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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LightPhoenix" data-source="post: 1391258" data-attributes="member: 115">I think something that we're all overlooking here is the fact that we are indeed a minority, not a majority.  We're very involved in the d20/OGL community simply by posting on these boards, let alone actually discussing such things as how to make a good magazine.  While this is pure speculation, I would bet that Joe Average 3E player hasn't even heard of a lot of the d20/OGL stuff out there, or even how d20 is connected to 3E.  Sure, products are out on the shelves, but that doesn't necessarily translate into people making the connections, or even looking at the books at all. At first, I was really surprised that there weren't more EZines out there that offered adventures and supplementary material.  But again, something I took for granted is that I knew what ENWorld was, despite it being one of the biggest 3E fansites out there.  If even 50% of gamers knew what ENWorld was, then even less are going to know where to go to get things like PDFs and EZines.  And I'm high-balling the percentage, based on the current number of users and the number joining every day here.  Another aspect I easily overlooked is that writers need to get paid - a free EZine doesn't allow for that.  Putting together adventures is pretty difficult, and when you balance that against a job, a family, their own games... it's tough to work that in there for money, let alone for free.  The EZine approach doesn't work then on either the paid or free level - the former doesn't get enough attention to make it viable to compete dollar-wise with a print magazine, and the latter doesn't get enough support from writers, for very good reasons. I think Dungeon/Polyhedron would work better if it was simply all adventures, and little else.  The problem as it stands now, and Paizo knows this too, is that you can't have a 50/50 split without half of the magazine being for the most part worthless to the 3E players.  Which is really the issue - not with those people that play both 3E and other d20 stuff, and not with the non-3E d20 players, because they're in the minority.  Personally I would love to see D/P be something like three 3E adventures, and then three Spycraft/Star Wars/d20 Modern/Mutants & Masterminds adventures.  But I'm, again, in the minority - most of the fan base plays 3E and only dips into the rest - and thus they're the more important faction. One final small point... I have doubts about Paizo's claim that Dungeon wouldn't sell well enough on its own.  I don't have the numbers, but I would guess that D/P is mainly being bought by 3E players, simply because they're a larger fanbase.  And frankly, I think the number of people playing only non-3E d20 systems is rather low.  So I don't think the merge was truly to save Dungeon, but rather to salvage Polyhedron until the other games took off more.  In fact, I think if they got rid of Poly altogther, the impact would be pretty minor, relatively speaking.</blockquote>

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