d20 bubble bust?- High Prices, too many books

[MerricB]

Before d20 there were a lot of great non-d20 RPGs released that survived and aquired a large fan base: Vampire (and the rest of the World of Darkness), Deadlands, Ars Magica, Shadowrun, etc. Now I think this is 10 time more difficult.

An alternative explanation (and one offered above in different terms) is that each of these games appeals to a different portion of the RPG fanbase... and then that portion doesn't need a new game produced.

So, AD&D starts by serving the needs of the majority of the fanbase, then Vampire gets a section of the remainder, then Shadowrun likewise, etc.

By the time you reach 2000, most of the fanbase is served by a RPG. A new RPG has to break people from their existing game, or capture some of those who haven't settled on their One True Game.

Cheers!

 

[woodelf]

To quote Theodore Sturgeon, "Ninety percent of everything is crap."

Crap falls, the cream (hopefully) rises to the top.

and, luckily for us, 90% of everything RPG is D20 System. So, don't buy anything D20 System, and you won't buy any crap.

Oh, wait, i guess it's not quite that easy.

Seriously, i'd actually argue that D20 System at first (well, once the market really started to grow, so after the first 6mo or so) was worse than Sturgeon's law--that a smaller %age of D20 System products were not-crap, than of RPG products in general. I think all we're seeing now is people recognizing that, and getting sick of gambling on new stuff without a proven (company or author) track record, which is what's weeding out some of the crap. I think Ryan's being overly optimistic to think that D20 System is going to beat Sturgeon's Law any moreso than RPGs in general do. But i think it's slowly swinging up to meet it, and we're approaching the point where only 90% of D20 System stuff is crap.

 

[woodelf]

in my view, starting about a year ago maybe, d20 started its rebirth and its going strong...

i have a good amount of d20 money slated for spending in the next 6 months and a lot of it is going to green ronin.

basically, we have moved away from then "how many different flavors od dnd" and now we are seeing games which take more radical departures, both in rules and settings and themes, and who deliver with quality.

I more or less agree with you. I find it a bit frustrating that the distribution chain seems to be getting burned out on D20 System just as good stuff is finally starting to reliably appear. I've seen more D20 System stuff that sounds good to me announced for the next year than has appeared in the past 4 combined. And for me, too, it's precisely because things are deviating further from the D&D3E baseline. I don't need to buy minor variations of D&D--i'll just invent them myself. If i need a new feat for a character concept, i'll write it up. The further it is from something i already have, the more interesting it is to me.

Now, to be truthful, i am buying a lot less WOTC stuff, but then i did not jump on 3.5, so they lost me there.

And here we see one of the economic factors that really frustrates me. WotC has the D&D name, so their sales are pretty much guaranteed. I honestly feel that if they had to play on the same field as everyone else (i.e., either they didn't have the D&D name, or anybody could use it), WotC'd actually be one of the companies cutting back production. Not failing, but definitely hurting: their products aren't crap, generally, but neither are they the cream of the crop. IMHO, they are consistently middle-of-the-pack.

 

[woodelf]

That isn't hurting the industry - it is helping the industry. It is creating a strong economic incentive to produce "non crap" or go out of business. Customers are a harsh taskmaster. They are very unforgiving. You don't get to screw them very often before they cease being your customer, and getting a lapsed customer back is horrifically hard and expensive. There will be a payoff for everyone after this spell of economic Darwinism has run its course in the form of more responsive companies with a better ability to meet customers needs.

I think that the days of 30-40 new products a month are almost over. And I hope, because of the unique effects of the OGL, that the ratio of "non crap" to "crap" will shift upwards as the total number of releases declines. Even a move to 20% "non crap" would have a big impact, in my opinion - the number of monthly releases could be cut in half, and we'd still have the benefits of 36 to 48 "non crap" products a year.

Ryan (if you're still reading this thread) or anyone else, why should the WotC OGL produce a better crap/non-crap ratio than in general? I'd think that, if anything, what we're currently seeing (at or below the Sturgeon Ratio) is to be expected from an open-content license. Sure, open-content development makes it easier to realize good ideas, but it also makes it easier to realize bad ideas. I'd think that the good ideas made it to print in any case (with or without an ogl), and the barriers to entry were more of a barrier for crap. So i'd expect that lowering everyone's barriers to entry would have a disproportionately positive impact on crappy products, increasing their numbers more than it increases the numbers of good products. Or am i missing something here?

