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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...

Here are some possible criteria folks might use to define a "successful" RPG. I don't necessarily agree with all of them or feel that a product must hit all of them to be successful but thought this list might help fuel the discussion. Is there a published physical book or other permanent...

By these criteria, there are no other successful RPGs but D&D? That was actually sort of the point in me asking the question. That last one the public almost certainly has no access to so we can't use that as a measure.

A while back I posted a thread on "What does it take for an RPG to die?". Now I want to flip the question. What does a "successful" RPG look like? With Daggerheart just released, Shadowdark having completed a gangbuster Kickstarter, MCDM's Flee Mortals coming out soon, Dragonbane running their...

I've been running a hybrid 5e game with three D&D 2024 characters, two Level Up Advanced 5e characters, and one D&D 2014 character. The characters are 12th level at this point and we've been doing this since they were about 9th level. I can't much tell the difference in power between them but we...

This is really interesting. This year we have three different RPGs inspired by D&D 4e: 13th age v 2 (I just got the near-final PDFs a couple of days ago), Daggerheart (PDF on my desktop, physical book on the way), and Draw Steel coming out in a few months. All three also have open community...

Thanks for the reply!

I'm running characters from both systems in a single game. It's a little messy at times but it's fine. I talked about it here:

I'm running all of them and they're all compatible.

What was the percentage cut between you and WOTC? If you can't say, was it because you're under an NDA not to disclose the amount? Did you go to them or did they go to you?

It’s not out yet but Kobold Press has a Planescape style book coming soon.

You'd be surprised...

I haven't run as many Kickstarters as @Morrus but all the ones I ran took two to three weeks to get the funds.

For me, a real game changer is recognizing the difference between a fact and a preference. Game X sucks is very different than Game X isn’t for me. “not for me” is a powerful way to recognize that others can still like something even though we don’t. And, of course, instead of having to put...

Thank you! We're going to start looking at providing support to Let's Quest which is an honest-to-god 501c3 for this sort of thing: https://www.letsquestafterschool.org

We all have our way of prep, of course. I’ve spent a lot of time digging into prep and find my own eight step method to work well for me in lots of systems. I was interested to find out that it’s as easy for me to prep a D&D 2024 and Tales of the Valiant game as it is a Shadowdark or Numenera...