
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Oh maybe something else happened in the industry or something else taking a dunk on Wick happened or -- Oh. Might as well stop feeding the troll, folks.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:18
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In addition to everything that's been said, digital versions of games are also super helpful for people with visual disabilities. There will never be a large print copy of even the biggest games in the hobby but I've got my e-reader copy of Monster of the Week that I can change the font size and invert the colors on, my 6x9 PBTA games that I've printed out 8.5x11 so they're more legible and my PDF version of Feng Shui 2 that I can turn off the background layers so that I can highlight it easier.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:28
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Comrade Gorbash posted:This thread’s true purpose is as a honey trap for people who don’t understand basic concepts of economics, labor, and/or production and refuse to do even minimal research to learn about them.
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Nov 6, 2018 16:32
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Comrade Gorbash posted:This thread’s true purpose is as a honey trap for people who don’t understand basic concepts of economics, labor, and/or production and refuse to do even minimal research to learn about them. Nice to see, even with the withering away of grogs.txt, that it still holds 100% true.
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