burntwire brothers wrote:According to Goodman Games website it states all you have to do is show up to recieve the free adventures. I plan on printing a copy and showing it to the store manager. Hope this will persuade them to do the right thing.

Now that's both intelligent and uber-collector-geeky.    However, I have no power to enforce whatever I print out.  And why do I, the customer, need to tell the stores how this promotion works?

I think that Badmike's and my frustration with the Lone Star Comics chain is that they don't know WTF they are doing.  Is this stuff free to everyone or not?  If I have to spend time to get it, then it's not free and certainly not available to everyone.

I have bought a chunk of Mongoose Slayer's Guides and five DCC modules from Lone Star in the past year, and within the last week I bought a $32 board game.  I buy miscellaneous cool crappe from them.  I purchase maybe $30 of comics a month (holy crap, that's about $30 more than I should be buying).  If I take my pitifully small RPG/comics budget elsewhere, Lone Star won't notice, but maybe the other game store will.

jamesmishler wrote: And then the e-mails I get... it's just... too much.

Wait until Saturday hits . . .  

Hell, yeah, I want my free goodies.  But I'm not going to blame the publishers if I don't get any.

Assuming that the publishers don't get soured by the blowback from tomorrow, next year's Free RPG Day will run much smoother with more promotion and a better set of ground rules.  Ummm . . . were there any rules for this year other than "Free"?  

Gus Landt wrote:Well, I got my copy of DCC 51.5 on Wednesday.  A friend of mine owns a store doing the free rgp day thing, and when the box came in, he pulled a copy for me (which I promptly ran to his store to pick up)  

I only got the one copy though.  I'd prefer the other copies go to people who don't currently buy the DCC modules, but might after being exposed to one.  

I figured most of the "Free" product will go to store employees and friends of the store owners. Hope I don't waste all of my Saturday running around the whole state in search of something that the general public doesn't have a chanceof getting.

At least we will be visiting many Hobby stores that I have never visited before. Hopefully we will be able to score something, either a freebee or some cool OOP items.

I called our local Hobby Shop today and asked if they were participating and they had never heard anything . They have 4 stores around the state and the only store listed on the Free RPG is the Bloomington one. The other local gaming store isn't participating either.

The goal of Free RPG Day as stated by Impressions was to get "lapsed" RPG players interested in gaming again.

My personal goal with participating in Free RPG Day was to get word out about the Wilderlands of High Adventure and Castles & Crusades to as many people as possible, new gamers or old, RPG players or not.

As editor of a magazine and a website, I earn my living based on advertising (I've also worked in advertising, marketing, and public relations in this industry for more than a decade... yeah, you might see why I'm cynical and bitter at times).

As far as RPGs go, this is one of the best ways to advertise. You actually get a sample of your product in players hands. Hopefully, they will actually play with the product. Ideally, they will enjoy it and desire more products of the same sort.

Whether it will work... I dunno. The market right now is so fractured, and the economy stinking so badly, I have no idea if it will work, and if it does, how well it will work.

I gotta say I'm real nervous about who is actually going to get these products... if they simply disappear into store employee/owner hands for sale on eBay, that would suck big time. If that happens extensively, there's no way in hell I'll participate next year, success or no, unless the retailers are paying for the products...

jamesmishler wrote:I gotta say I'm real nervous about who is actually going to get these products... if they simply disappear into store employee/owner hands for sale on eBay, that would suck big time. If that happens extensively, there's no way in hell I'll participate next year, success or no, unless the retailers are paying for the products...

As a store owner and a collector, I will admit I did skim off the top for my collection and then I used some to bribe a friend to run a game in store tomorrow, but I still have 65 items to give away.

jamesmishler wrote:The goal of Free RPG Day as stated by Impressions was to get "lapsed" RPG players interested in gaming again.

My personal goal with participating in Free RPG Day was to get word out about the Wilderlands of High Adventure and Castles & Crusades to as many people as possible, new gamers or old, RPG players or not.

As editor of a magazine and a website, I earn my living based on advertising (I've also worked in advertising, marketing, and public relations in this industry for more than a decade... yeah, you might see why I'm cynical and bitter at times).

As far as RPGs go, this is one of the best ways to advertise. You actually get a sample of your product in players hands. Hopefully, they will actually play with the product. Ideally, they will enjoy it and desire more products of the same sort.

Whether it will work... I dunno. The market right now is so fractured, and the economy stinking so badly, I have no idea if it will work, and if it does, how well it will work.

I gotta say I'm real nervous about who is actually going to get these products... if they simply disappear into store employee/owner hands for sale on eBay, that would suck big time. If that happens extensively, there's no way in hell I'll participate next year, success or no, unless the retailers are paying for the products...

For the record I think it's a great idea.  Whether or not the stores plan to do their part isn't really something the publisher can control.  IMO, and this is just me, a possible solution would be to devalue the worth of any such free game item to the point that "hoarding" copies for online sales, say, would not be effective.  Doing this would require either printing tons of copies to flood the market, or releasing the items as free pdfs the day after.  
 Anytime a "collectible" is released in a limited quantity under specific conditions, there is a type of mentality that takes over...seen with Beanie Babies, for example.  
  C&C seems like a really, really cool product. I really hope this takes off.  I know I'll be buying most of the supplements.

Mike B.

I'm with the group that thinks this is a great idea. A publisher cannot help if a gaming store owner doesn't promote the event, or stashes ALL the goodies for resale on ebay, or is an idiot and shoots himself in the foot. But eventually, the free market will take care of this, and bozo X will go out of business.

(While there might be some bad apples that take advantage of the free RPG day publishers, they are, IMHO, the exceptions.)

It would behoove us as customers to note that the publishers are all taking an finanacial hit to do a favor to the stores and the customers. You think James has money to drop on 10,000 copies of his wilderlands city?

Heck no. That's money out of his pocket, and, in this day and age, we should all be disabused of the idea that most RPG publishers have money to burn. This is true of most the publishers in the free rpg day group (with perhaps the exception of White Wolf).

They all are owner operated, with the owners taking a hit by providing free product, in the hopes that it might aid game stores' chances of survival in the age of the internet.

And finally, it would behoove the publishers, IMHO, to recognize that any these disaffected posts are just from players who desperately want your product. We might not have said it in that way, but if we're pissed that we can't find random copy of product X, it is just because we love your line so much.

So, thank you, James and Co., and please do Free RPG day again next year, and if possible, find a way to make it bigger.

First post. First rant. Not a good omen of things to come.

jamesmishler wrote:I gotta say I'm real nervous about who is actually going to get these products... if they simply disappear into store employee/owner hands for sale on eBay, that would suck big time.

If this does happen again next year, perhaps all of the products could be shipped to a single publisher and then shrinkwrapped or securely bagged as sets so that all of the swag is given out to a customer.   If I can get only one or a few pieces per store, then I'll have the DCC module and the Castles and Crusades rules and not much else.  

I'll STFU since I am commenting from ignorance and the peanut gallery . . .

James, you and the others have cojones to get involved with this endeavor.  Now the RPG community will have a single data point (better than nothing) with which to gauge future promotions.