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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Seeten" data-source="post: 2021931" data-attributes="member: 27186">I must say this: The Massively Multiplayer Online RPG phenomenon is bringing all sorts of people who are potential RPG players, and focusing them in one place. A previous poster cried out about the ways he had lost his group to this phenomenon, I too play World of Warcraft, and City of Heroes before it, but I still find the time to game 3 times a week.Problems that plague the industry(Or perhaps they just plague me): Time. When I was young, we played every day in the summer, for some epic campaigns. Now, We are lucky to find a day each week where everyone is free. We all have wives, children, girlfriends, etc, and there are also movies that play, etc. Basically, the entertainment allotment is smaller, and the amount of things to do is larger.Choice.I can, and have, designed my own systems from the ground up, to do what I wanted for a genre. My group will play diceless, or with rules made up on the spot for what makes sense. This means if a system is rules heavy, it had better be consistent, and if Joe Schmo publishes works for it, they better follow the rules or I wont buy it.  What the industry does not need is yet another take on material done 91 times already.Availability.To be frank, a quick search 5 minutes ago on Kazaa shows about 100 different and unique D20 products available to download. This cannot possibly be helping the industry any more than it helps the music industry sell CD's.Things that I do not consider problems:PDFs.Aside from the piracy angle, my group now brings at least one laptop to every session. We have about 4 gigs of material on that laptop(game related, that is) including all the character sheets in fillable pdf's, etc, and it makes the game truly shine. A sheet that does my accounting for me? WooHoo! Trouble reading a pdf? More convenient for me than a book. I dont have time to read books, I am chained to a computer all the time. I only have time to bring up pdf's in the background.Miniatures and Dungeon Tiles.I want more of these. They add so much. I want good and reasonably priced choices.Not cheap mind you. I might not have the time to play any more, but I certainly have the money.I love the RPG industry, but it doesnt market itself at all, I never heard of half the products available until I signed up for ENWorld, and ENWorld isnt well advertised either. I mean really, its pathetic. How can you expect to sell a volume of product with the type of marketing thats done? Its like preaching to the choir. You need to reach the masses.So in short, we bring laptops to the game already, it isnt 10 years down the road, pdf's are great especially for on the move professionals, and the glut of current material thats basically the same thing needs to stop being produced. If some of the publishers consolidated, we might have less extraneous material, and higher quality material, and more profit to go around. If 10,000 people bought Mongooses Complete Drow, and 10,000 people bought Green Ronins Drow supplement, that could have been 20,000 buying the one or the other, for the same outlay of art, writing, etc.This only makes sense, from a business perspective.</blockquote>

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