Printing, and the continued life of game shops

Okay, here's my rant on local, physical, game shops.

My home town has had a Challenge Games (Games Workshop, and Paintball), and a home run place called Mad Hatter's House of Games for several years now. I got started with the Star Trek CCG as a middle school student at "Hatter's", occasionally bought Battletech stuff there, and generally went there for gaming events (few and far between).

My brother spent a lot of time at "Challenge" because of warhammer fantasy... and I swing by there from time to time while I'm at the mall.

Now, with Paizo, and RPGNow, and other sites... I order lots of stuff online... it's cheaper, you typically get more stuff (pdf's to go with your dead tree copy), and I don't have to either write a paper check or run my debt card through one of those old carbon-copy card swiper things. (Yeah, Hatter's still uses one, and the credit card companies still accept them... scare's the **** out of me honestly... that thing makes 3 copies one you get, one goes to the c-card company, and one the store keeps, more than once I've seen a bunch of them just dumped in the trash... no shredding, whole carbon copies of peoples c-cards or debit cards in the trash...)

Lots of better off stores are complaining about the online shopping, but to be honest, my friend "prillo" ordered his 4rd edition battletech boxed set through the mail, from a catalog that came with his new copy of Mechwarrior 3 that he ordered online back in '98. Then there's bookstores, sure once upon a time finding a gaming book in a bookstore was unnatural. Now, not so much, Hastings has them, and we just had a new Barnes&Noble open in my hometown (the old one was getting a little small for the traffic), and they currently have a better selection in 4th edition DND than either actual gaming store in town. Other options have been with us for 11 years now... and longer if you count mail orders through catalogs... so why are they complaining now?

I think it's because a lot of them are like Hatter's, they've waited to long to make the way they do business to keep up. They've done it to themselves. But what could they have done differently?

I donno... I'm not gonna speculate either. I know what I'd offer if creating a gaming store from scratch now... but 10 years ago, I'd probably have made the same mistakes... but 10 years ago I was a high school student.

But that's mostly ranting... I said I'd talk about printing, and gaming stores continued life. Well, I think they're gonna go hand in hand.

Recently while working on my own setting, I had a pendrive on me, it had a copy of one of the maps I was working on... saved to be printed at 13x19 (I'm considering a new printer), and I was just finished eating with some of my buddies when I realized I was standing in front of a Kinkos-Fedex store.

I went in, planning on printing the map. First, I asked if they could print 13x19... the answer was "only on our plotters, which are charged by the square foot" and that was expensive... I was thinking about 10 prints, and the math came out to about half as much as a 13x19 borderless printer I've been eying from HP... no thanks...

"But you can print 11x17 at our self service station." I jumped on this... I went over, plopped down, and stuck my debit card in the thing to charge me by the minute for use of the pc to do the printing. 1 test print, plus a few extra prints, I'll be out of here on a buck and a half. Boy was that wrong.

First, it takes the pc a while to recognizance my pen drive, then I find that the printer that prints 11x17 doesn't do it unless you hand load the paper into the manual feed tray... no big extra minute.

Then I can't get the pc to realize that the manual feed tray is set for 11x17 paper, even though the printer knows it's got 11x17 in it. I ask for assistance guy comes looks at the printer, says "It should work fine" and leaves the room. Doesn't even give me a chance to explain my problem or even bother to look at the computer with me.

So, I've now spent 3.43 on some completely worthless computer use time. I kill the login session... go to ask for a refund, or maybe some help... and all I get is "sorry".

Now, 3.43 isn't going to break me, but that's got to be the absolute least effective way I've ever spent anything, including the time that I bought things and then left them at the register at walmart, because at least that was my fault.

So how do I think physical game stores should counter loss of sales to big bookstores and online sites. Among several other services, I think they should invest 500-600 bucks in a good model 13x19 borderless color printer, paper, some laminating hardware and materials... and offer to print custom and legitimately purchased electronic maps in house. It won't turn things around instantly, and it won't do it alone to be sure, but I know I'd spend lots more time at either Hatter's or Challenge if I could get some of this stuff printed. I'm not the only one either, and I live in a "little" town when it comes to gaming. There are cities with lots more gamers, of all types (including custom campaign setting builders) who'd use it.

