Recent content by Haffrung

While it’s nice to see the success of old classics revived by Goodman Games, can there be any more doubt that collectors drive much of the RPG market today? Massive 250+ page hardbacks containing three or four different versions of the once 32 page modules are the farthest thing from a practical...

“You don’t know what that spells is.” That’s it. In my worlds, the magic system is not mechanistic and transparent. There are no magic schools or comprehensive catalogues of spells. Monsters and NPCs may well have access to strange spells and effects that are unknown to the PCs.

No. I’m at the stage in my life where ease of running the game at the table trumps pretty much all other considerations. The pros of fully-stated NPCs are far outweighed by the work and hassle involved. An NPC only needs as much detail as will be useful in its interactions with the PCs, which...

Bought the Holmes set after reading an article in my mom’s People magazine about Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons. It absolutely blew my 9-year-old mind, but I couldn’t make head or tails of it as a game. My most powerful memory of the books (aside from the classic Holmes box cover) is the...

Chaosium does it too. Call of Cthulhu and Runequest adventures are incredibly bloated with backstory and other content with no utility at the table. But it doesn’t seem to hurt their business. I’d wager even more of their adventures than WotC are read but never played, so they’re just responding...

They may know who. I doubt they know why. Unless they’ve done another massive playtest and survey like the one they did for Next.

Yes. But I hope WotC doesn’t fall into the trap of regarding people who are highly engaged on social media as representative of the player base as a whole. Few of the people I’ve gamed with over the years are active on forums, twitter, etc. And they’re largely oblivious to the controversies that...

4e gave us the first D&D rulebooks that looked like they had an instructional designer - or really anyone with modern layout experience - involved in their design. I hadn’t given any thought to playing 4e until I picked up an Essentials book at my FLGS and had an enthusiastic jolt of this looks...

Because they are. I’ve seen insiders discussing the customers who read but don’t play bandy around the figure of 50 per cent. And those are buyers who aren’t actively gaming at all, not gamers who have bought a book and haven’t gotten around to using it yet. Look at Paizo. The foundation of...

Immersion is one of those terms that seems to mean very different things to different people. To me, it means the real world dissolving and the game world taking its place. And in my game worlds, combat with nameless horrors is not a cooly deliberative endeavour. It’s desperate, wild, and...

I expect that would just result in the middle tier losing market share to the 3rd tier. Given kickstarter, desktop publishing tools, and the ready availability of freelancers to provide art and layout, independent publishers can publish RPG material of a comparable calibre to middle-tier...

How do you propose to stop independent creators who have no need to earn a living at it from publishing RPG material?

And if that means every RPG publisher except WotC closes up shop? Again, it’s not a given that there’s a viable market for RPG books priced at a level that supports secure middle-class livelihoods for creators. Maybe Morrus can give us an update in a year or so and tell us if Advanced 5th...

As a player, my sense of immersion is dispelled if I know or control the game world beyond what my PC knows and controls. I don’t want to peek behind the curtain or pull levers - I want the illusion to feel real.

The assumption around these cases always seems to be that ownership makes heaps of profit off the business and this sort of action will just mean they’ll make a little less. But the truth is these types of creative boutique businesses typically operate on the margins of profitability, and it...