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It's essentially worthless. So few entities are using it that Wizards would have been better off with a confidential set of 1-off licenses. RyanD

Well you're asking several inter-related questions. I'll try to answer as best I can. Remember, I don't have access to unit volume or revenue figures anymore so I have to treat the TRPG business as a black box and do my analysis from the outside. First, I honestly believe that there's no way...

Who Am I & How Did I Get Here? Greetings! It’s been a while since I’ve been an active member of the ENWorld community or actively involved with publishing tabletop RPGs so I may need to make a few introductions. Almost 20 years ago I created one of the first ecommerce businesses, RPG...

Who Is Sitting At Your Table? This might seem like a simple question to answer. Usually, you play with a group of friends whom you’ve come to know quite well. Even if you find yourself in a hastily assembled game at a convention or store, you usually have a lot in common with the other folks you...

The purpose of the OGL was to act as a force for change. In that sense I think it is an unquaified success. It changed the relationship of fans to publishers - any person with an idea could participate in the market if they wished. It changed the relationship of developers to publishers -...

Fates of the One Eye'd Kings Wizards of the Coast I'll call my prediction for Wizards of the Coast a miss. They actually did release a couple of new things in 2007. Keep watching in 2008. Upper Deck I get a hit for this prediction. Essentially everything I suggested would happen has...

For the record, I score myself as follows: Overall, 3 hits, 3 misses, 2 "passes". As prognostication goes, I would not call that a very successful series of predictions. I comfort myself though by knowing that Wizards will likely end up canceling all the new stuff it made in 2007, and that...

Was it really that long? My memory has gone hazy but I thought we got the approved OGL out before the Monster Manual shipped.... Quick google search failed, and my ogl-l archive doesn't go back further than the first of 2001... RyanD

I really appreciate ENWorld support in hosting these discussions. I just don't have time anymore to deal with the routine list admin overhead. I suspect that with 4E coming, and WotC appearing likely to alter their licensing regimes that interest in these topics will increase. Having the...

It worked incredibly well. If you compare the output of TSR from 1989 (2E launch) through 1996, to the same length of time (2000-2007), you'll find WotC published about 10% as many D&D TRPG products as TSR did, yet made roughly the same amount of revenue. Ryan

I have decided not to comment publicly on 4E. The current WotC team has a very hard job ahead of it, and nothing I could say would likely make it easier (regardless of if my comments were positive or negative). I wish them the best of luck; I'm as much a spectator as you are at this point. Ryan

One thing I think people mis-remember is how powerful the internet was in 1999. We had data that showed that a small number, perhaps less than 30% of the market "used the world-wide web" in 1998. Eric's site was like a megaphone: there just weren't that many places to get D&D content, so...

Assume a scale from 1 to 10. That gives us a matrix of 1,000 potential points in the GNS spectrum. We don't have to design 1,000 games, but we could probably design 100 games that would be statistically representative of the whole matrix. "Games" in this case meaning "enough game to be played...

The GNS model is a good model for the taxonomy of RPGs. It can be used fairly accurately to describe almost any RPG, and differentiate it (or identify it) with others. It is a very useful tool. Where the difference of opinion is that I have hard data (that I trust) that shows that player...

My basic prescription for emphasizing the differences between MMORPGs and "Storytelling Games" is: #1 leads to breaking up the GM/Player duality (all participant actions should shape and redefine the game world, not just one persons (the GM) actions. #2 links to the concept of distributed...

I did not believe that they were in 2000. We studied EverQuest and Ultima OnLine extensively, trying to determine to what extent the two modes of play overlapped and directly competed. My conclusion at the time was "not much". We found small amounts of overlapped, and many lapsed TRPG players...

There used to be vastly more people playing TRPGs monthly than playing Magic monthly. In 1999 we estimated the monthly player community at 1.5 million players (for D&D) and about 2-2.5 million players (all TRPGs combined). I believe that total increased from 2000-2003, but I don't have access...

My data is based on public & private sources. For 2006, I estimate the size of the tabletop RPG business (exclusive of miniatures & support products like magazines, dice, etc.) at $17-$20 million (at wholesale). To put that in context, my estimate for the size of the TRPG category in 2001 was...

I was never a fan of that strategy. I wanted eTools to be a suite of software that DMs would use to create content like that found in WotC modules, and players would use to make PCs correctly and quickly, avoiding the problems of complexity. I was a very strong opponent of the idea that eTools...

I have intended to write this novel each year for 15 years. I'll get to it eventually. :) Ryan