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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6264935" data-attributes="member: 4937">But therein lies the problem.  A product that involves such little investment is probably not one you can differentiate and get people to pay for because it doesn't have a lot of added value over getting someone to do it for free or doing it themselves.  Dungeon World as a game model is in my opinion relying on two things - nostalgia and novelty.  Novelty wears off really quickly.  In effect the players go, "Is that all this can do?  Why am I paying for this again?"   Old school players are looking to recapture the feel of games long gone, and if they don't figure out soon that the feel they remember was largely based on novelty, then its likely just nostalgia, friendship and/or a lack of substitution goods keeping the game running.Once again, based on my own 30+ years of experience, I assert that there is a direct relationship between the amount of prep time in a game and the ammount of fun the player of the game has.   Once the novelty wears off, players naturally begin demanding things that require more and more work - more story, more investigation, more puzzles to solve, more novelty, more epic plots, more tactical fights, more consistency, more kingdom management - because very quickly old school dungeon crawling as the sole game element tires and always has quickly grown tiring.   It's just not possible to run a worthwhile game off of no prep for very long.  At this point, I just don't think there is much value in offering people a chance to kill things, take their stuff, and level up.  You've got too many competitors in that market.And if what you are offering me is a chance to kill things, take their stuff, and level up, frankly, I won't be back for a second session and I'll feel like I've been cheated because I too am a product of the potlatch economy and @#$@ it, I expect more than that at this point because I've savored what the game can be like when more is offered than that.You can substitute some of your work for the work of someone else - professional game scenario writers, for example.   But you can't offer as high value product something that has no value put into it.Which just makes me realize that this trend I mentioned above has been going on since the hobbies beginning.In the Beginning, Gygax was running tables of up to 12 or so players 5-6 nights a week.  There was high demand for his product because literally no one had seen anything like it before, and honestly, had he been charging money back then - it would have been paid.   The only way to keep up with demand was to run a specific sort of high play time relative to prep game - the classic persistent Maze-like Mad World Mega-Dungeon near to a Haven game that is the height of old school.  I know how to generate those things, and I could easily build one that would handle that sort of demand indefinately off of relatively little prep - essentially generating more play than could be consumed.But right from the beginning, many people in the hobby got bored with that and started imagining what else you could do with the mechanics of an RPG.   Some of the early flights of imagination attemtped to do EXACTLY what you just said -"20 people who are all vying for their own personal power and glory - making alliances and turning on each other, all while trying to combat some external threat", and you are right - no one wanted to do that for free because they realized it was a full time job.  So the attempt was made at pay for play Play by Mail games.   The problem was, so far as I know, just about every single subscription PbM game of that sort just absolutely floundered, and in many cases failed to ever successfully launch (the 80's equivalent of a failed Kickstarter, I suppose) precisely because the would be professional GMs vastly underestimated the effort required to run such a game.   Imagine trying to run say World of Warcraft as a play by mail game with just one person on your staff.Lots of the early visions collapsed because the work load was too high, or else had to be ported to computer environments ('The Hundred Years War', for example, was an early fairly successful cRPG port of what you just described).</blockquote>

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