Charles Ryan on Adventures

[The Shaman]

It doesn't matter how good your product is, if you don't have a market to sell to.

It's called "creating demand."

Any damn fool can sell ice in Arabia, but it takes talent to sell it in Siberia.

Awhile back Mr. Dancey weighed in with the opinion, echoed here by Mr. Mearls, that publishers "split the market" by offering alternatives to, instead of support for, Dungeons and Dragons. It appears to me that the other companies are saying, "Splitting the market is how we sell books and meet the needs of gamers that you've ignored or turned off. Moreover, we're going to offer something that gamers didn't know they wanted in the first place and make it so cool that they can't resist picking it up." Apprently this strategy is successful enough for the companies publishing these alternative fantasy games to keep doing it.

As a business strategy, going straight at your competitors instead of nibbling around the edges can be a good idea. Not everyone wants to buy the same thing, and these other publishers are going after that market, exploiting the wedge of gamers who want something other than Dungeons and Dragons and creating buzz around their product that entices folks to check it out.

Will D&D always be the largest selling name in the business? Probably. Does that mean that the only successful business strategy is to sell product in support of it? I don't think so.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to see a guy in Irkutsk about some ice...

 

[King of Old School]

PDFs support like 5,000 people...maybe.

Do you really mean to imply that 5,000 people is an insignificant subset of the Freeport fanbase (or the fanbase of any non-Wizards line)? That doesn't jibe with my understanding of industry economics in 2005, where 5,000 is a reasonably successful print run for a supplement not published by the top two companies.

KoOS

 

[Rasyr]

Awhile back Mr. Dancey weighed in with the opinion, echoed here by Mr. Mearls, that publishers "split the market" by offering alternatives to, instead of support for, Dungeons and Dragons.

Which is hilarious since Mr. Mearls helped to split the market with Iron Heroes.

As a business strategy, going straight at your competitors instead of nibbling around the edges can be a good idea. Not everyone wants to buy the same thing, and these other publishers are going after that market, exploiting the wedge of gamers who want something other than Dungeons and Dragons and creating buzz around their product that entices folks to check it out.

Note that this does not apply solely to the d20 market, but to the entire rpg market, as evidenced by GURPS, HERO, RM, HARP, Palladium, the Omni System, Unisystem, etc...

Will D&D always be the largest selling name in the business? Probably. Does that mean that the only successful business strategy is to sell product in support of it? I don't think so.

Many other companies don't think so either (see response to previous paragrapgh).

 

[Akrasia]

Which is hilarious since Mr. Mearls helped to split the market with Iron Heroes.
....

Well, to be fair, I suspect that Mike Mearls would consider IH akin to AU/AE -- an alternative PHB that can be used on its own, or 'plundered' for ideas for a 3e D&D game.

(However, if this is true of IH, I don't see why it's not also true for fantasy OGL games like Conan or even C&C.)

 

[The Shaman]

(However, if this is true of I[ron]H[eroes], I don't see why it's not also true for fantasy OGL games like Conan or even C&C.)

*PING!*

So why do Messrs. Mearls and Ryan see this as a bad thing?

 

[MerricB]

It's worth considering how well these games fit into the existing framework.

If you replace the PHB with Iron Heroes, does your Monster Manual become obsolete? I suspect not - the power levels are on the same level.

However, can the same be said about Conan?

Cheers!

 

[Michael Tree]

I'd wager a guess that 90% of all gamers don't even know that PDF's exist in any meaningful sense. Support that only reaches a tiny fraction of the market is very close to no support.

I'd wager a guess that 90% of all games don't even bother looking at non-WotC books in any meanigful sense.

Adventures are not profitable. Adventures that can only be bought by a small subset of all potential customers (ie. adventures that are only useful to buyers who own and are using a particular setting or supplement) are likely even less profitable. Given large financial risk with poor potential profits, adventure supplements aren't viable in print, so complaining that they doesn't exist is fruitless. What would you rather have, no support whatsoever, or support in pdf?

 

[The Shaman]

It's worth considering how well these games fit into the existing framework.

Hrrm. There seems to be a fair amount of broken (or at least cracked or chipped) stuff published for D&D even by those publishers writing specifically for the game (and that includes WotC), so I'm not sure that I agree with your premise here.

 

[Akrasia]

It's worth considering how well these games fit into the existing framework.

If you replace the PHB with Iron Heroes, does your Monster Manual become obsolete? I suspect not - the power levels are on the same level.

However, can the same be said about Conan?

Cheers!

To answer your question: the same can be said about Conan. (You will not be able use the CR system anymore, but you can definitely still use the MM. Of course, 'monsters' are much rarer in Conan.)

Similarly, you can use the MM with C&C. And probably most other fantasy OGL games.

It might be true that it is slightly easier to use the MM with IH than Conan (simply because IH tries to maintain the usefulness of the CR system) -- but not so much as to place IH in a separate category.

 

[Wraith Form]

sourcebooks of the sort we already make (and make better than anyone else).

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Oh, that's rich! Those WotCs, they're so funny!