Federation Commander

Dear ADB Friends,

What if, to save production time and printing costs, you guys consolidate your future PD releases. Meaning, instead of coming out with separate D20 and Gurps (and eventually MG Traveller and Savage Worlds !) versions of the same books, you produce per new subject one book and place all the game-specific material as annexes. As we have noted, the substantive content of all PD works have about a 80% commonality. With tighter writing and editing, you could even further streamline the game-specific stuff. Well, you'd probably keep separate books for the core PD rules per system, but use this consolidated approach for the Empire-specific sourcebooks.

Cheers,

Gary

Hi Gary,

I am not sure that people would like the results of our combining gaming systems into one book. It would raise the page count and that would mean that we'd have to raise the price for what some folks would consider "a waste of good trees"!

The way it works is this: I edit the "base book", one that no one will see except the key people on the Prime Directive Team. That is the book that will have game-specific data inserted into it. The PD team for each "flavor" of Prime Directive look at the flavor that it is best in. There's no reason for me to have a GURPS specialist try to figure out what on earth the PD20M folks are doing.

The other reason for not doing that is it would mean redoing the Klingon book each time we added a "flavor" and that would be a killer for the stores. Can you imagine the reaction of a retailer who was told "Oh, you know that book you bought last year? Well, your customers are never going to buy it because we just added Savage Worlds rules to it." They'd have our heads and never regularly stock our books, only doing special orders when customers asked.

Does that help explain why we do the books individually?

Jean

Dear Jean,

Thanks for the explanation. Ok, what about this then - issue the base books as basic books without game-specific material, and concurrently release annexes per book as separate publications for the different game systems ?

Cheers,

Gary

The stores don't want it that way, and neither do the players. The players have been VERY clear about that. They want THEIR book for THEIR system, with no other system in it, and with the system data integrated into each page.

Oh ok ! Thanks.