D20 MODERN Magazine!

[Vigilance]

Right it was part of the RPGA membership, but it was a seperate magazine, covering Greyhawk and the d20 System in general. It was there that I first learned of ENWorld in fact.

But to the best of my knowledge it never went away. It just moved.

And when it was moved to the backup of Dungeon, I began receiving that.

My point still stands, it wouldnt have survived as a seperate magazine, or else it wouldnt have been a membership benefit, and it wouldnt have been a backup.

See Im not just talking out of my *** I know how the whole thing went down cause I was there on the subscriber level

Chuck

 

[Dark Psion]

Well, as I said above, I think that crowd is going to find its selection of dead tree newspapers and magazines slowly dwindling to almost nothing, if "holding it in your hand" does not include a palm pilot.

I just don't think dead tree magazines and newspapers are that viable anymore. There's so many entertainment choices, that you can't command enough market share.

Entertainment magazines are affected by this fracturing of marketshare as 3 TV stations has become 300, and why read a newspaper and accept its bias when you can find a blog you trust that presents news YOU are interested in.

This I have to disagree with. There are many, many people who have never turned on a computer in their lives. The store I work at just upgraded their registers last month to scaning UPCs for example and I get a lot of people looking in wonder when I get them information from the internet. Even my boss didn't know what Amazon.com was till I showed her.

There are still many people who read papers, magazines and other print items. Entertainment mags are not a very good example. Most look exactly alike and TV Guide is failing because it no longer has hardly any TV listings in it.

Why don't they stop printing Hardcover RPG books if pdfs are cheeper? Because people want that book in their hands. I'll bet a lot of the pdf crowd still prints out their pdfs after buying them. One of the biggest complaints during the "DRM" crisis was that people couldn't take them to Kinkos to be printed and bound.


Maybe someone can come up with a "Print on Demand" option for pdf. magazines?

 

[Ranger REG]

Oh Lords, if I had the money to turn MODERNIZED into a print venture. I think looking back on the "failure" of Polyhedron as proof of the unviability of a d20 Modern magazine is somewhat flawed. Using Polyhedron, a mini-magazine attached to another, very different magazine, was a pitiful attempt at testing the waters. With aggressive marketing and confident investment, I believe a d20 Modern magazine could go far. I don't think there's any way for Wizards to do it, however, as WotC would have to perform a major gearshift and start paying more attention (in terms of products, support, etc) to the d20 Modern game than they are now. Honestly, since the 3rd party market is left with the job of supporting d20 Modern (and has been doing a better one of it, in my humble opinion), then it is the 3rd party market we should look to for a d20 Modern periodical. The Modern Dispatch is a great step towards this. Hopefully the day will come when one of the big 3rd party d20 Modern supporters has enough capital and enough hutspah to create a print periodical for d20 Modern.

Damn right it's flawed. You expect Dung readers to accept such a thing, pay full price for half the magazine that are of most interest to them?

Ranger REG... I somehow think your abbreviation of Dungeon, and the word it coincides with, is deliberate.

Oh, my!

I made a faux pas. I hope I don't slightly OFFEND the interested party.

 

[Ranger REG]

Except that wasn't what happened. Poly started out as a seperate magazine that couldnt sustain itself. Pairing it with Dungeon was a last ditch effort to keep the magazine around.

Poly started off as a newsletter for RPGA, when they were accepting annual fees from members.

Unfortunately I must conclude that there isnt enough of an audience to support a modern print magazine.

Sighs. You got a valid point.

I am also of the opinion that MOST (as in virtually all) magazines and news papers will shift to being electronic enterprises over the next 10 years.

Sighs. I'm all for high tech, but I still too old-fashioned and still too attached to literally pen-n-paper.

 

[Vigilance]

This I have to disagree with. There are many, many people who have never turned on a computer in their lives. The store I work at just upgraded their registers last month to scaning UPCs for example and I get a lot of people looking in wonder when I get them information from the internet. Even my boss didn't know what Amazon.com was till I showed her.

Its not going to be a matter of choice, and I do not contend that virtual newspapers and magazines will have anywhere near the readership (at first) as conventional magazines.

Why do I say it wont be by choice?

Look at newspaper and magazine readership. Its going down. The interests of Americans are so divided by all the different options we have for news, information and entertainment (internet, print media of various kinds, broadcast television, cable television) that very few magazines have a broad enough audience to to sustain themselves.

This is also happening in newspapers. It used to be even small cities had two and three newspapers. Then that dropped to one newspaper. Now many city newspapers have a few reporters to cover local events, with the vast majority of their news coming from larger organizations like the New York Times and the AP.

Sometimes even THAT isnt enough and two nearby cities will SHARE a paper.