I'll probably come back to this, as there are some "services" a gaming store could provide to make this even more attractive to the pen and paper gamer. (Can't afford a copy of Campaign Cartographer... come set on our pc for the afternoon... 5 bucks to use the pc, plus 10% off anything you print today) I just need to get back to work.

So what say you?

Pathfinder Advanced Players Guide Playtest

Okay, so paizo's gonna play test 6 new classes for the APG... and the first two are appearently ready... so grab them here.

I've read through them... Cavalier looks like it'll make an awesome knight-like character... and Oracle's gonna be great. Bone Oracle's are gonna creep the crap out of people as major NPCs... and the others are just all kinds of fun. I'm thinking of actually using Bone Oracle for the avatar of a deity in my setting attempting to return to power. Many of the things in Bone Oracle look a lot like what I was going to try and find some way to do anyway... and the abilities all sound better thought out than what I had in mind for the first play test.

Why do I have to title these anyway

Seriously... mostly I'm just rambling.

Anywho... Haven't worked much on the realm sheet. I've been focused on maps... maps that are frustrating me beyond saving... I like the land masses I've got... but getting down to a one or two kingdom scale on the map has proven that somethings simply aren't meshing logically.

I don't think I'm gonna be throwing that much away to backup... but I'm considering wiping the political boarders off until I've got all of the terrain figured out.

I've not heard back from Sarah Stone on the character sketches... so I'm looking around for others. The local possible artist is swamped, and honestly still not shown me anything impressive... oh well.

All of this kinda sucks, because I thought I was going to have something ready soon, but if my maps don't make any sense... and I have no character sketches... not really all that good for handing to someone else to play.

On a side note... Hawke from www.rptools.net got me a google wave invite. I'm playing with it, but not getting anywhere. I'll see where things go with it over time.

More work going on

Well I've done a lot more on the Realm sheet. I'm finding a few things frustrating, but it looks like I will have a fillable pdf that prints well.

Also, working on my campaign setting a lot... I have an adventure outline for a 1-5 for two or 1-3 for four or more flushed out. I've recontacted some artists, and I've made some larger steps towards a well detailed region for the adventure in mind.

I also finished my brothers Pathfinder Mystic Theurge Lich for his game. The spell list visits WoTC's Book of Vile Darkness 3.5 for a few undead only spells, but I'll be removing them if I ever post the character.

Also, if there is anyone who pays attention to this blog... I have a question that needs to be answered.

Should a creature that has a above average (say 50%) of becoming undead instead of simply dying increase its CR? Especially if the transition takes a d4 hours? I'm thinking it's actually a separate encounter, but it is a creature people tend to gather up the corpse of for materials for potions and or magic items. Comments welcome!

Now for something completely off topic... I've rediscovered Mathemagician's DND Stuff, and finding it handy. So I thought I'd publicly thank him for it.

And now for something different... Mozilla labs is working on a project called Raindrop I want to play with. I think it'll be really nice if they do it right, Thunderbird has really been a disappointment compared to Firefox, and perhaps a re-thinking was in order.

Holloween Gaming, Kubuntu

I got to run some Krenna stuff with the sibling and one of his friends this weekend. It was a pickup game, but let me bounce some things off them and see if they enjoyed it. It was a good step towards smoothing out the opening adventure I intend to put out for the public. I should have something very soon...

Also, I've upgraded the laptop and the virtual machine at work to Kubuntu 9.10... It's definitely an improvement. Faster boot, less bugs, it auto-updated installed software, and generally easier to deal with. The new Ubuntu One was showing promise but is currently down. Oh well.

I think I'm gonna work on a village map, and finish up some stuff about a particular animal... then start putting things together.