Alzrius said:
I could not disagree more.
Frankly speaking, I have no use for, and could not use, articles on RPGs such as Rolemaster, GURPS, World of Darkness, et al. To me, those parts of the magazine would just be wasted space.
Yes, you
could use them, if you wanted to--that's my point. Now, that you choose not to is your perogative. I had a subscription to Dragon for well over a decade, and during most of that period, it nominally supported all RPGs. Yes, the vast majority of articles were for (A)D&D, but i think every issue had at least one article for something else--and some were as much as 35%, or maybe even 50%, non-D&D. And i used almost every RPG article in there, regardless of the system it was written for. The article about the dragon behind the scenes in ShadowRun? Borrowed some of the political elements. The deck plans of the Princess Ark? Used them for a regular ship. New mutation rules for Gamma World? Turned them into psionics. And so on. My useability rate for non-D&D articles was as high or higher than for D&D articles, and the only game i was playing was AD&D(1, then 2). RPGs are all so damn similar that it is trivial to port from one to another, if you want to. And the underlying elements (plots, personalities, etc.) are even more portable. And given that even the D&D articles were probably, at best, 2/3rds useable to me (almost anything with a Forgotten Realms label, frex, i probably couldn't use without significant alteration, due to either setting ties or power level), i don't see the big deal. This thread alone demonstrates that the magazine isn't currently producing 100% useable content for any given consumer, so i think it's a false negative to claim that content statted for another system would significantly reduce the magazines value. Right now you have, say, 65% content useable as-is, 25% useable with modifications, and 10% unuseable (or, at least, not gonna be used), for any given gamer. When i was only playing AD&D, and Dragon covered whatever RPG it felt like, i got similar results. And i wasn't "trying": i didn't go out of my way to find uses, in order to justify the cost of the magazine, or maximize my investment, or any such thing. They just jumped out at me. The only articles that i never found a use for, even when i tried? Computer game & miniature articles. I even got some game use out of some of the book reviews and fiction (stole a couple plots and NPCs). If i were gonna narrow the focus, it'd be to ditch fiction, and non-RPG-related articles. But keep RPG reviews.
d20 games are already a niche market (within the niche market of tabletop RPGs), and trying to sell magazines to that crowd is difficult as it is (since not all of any market buys magazines on the subject). Trying to sell a magazine that appeals to more than one such market at a time is a recipe for disaster, since people tend to see what is lost more than what is gained.
Yes, there are gamers out there who play more than one RPG system, but the way it breaks down is that almost no one would play all the games that such a generic RPG magazine would cover, meaning everyone would have some part of it that was useless to them. Given that, people would quickly lose interest, as no one wants to pay (over and over again) for a product that you can't use all of - or worse, only use a tiny portion of.
I'm not claiming that anyone plays all the systems. I'm claiming that it doesn't matter if you play the system in order to find the article useful.
The best thing to do is what Paizo is doing: appeal to a single target group with no deviation. That way you at least know who your audience is. Trying to appeal to multiple groups simultaneously is murky at best, especially since, as a general rule, gamers tend to fractionalize along lines of what game they play. If Paizo tried to please everyone, they'd end up pleasing no one.
I strongly disagree--look at the popularity of Arcane, to this day. Now, you can't base an ad campaign around "the perfect D&D resource" and then expect people to be happy if it covers multiple games. But if you base your reputation around maximal utility, rather than specialization, you might be able to pull it off. I don't think anyone expects every single article in Newsweek, or Cosmopolitan, or Reader's Digest, or Discover to be interesting to them, but they still buy them.
Moreover, once you start down the narrow specialization road, it's never ending. If your stated goal is to be a narrowly-focused resource, then people will expect you to meet their needs perfectly or not at all (or, at least, in proportion to their interest in thefocus). It sounds like Dragon has already functionally narrowed from "D&D" to "feats'n'PrC-R-Us" (or at least is well on the way there), which is already losing readers. Will an even more crunch-heavy focus make those who are currently happy with it happier, or pick up new readers? Will it make up for those it drives away? Alternately, could they have a better magazine, more appealing to more people, if the content were, say, 2/3rds D&D crunch, and the rest a mixture of non-crunchy articles and articles aimed at different systems?
Now, maybe they couldn't, because of the peculiar demographics of the RPG market: if, say, 20% of all RPG players are sufficiently partisan to not even be willing to look at an article for another system, it would seem like a win to go with diversification. But, when you figure the huge marketshare that D&D has, it might be that gaining that extra 20% of D&D players is more people than the 80% of everything else that you lose. Plus, of course, it'd take a *lot* of effort to get those who don't play D&D at all to even give Dragon a look, since it's made such a big deal out of being exclusively D&D for several years now, so there might be no going back at this point.
