Are we on the cusp of a Tabletop Hollywood moment?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Lovecraft Country is about racism in the 50s (and doesn't actually involve Lovecraft).

Eh, it does, but it's not Cthulhu Mythos. The characters both interact with pulp and genre fiction and experience it, including a very Lovecraftian cult throughout the series.

For the record, the book is much, much better, although some of the performances on the show were excellent.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Blades in the Dark has been optioned for a television series. I'm not sure if it's actively in development right now.

There's definitely potential there, but there's also plenty of potential for it to be a cheapo fantasy series like so many others are.

While BitD cries out to be treated like the Wire or the Sopranos, I think anything better than the Wheel of Time will have to be counted as a major win.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Charlaine Harris hits the urban fantasy, mystery, and romance buttons, folks. Nobody should be surprised to hear she was successful before the TV show.

Her books are the reason that seemingly every female writer I know also has a side hustle writing self-published books about brilliant women having sex with werewolves, etc.

The woman effectively created a whole genre. It existed before her, but paranormal romance pre-Sookie Stackhouse and post-Sookie Stackhouse are practically different planets. Horny, horny planets.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think we need to consider a difference in comparing novel audiences to game audiences. To me, 37 million copies of a 13-book series says an audience of maybe 3 to 5 million (assuming most of them bought all the books). 10 million game titles might represent 1 million unique buyers (a total guesstimate), but most buyers would be GMs, which would have players, so the total audience would grow to maybe 4 to 5 million.

Nah, by the end of the 1990s, White Wolf was pretty openly creating books for people who read their books, rather than played them. The two camps were bitterly at war on use.net, with the readers insisting that WWGS cater to them exclusively and, for the most part, were listened to, as the books got less and less balanced and well-designed as time went on and WWGS even killed off the entire WoD for the sake of the story. (And then spent 20 years trying to recover their audience after doing so.)

There's no correlation we can infer between how many WoD books were sold and how many people were playing, because many (maybe even most) of the people buying the books never ran a single game.

 

[Reynard]

Nah, by the end of the 1990s, White Wolf was pretty openly creating books for people who read their books, rather than played them. The two camps were bitterly at war on use.net, with the readers insisting that WWGS cater to them exclusively and, for the most part, were listened to, as the books got less and less balanced and well-designed as time went on and WWGS even killed off the entire WoD for the sake of the story. (And then spent 20 years trying to recover their audience after doing so.)

There's no correlation we can infer between how many WoD books were sold and how many people were playing, because many (maybe even most) of the people buying the books never ran a single game.

Even Paizo admitted to creating content to be read rather than necessarily played with the APs. They knew their customers couldn't run all those APs but designed them to be read in a way that kept folks invested -- and therefore subscribed -- for years. I had James Jacobs tell me that straight out on a thread on the Paizo forums when I was arguing for a more utilitarian layout of the APs.

Which, incidentally, I am STILL waiting for. From everyone. It's a rule book, man, not a novel. Give me the info! Ahem. Sorry.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Some of us will go to our graves wishing for a table-first presentation of RPGs that likely won't ever be the norm.

 

[RivetGeekWil]

How is that material to the discussion?

It went something like this:

You: Which one would Hollywood pick? The built in audience for the best selling novels or the game
Me: The audience for the game was bigger (unspoken: at the time. because there was no audience for the novels).

 

[overgeeked]

Some of us will go to our graves wishing for a table-first presentation of RPGs that likely won't ever be the norm.

They were in 4E and they are in a lot of the OSR.

 

[Ryujin]

It went something like this:

You: Which one would Hollywood pick? The built in audience for the best selling novels or the game
Me: The audience for the game was bigger (unspoken: at the time. because there was no audience for the novels).

That's a stretch, but whatever.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

They were in 4E and they are in a lot of the OSR.

I openly lust after The Monster Overhaul. There's no question that it would be my go-to monster book if I ever switched to running an OSR system.