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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Juxtapozbliss" data-source="post: 9234682" data-attributes="member: 7042149">Uninformed...but pretty reasonable guesses. My general opinions are pretty much in line with these. As much as I like Kobold Press, I have a hard time envisioning Tales of the Valiant taking over many tables. I've been introducing my players to new rules ever since the OGL fiasco, but it takes me a while to get up to speed on them well enough that I feel comfortable running them. So far, I've only actually run two other systems beyond 5e--Shadow of the Demon Lord and very recently Blade Runner RPG. One of my players plays another campaign of Pathfinder, but the rest of us are not ready to dive into that. I think one big factor for us is...we're perfectly happy with 5e for a high fantasy. Even though we all don't "love" WOTC or Hasbro, we don't have much motivation to switch rule systems that are 5e adjacent. If we're going to switch, I think we all mostly feel we want to switch genres. Hence Blade Runner. I'll probably try to run Aliens next. I'm trying to get a superhero (Champions) campaign started with them, but we just don't have the time to get together frequently enough to adopt multiple campaigns. There's bandwidth for GMs to learn and bandwidth to actually schedule and play. Adopting new systems and investing in the time (and cost) is not a no-brainer.I agree with many of the critiques of the flubs in the article. But I think one aspect of what he is trying to say is not so much about the community but is about the business or companies producing TTRPG material. As Mike Shea is fond of saying, we can all keep playing with the rules we already own or that are released in the commons. But how many companies can sustain themselves producing new material? The industry side is appearing to become more fragmented so how many companies can thrive in that context? Producing physical books is very expensive. Even producing quality PDFs is expensive. Both affected by commissioning great art and having strong writing and storytelling. Whether you are producing an adventure or a supplement or a whole new rule set, to do quality work takes a lot of time, energy and money. It's arguable pricing of books is too low to pay a decent living to the folks who contributed. Producing books and selling to a smaller pool makes paying your staff difficult. Freelancers are mostly underpaid as it is. So the question is more around how sustainable running these businesses will be that we want to be healthy. Folks also assume that Kickstarters are going to succeed for these companies. They could flop too, there's no guarantee they will do well enough to pay for themselves. The actual profit is much lower after costs. I just saw a Kickstarter for a pair of well-known Youtubers fail to meet its goalPerhaps the future of these small businesses will be producing everything via crowdfunding followed by a Patreon style program of continuously generated content for pay. Just spitballing here, there may be new business models required in a more fragmented industry. On the other hand, some companies with a strong niche have been able to sustain with independent systems--the aforementioned SotDL from Schwalb Entertainment. I'm personally in favor of diversification, but that doesn't necessarily lead to sustaining businesses. Perhaps like Retreater hypothesizes, many of these medium size companies will squat back on 5e when 2024 5e settles. Time will tell, but I think the key point that I do agree with from the original article is that selling books to a smaller pool of people is harder than selling to a larger pool around 5e. It can succeed but in a tough business, it's increasing the Difficulty Class of success.</blockquote>

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