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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DarkKestral" data-source="post: 4198524" data-attributes="member: 40100">Cards are not a substitute for dice. That is correct. But card-based play done well is possible. It has different requirements, and different strengths, but it is possible. I'd say Dragnlance SAGA system and Marvel RPG Superheroes tanked becuase they were bad, not because they were cards-based and didn't have a good reason for being cards-based. There have been widely successful cards based systems, after all.White Wolf's MET for nWoD is fairly popular in it's field, though to be fair, it's a LARP system, and the reason it's cards-based is that most LARPing is difficult to do with dice. Original Deadlands did quite well, and was originally a cards-based system and fairly early, as far as things go. It had a poker-based mechanic that worked well with the "Weird West" style of world that was it's setting. It even did well enough to eventually spawn its own progeny, though I'm sure the reason they had to move away from the original Deadlands poker-based mechanic was because the mechanic was too tied to the Deadlands flavor to be generalized well to a wider array of genres.Then I question the quality of your local stores. My local big box bookstores carry M&M or Hero. So do the gaming stores. How is it that the smaller gaming shops manage to stay in business? Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders offer WotC and White Wolf products almost all of the time, and are typically the cheapest places to go for those books, so staying solely within the D&D sphere sounds like a way to lose one's shirt.Yeah, at this time, WotC and White Wolf are essentially a duopoly in terms of sales to mass-market bookstores. But frankly, that is because D&D and Vampire were widely popular fads at one point, so they had clout and got extra boosts of popularity at a point in their careers that have made them "bankable" for major bookstores. So yeah, they won't compete at the same level. But HERO is apparently popular enough that the biggest Superhero MMO designer, Cryptic Studios has decided that their next game will be HERO based. And don't forget the spate of comic book properties being turned into blockbuster movies in general. If a property does well enough, big box retailers will pick it up.</blockquote>

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