Im not saying its going to happen necessarily overnight, and Im not saying it wont result in less readership (as a matter of fact the less readership has come first- magazines and newspapers are folding because they are being read in smaller numbers). Im saying these are the trends that I see and this is the direction I see print magazines and newspapers heading.

 

[Vigilance]

Poly started off as a newsletter for RPGA, when they were accepting annual fees from members.

Correct, that's what I meant when I said started off as a seperate entity. Didnt mean to imply you could just go buy it, but since I had a subscription to it I always just thought of it as a magazine regardless of the fact that I couldn't go BUY it

Sighs. I'm all for high tech, but I still too old-fashioned and still too attached to literally pen-n-paper.

I never said I *liked* that fact. I miss my Poly mags something fierce.

Heck in a perfect world, Id like to still get my PYRAMID magazine in the mail too. But there werent enough me's to keep Pyramid or Poly in circulation.

And I must, unfortunately also conclude that a print d20 Modern magazine would fair poorly as well.

 

[kingpaul]

And I must, unfortunately also conclude that a print d20 Modern magazine would fair poorly as well.

What about collecting a year's worth of Dispatch and printing it? Do you think that would sell? Or is Dispatch to eclectic of a mix to probably fair well?

 

[Vigilance]

What about collecting a year's worth of Dispatch and printing it? Do you think that would sell? Or is Dispatch to eclectic of a mix to probably fair well?

I think it would sell ok. The question I'd ask myself is A) would it sell better than a similarly-sized sourcebook that I could print for the same price (imo the answer is no) and B) would the people asking for a monthly print magazine consider their request filled by a one-off publication (I think again the answer is no).

Chuck

 

[Vigilance]

There are still many people who read papers, magazines and other print items. Entertainment mags are not a very good example. Most look exactly alike and TV Guide is failing because it no longer has hardly any TV listings in it.

I really have to revisit this again because I think you haven't thought through what you're saying here.

People adopt technology at different rates and for different reasons. We all know this, we see it everyday in our lives and our work.

Some people are "early adopters". They want all the new gadgets right now, even though they are essentially paying (in some cases a lot) to be Beta testers. God love em, they make things easy on the rest of us.

Some are luddites. They just don't like that new fangled stuff. I had a neighbor who was mad when the phone company essentially took his rotary phone away. The old one worked fine.

In the middle is the vast mass of the rest of us, we make technology decisions on a case by case basis powered by our values and individual circumstance.

For example, I do not currently own a car. I know how to drive and have owned a car for a good portion of my life. But when I started writing full time, which meant I was working from home, the expense of a car didn't add up.

If you knew me, you would know someone who "still doesn't drive a car". Would this be a statement on the efficiency, economic viability and/or prevalence of the car? I don't think so.

Similarly people who are slow to adopt electronic media, or who never will, either because they are simply luddites, or because they have privacy/security concerns or maybe they just find (like me with the car) that a computer and net connection is a meaningless expense
in no way reflect on the fact that over time more and more reading material will be provided electronically and more and more of that reading material will be provided no other way.

For now that's an easy choice to make. We're still in the "horse and buggy" phase of electronic media.

There's still plenty of print media available (we'll call this the equivalent of roads that are not too congested with cars to make riding a horse into town unsafe).

The electronic medium is still in its infancy and thus is often less attractive than print books due to a lack of selection and/or lack or hardware to make them as portable as they could be (we'll call this the low speed/hard to get fuel part of the equation).

But over time, those who don't adopt a powerful technology will limit themselves.

When cars were new, you could still ride a horse, and most things were localized enough that it was easy to get by without one. Then roads became so congested that riding a horse became unsafe in the city, and finally illegal. Then cities began to spread out and become larger, and longer commutes became a way of life for many people.

This doesn't mean that some people won't put up with the extra time it takes to walk or ride a bike or use the bus for some reason. But because they choose not to use a technology, that also doesn't mean that technology won't become increasingly prevalent.

Chuck

 

[Roudi]

While we're on the topic of Modern publications...

MODERNIZED has once again made an open call for submissions (the full details can be found here). MODERNIZED is a e-zine that has been enjoyed by over 3000 gamers to date. Personally, some of the best articles in MODERNIZED have come from ENWorlders: Frankto's Torture rules in issue #1, Masada's "Modern Mortem" vampires and Warlord Ralts' "Powell Main Battle Hovertank" in issue #2 rank among my favourites. I know there is a lot of talent present just among the posters in this thread; I would really like to see some of you show off your work in the pages of MODERNIZED.

So maybe a print d20 magazine won't happen anytime soon. As far as I'm concerned, MODERNIZED and the Modern Dispatch are the next best things. It's a hell of a time to be a Modern gamer.