Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs

[MerricB]

More than a few years ago.

We have a new version of WFRP out now, that appears to be doing quite well by all reports. GURPS 4e also appears to be doing quite well. According to Nephew, Ars Magica 5e is thriving. And now Mongoose is planning to publish a new version of Runequest (the main rival to D&D back in the day).

I'm no "industry insider", but the range of non-d20 options seems much healthier now than merely two years ago.

I guess I would think that the "lowest level possible" would be lower than what is available now. But that's just my interpretation.

Ask yourself how much of the redesigned systems are due in large part to the competition that 3e has created? When you have substantial redesign of GURPS, WFRP and Storyteller, that indicates that there is a real pressure for getting those games as good as they can be.

Having a strong d20 System really makes people think: Do we want to use d20? There is now a choice for both players and designers that, in the old days, was "I want to use AD&D for the system but I can't because of copyright laws, so I'll publish Palladium (or any one of another of D&D copies)".

Such can still happen today, but because of the OGL, you can explicitly use parts of the d20 system and thus have people already familiar with it.

Cheers!

 

[Turjan]

You might be right about this. And I'm certainly no "industry insider".

But WFRP 2e seems to be doing reasonably well. A new version of Runequest wil be coming out soon. Ars Magica 5e is a success (acc. to Atlas president John Nephew). So not everything looks bleak in the non-d20 world.

WFRP with GW in the background is a worthy contender, that's right. It's good when you know upfront that you have a sufficient fanbase when you design a game and, not to forget, a publisher with deep pockets of money .

The newest version of Runequest will come next year, and we will see whether it's worth the effort, given the fact that D&D3.x/d20 have already plundered some of its strongest parts. I'm really very curious here how different from d20 it will be .

For games like Ars Magica, I'd say that even when the word success is used, it still means that it's a niche game; I suppose that the sales expectations are not too high from the very beginning on.

 

[John Morrow]

I suspect you're right about it being a style difference. The decisions aren't absolutely equivalent, but I think I see the differences as significantly smaller than you and some of the other people on this thread. From my POV, the things that 3.x D&D asks a DM to "make up" about the game world are at least as significant as whether an NPC has a good reaction to my PC or how hard it is to jump a 10ft pit. The fact that all game systems that involve a DM/GM/CK/etc. ask the referee to create and adjudicate the fantasy world at some level (and as a result, trust that the referee will do a good enough job of it to make the game fun) seems more significant to me than how much guidance in terms of hard numbers the rules actually give that person. It seems to me the difference is only really significant from the referee's side and that, for players, the difference is more qualitative (what kind of judgement calls the DM is making) rather than quantitative (how much the DM's judgement comes into
play).

I think the difference can only be understood looking at how decisions are made.

First, if the GM puts a 20 foot chasm in the setting for the purpose of providing a specific level of challenge (as opposed to putting it there for setting-based or incidental reasons), then there won't be much of a difference between the GM putting the element into the setting and the GM deciding the difficulty because they are really the same decision. Not every GM puts elements into the game that way.

Second, the GM will inevitably include incidental elements in the setting and if the players decide to use them, objective rules allow them to make certain assumptions about incidental elements. As a totally hypothetical example, if my PC visits an NPC crime kingpin in his 3rd floor office with a large glass picture window behind his desk. The NPC's lackey pulls a gun so I decide that my PC will hurl himself at the window and take the chance that he'll survive the glass and the fall. If the game has rules for breaking through a window and falling, no GM interpretation is really necessary because the scene has already been set, even if the GM didn't anticipate that move. Now it's entirely possible that the GM could have already decided that the window is bullet-proof or could decide that on the spot, causing the action to fail, but it makes a difference (that some players can and do detect) whether the GM makes that call for world-based reasons (a crime kingpin wouldn't sit with his back to a big window
unless it was bullet-proof) instead of story-based reasons (the GM wants the PC to be captured by the kingpins thugs for some plot purpose -- perhaps to put the PC in a giant Frosty-Freeze or something).