 

[RyanD]

Ryan (if you're still reading this thread) or anyone else, why should the WotC OGL produce a better crap/non-crap ratio than in general?

As a student in general of the concept of open gaming, I think you probably already know what my answer will be.

The OGL acts to increase the efficiency of the transmission of ideas in game design. In fact, it increases the efficiency of that transmission almost all the way to 100%. Weird, wonderful things happen as efficiencies approach perfection that can't and don't happen when there is even minor friction in the system.

When a "good idea" appears, that good idea can spread to as many new products in which that idea is appropriate, without any limitation caused by a need for permission, approval, or review. That means that publishers have no good argument for not using such "good ideas" and instead using a "less good" idea of their own invention. Consumers, once educated to this fact, will start to impact the market by either rewarding or punishing publishers (by purchasing or not purchasing) the work they produce based on how well that publisher is maximizing the value of the total shared base of "good ideas".

We've just gone through two transition periods in the OGL/D20 market, and both improved things, in my opinion.

Phase One was the initial period following the publication of the OGL and the SRD. I liken Phase One to a whole bunch of people who have told themselves for years "I could do that" when looking at TSR/WotC releases actually being given permission to try. The result was an absolute explosion of pent-up demand for "the right to try". Some good, mostly bad, but at least very, very diverse.

Phase Two was the period we are now emerging from, when the pent-up demand was mostly spent. The people who were left were the people who really did intend to try and make "publishing games" a part of their life, something they would do either as art or industry, but would do to the best of their ability. Of course, that period also produced some good, and mostly bad products, because even with the "will" to do things right, good game design is a lot harder than it looks, and doing good work turns out to be as much a function of sheer hard work and attention to detail as any other professional occupation requires.

Phase Three is where we are now. In Phase Three, the people who sieved out of Phase One ("pent-up demand") who really intend to keep trying, were forged in the fires of Phase Two ("learning to be professionals"), and now we're in Phase Three, which I define as "honing the craft". The number of people doing OGL/D20 design "for a living" is now probably 100x the number who were doing it "for a living" in 1999. The result is that more creativity and innovation is being applied to the game system all at once than in any time in the game's history. The result should be a sprial of upward quality as these people learn from each other, feed on each other's ideas, take the best that is available and re-use it, and try to make their new innovations match the quality level of the stuff they are re-using.

If I could draw a graph of unit volume, I would graph a high point in the twelve months after 3E launched, as the "pent-up demand" people met an audience enraptured by the idea that all these people were actually doing it. From the middle of of 2001 to the end of 2003, that graph would slowly show declining sales each month as purchasers got tired of buying stuff just to watch the show, and started to concentrate dollars on stuff they felt likely to be of high quality. My hope is that from this point forward until the next Phase, the graph will show an upward direction, as the increasing quality of the products available induces people to buy them, and with each purchase, get more confident that the work they're buying is good, and thus feel more willing to buy the next thing as well.

 

[woodelf]

I got really burned on the 3.5 updates. Half of my collection had to be retired to the place I keep my 2e books. And I know that Mongoose has really alienated me by bringing out the Quint updates. Heck, they did not even have books for all the base classes before they updated the Quint fighter, and not we have Quint II, so on and so forth.

You seem to be a bit contradictory here. Why did you have to "retire" half your collection? Because you don't consider D&D3E-compatible books sufficiently compatible with D&D3.5E. Yet you're complaining when a company updates their books to be D&D3.5E-compatible. If they'd continued the Quintessential series as 3E-compatible after 3.5E came out, you'd be complaining that they're publishing books you can't use. If you consider 3E and 3.5E incompatible, then you can't really complain at people updating books designed with the former in mind so that they work with the latter. And if you don't consider them incompatible, then why'd you "have to" retire all those 3E-compatible books?

 

[woodelf]

...Oversaturated. That's a good way to put it, whoever beat me to it.

The big problem? In my opinion? OGL

That's right, the Open Gaming License. I found two different d20 Modern Martial Arts handbooks, and they were both essentially the same, just reworded to avoid plagarism. I bought neither.

