07.2024 Critical Hit Products Announcement

Publisher/Date:
Critical Hit (2021+)

Country of Origin:
United States

This website includes write-ups and evaluations of Critical Hit products from 1994 through part of 2021.  However, going forward, Desperation Morale will generally not include write-ups of future Critical Hit products.

There are several reasons for this:

1. Because of the expense of Critical Hit products, including the constant revising and re-releasing of older products, the purchasing of Critical Hit products for write-up purposes became the single-biggest yearly expense of maintaining this site.  This site gets no free “review” copies from Critical Hit (for the record, it has only ever gotten a handful of review copies total from the entire ASL community over the past 20+ years).
2. The revising and re-releasing of older products under different names, as well as the renaming and recycling older scenarios into new products, also became a detective game of analysis to find out how much of many releases were actually new and original, as well as what the differences were from version to version. This took too much time for too little reward.
3. Critical Hit’s website is so poorly organized (and the products on it are so poorly described) and its weekly e-mailers are so rambling and incomprehensible that often even understanding what and where the new releases are becomes a frustrating endeavor.
4. Critical Hit often announces products for sale long before they are completed, so purchasing a product does not necessarily mean one will get it. As of this writing (July 2024), Desperation Morale is still waiting on three products ordered in 2020–and there is still no sign that the products will ever come out.
5. For some years, Critical Hit has not been naming playtesters on most of its products and it is not clear that most are actually being playtested in a meaningful sense.
6. Many Critical Hit products do not get a lot of play in the ASL community compared to those of other publishers, as can be seen by looking at the ROAR and ASL Scenario Archive websites.

This announcement should not be taken as a blanket ban on all future Critical Hit products being written up on this site. Exceptions may possibly be made from time to time, especially if a future new and original product actually includes evidence of playtesting.  But, generally speaking, this site will not include write-ups of Critical Hit products from 2021 onwards. It is a huge expense in time and money. Apologies to those people who depended on Desperation Morale to help people sift through the endless renaming, recycling and re-releasing of Critical Hit products.  But, honestly, your gaming dollars are better spent elsewhere, anyway.

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