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I'm not caught up on the whole thread and someone else might have mentioned it, but I'm now a huge fan of Doom Points from Tales of the Valiant. Doom points and luck have changed all of my 5e games for the better. As a disclaimer, after doing a video and article about them, Kobold Press...

where was I eager?

"was" is an interesting word here and part of something I learned in this thread. "Success" is a moving spectrum. Games may be successful for a very short bit and then fall off.

I think that can be a valuable conclusion to arrive to and is also part of the point of discussing what makes an RPG die and what makes an RPG successful in one's mind. It re-establishes our baselines so we're not constantly calling an RPG a failure if it doesn't dethrone D&D or an RPG dead even...

I can still purchase past copies in PDF. I have a full collection of every version of D&D on my hard drive. I have a bunch of physical ones and I think a lot of them are available POD.

I think being tied to a bigger IP is actually a risk since the IP holder can pull the license and remove it from publication. I bet there are a list of games like those that disappeared.

confusion == beautiful independent thoughts and shared ideas. We don't have to come up with a consensus. What does it mean to you is just as valid (even if few share such an opinion, like the only successful RPG is D&D...).

Is there an opportunity for someone to purchase it and run it themselves? That's sort of why I have that qualification myself. It cant be a successful game,in my mind, if I can't buy a copy.

Remember, I wrote down one’s that were on the edge of successful or not. Games that clearly are successful, like Shadowdark, don’t need to be on that list.

I think the total was more copies than that. More like 60k?

That's actually part of the design of the question! I want to see the variance in people's views on this.

Yep! Like I said, it's far from a complete list. Just some games that might be on the threshold?

how many are playing it?

so I gave my longer list but now I'll narrow down based on these excellent conversations on what I think would tell me a game is "successful" which might mean "healthy" or whatever. I can actually buy it and own it (PDF or print). I hear people talking about it and talking about actually...

Incorrect. https://alphastream.org/index.php/2023/07/08/pathfinder-never-outsold-4e-dd-icymi/

I know this is sort of the thing I focus on but I think having an open license and open reference document that other creators can build off of after you're dead and gone is one way to make something more likely to be successful long-term.

Not at all! My goal was to bring up the conversation because I knew there were people out there who benchmark every RPG against D&D -- which is an impossible benchmark to make. So now we get to recognize the fallacy of that idea and find out what actually makes a successful RPG. Alphastream did...

Yeah. I wonder if it helps to look at RPGs that are on the lower line of success. We know Shadowdark is successful. Time also changes success. Is the original 13th Age successful now? I'd argue it was successful in the years after it came out. I played it at conventions. They had a lot of great...

You and I are in a different boat than most. For me, I'm asking RPG enthusiasts and GMs what makes it successful to them. So I'm not quite as interested in success from the company's point of view, although I think that leads to the other downstream measures of success (continued first party...

D&D's sales data isn't on DriveThruRPG (because they don't sell PDFs....) NPD data is all over the place these days. It's what led to that whole idea that WOTC only sold four thousand copies of the 2024 PHB. Morrus responded better than I about the idea of only measuring success against D&D...