The problem with OGL is the same thing that's good about it: Anyone can publish anything d20 without special dispensation from WotC. Specific stipulations within the OGL 1.0a (as I understand it, you lawyers out there feel free to correct me) allow the reprinting of ANY RULE, but not any sort of original creative subject matter...such as the name of the feat, spell, item, etc. The result is, not purely by coincedence, the same thing can get published with a different "flavor" a dozen times, and anyone can reprint anyone else's rules material. So, take "Fireball" and call it "Blast of Flaming Doom" and viola! a "new spell!" Same stats and everything, but, oh! the name is DIFFERENT!!

Not really true. Anything that is OGC may be reprinted. Anything that is not, may not (except to the degree allowed by Fair Use and other exceptions to copyright and trademark restrictions). Also, anything "derivative of" OGC must also be OGC. So that's where you get the general division you're observing from: the vast majority of WotC OGL-released products are D20 System. And WotC started the trend of splitting things that way by releasing all of their rules as OGC, but absolutely none of the flavor text. However, there's nothing stopping you from releasing fluff as OGC (we'll be doing it with Four Colors al Fresco, Green Ronin did it with Freeport). And there's nothing stopping you from keeping your crunch as closed, provided said crunch is not derivative of material that is OGC. [Now, arguments can be made that anything that is D20 System-compatible is "derivative" of the D20SRD and must itself be OGC, and they might be right. But "derivative" is a fairly nebulous term, undefined in the license itself, and with a spectrum of meanings outside the license. So i won't rule out wholesale a perfectly legal D20 System product with non-OGC crunch.]

Also, as for widget names, you've hit on one of the ongoing debates about the use of OGC and PI. Generally speaking a widget which is OGC but whose label is not is what is referred to as "crippled" OGC, because, while you can reuse it, you are forced to rename it, so the reuse is non-obvious, and sources can't easily be tracked. Furthermore, in some cases, renaming can be tricky, if the original name that was not released is fairly generic ("shadow weapon" was an example spell name of this sort, IIRC).

 

[woodelf]

I think the Harry Potter RPG is an unfair example. This RPG would be riding on the success of its books and motion picture success. Most people buying it would be Potter fans as opposed to RPG enthusiasts.

So I ask: What non-d20 RPGs have been released since d20 -- and that are not based on a major motion picture -- and have survived in the market?

And if D20 System hadn't had the success of the D&D brandname to ride on, where would it be today? In the world of RPGs, i'd say the D&D tie-in is at least as powerful as a major motion picture tie-in.

 

[woodelf]

It's not too different than most computer manufacturers having to use Intel processors or go out of business. Between Intel's branding and their MDF, it is pretty difficult for other CPU manufacturers to get traction unless there is some substantial economic benefit.

There's one huge difference. If i sell a computer that can't run existing software, people literally can't use the computer until some software exists. There's no such thing as an "incompatible" RPG in the sense that there are incompatible computers--RPGs don't even reach the level of incompatibility of two word processors for the same OS. Any two RPGs are perfectly interoperable, because they use the same "operating system" (human mind) and the same language (English, at least in the US). Two RPGs are, generally speaking, more like The GImP and Photoshop than like a Wintel computer and a Mac: they operate on the same basic data bits, they just do it a little bit differently. Genre and setting are *much* bigger obstacles to interoperability between RPG books than system, with a few exceptions (things that actually *are* different, like Everway, Over the Edge, Hero Quest, or Story Engine).

 

[Sir Whiskers]

When a "good idea" appears, that good idea can spread to as many new products in which that idea is appropriate, without any limitation caused by a need for permission, approval, or review. That means that publishers have no good argument for not using such "good ideas" and instead using a "less good" idea of their own invention. Consumers, once educated to this fact, will start to impact the market by either rewarding or punishing publishers (by purchasing or not purchasing) the work they produce based on how well that publisher is maximizing the value of the total shared base of "good ideas".

While this seems good in theory, in practice there is almost no sharing between publishers. Partly this is due to "crippled OGL's" and other such mechanisms that some publishers employ to make re-using their material as difficult as possible. Partly this is due to no central repository to facilitate re-use of these "good ideas". Mostly I suspect that writers and designers tend to steal ideas, but not actual implementations, meaning we still get slightly different rules: different wound point, spell point, item creation, etc. systems. Another example: how many different variant rangers did we see pre-3.5? While the idea of changing the ranger class was widespread, no one variant acquired universal appeal.

From the buyer's perspective, this often leads to the situation mentioned earlier in this thread, where WOTC has the only material viewed as "official". Anything else (even from major publishers such as Malhavoc) is used by a very small fraction of the d20 community.