@RDC Yeah it's clever but a bit nefarious.
Core box contains a LOT of physical materials. Cards, a game board, books, etc. These usually contain the descriptions of what things do.
The BOOKS are 10x10, so they're square and not easy to photocopy for character sheets. If you try, the sheets are either weirdly distorted or when printed on standard paper have a lot of space at the top or bottom (I got around this by purchasing a journal and turning it into an art project, like a zine for my character).
There are some 3-4 books in the core set that compartmentalize information between the books. There's the "Key", which focuses on character generation and how to spend xp, with references to things like spells, secrets etc that aren't in the KEY book, they're in a book in the core set. In the core set book with spells? There are the names of the spells, but not the descriptions. The descriptions are on the cards in the core set.
The "vislae kit" comes with a copy of the Key and 10x10 character sheets, one for each kind of vislae, and those aren't easily reproduced because few people print on SQUARE paper.
So one of my big issues is this. I don't have any books and I'll be damned if I'm spending $100 on PDFs for a game that I'm not entirely sure that I like. I joined this gaming group after they'd already purchased and received the kickstarter, which included a campaign remotely assisted by Monte Cook himself. This is cool, but was also expensive.
It's hard understanding the game with the hand-out PDF of the key, since the setting, spells, etc aren't in that book. I can't look at the OTHER books because a lot of that stuff contains proprietary information that the GM uses, so my GM has requested we not peek through those books. So a lot of my setting/understanding of the game knowledge kinda gets trickle fed to me by the GM...
...who is also having apparently tons of side-rp and scenes with 2 of the other players.
So I may game with them, and let's say we're all the equivalent of some level "2" type character. I'll come back 2 weeks later and these guys will be all: "Oh! I did downtime stuff and got these spells and this xp and ranked up in my order and investigated a murder", so now I'm the equivalent of a 2.5 level character and they're level 4.
It's a neat game where you can create a lot of custom content and the game is really limited by your imagination, which is COOL, but it's also a MASSIVE risk for people just going all kinds of crazy and spending hours per week obsessing over it while I'm doing stuff like...working, sleeping, hanging out with friends, drinking coffee, getting laid, playing video games.
Anyway, my issues with the group aren't the point. I like to joke about this game as being the white privilege of RPGs, since they've definitely countered any risk of piracy with making it mostly accessible to people with the ability to throw away some 300 per group and an additional 30-50 per player.