I think that's exactly my point. The pre-packaged AOR makes the process go faster for your group, who are already pretty adept at finding a common AOR anyway. That's exactly what I would expect - and one of the great strengths of rules heavier games.

Fair enough. I don't play with socially disfunctional groups or players (as illustrated in the thread about throwing people out of games) so I tend to assume at least some basis ability to communicate between the participants.

I would say all RPGs require the group to reach some level of consensus. If a group is bad at that, I expect them to be bad at it no matter what kind of game they are playing. IME, the rules-heavy systems CAN help by giving a pre-established base-line, but they can also hinder by giving players a sense that the rules are going to do the work of reaching consensus for them. If a group has a difficult time with communication in the first place, playing a rules-heavy game can simply be an excuse not to communicate about their expectations AT ALL, leading to the same types of problems they experienced with a rules-lite game.

In convention games, I've seen the rules provide a common AOR despite the players not knowing each other and doing a minimum of talking. I'll agree that this might not be idea, but I do think it can make the difference between a group being able to role-play together or not.

I'm not saying it can't help, just that it's not a guarantee.

I'm not talking about guarantees. I'm talking about improving the odds of success. I think that when people don't know what to do or can't find common ground, rules and structure can at least create a functional situation. Software development methodologies don't guarantee that a software project will succeed but they can often help a bunch of software developers who can't just work together do production work. Yeah, those methodologies also all have a cost and all have their problems but they can tell people what to do to move ahead when they can't figure out how to move ahead on their own. That's what rules are for. They tell you what to do when you can't work it out on your own.

Here you're trying to put me back in the position of defending rules-lite vs. rules-heavy. I'm certainly not saying that RPGs are somehow better or more fun or more playable the fewer rules they have. How complex a system to use is a matter of taste, for GM and players.

Agreed.

To put it in concrete terms, let's say a rules-lite system covers 10% of the possible decisions a GM might have to make about the world while playing the game and a rules-heavy game covers 60%. I honestly can't see a qualitative difference between a game where I'm frustrated by 40% of the GM's decisions and a game where I'm frustrated by 90% of the GM's decisions. Both would leave me miserable and wanting not to participate in the game.

Well, I disagree. Part of Ryan Dancey's point was that every role-player spends some percentage of their role-playing frustrated by something not going smoothly in the game. And I think the quantitative percentage of time that a player is frustrated can have a very real qualitative effect on how much the players enjoy the game, especially if the shift is from 40% (most decisions not frustrating) to 90% (the vast majority frustrating). Sure, 40% is a lot worse than 10% or even 0% but it's a lot better than 90% and not everyone has the opportunity to find a perfect group or game.

Likewise, I suspect if another GM ran a game where the 40% of decisions left in his care were resolved in a way that I enjoyed and trusted, that if that number were expanded to 90%, I'd still be enjoying myself - because obviously the GM and I are pretty much on the same page as far as expectations about the game. YMMV.

The possibility that you are skipping is that you might be happy with the 40% of the decisions that the GM is trusted with in a rule-heavy game but might be unhappy with that extra 50% that will likely involve different aspects of the game. Again, not all decisions are the same, though some styles of play make the differences more important than others.

The ideal level of rules for a particular group would leave those decisions up to the GM that the group is happy leaving up to the GM and would provide procedures to handle those situations that are either handled better by the rules or badly by the GM. And that level, of course, will differ from group to group with no one right answer.

 

[RyanD]

The fatal flaw with this 'strategy' is that it assumes that 3e D&D (or, more generally, d20) can accommodate everything that different gamers want from their RPG sessions.

That was never an assumption of mine and I've never stated such. D&D (and D20) is very good at modeling a certain kind of RPG experience (a party of adventurers forms and seeks challenges and are rewarded with increases in power). It is not well suited to many other kinds of storytelling/gaming; it cannot be all things to all people.

Hence it is not surprising that -- following the collapse of the 'd20 bubble' in recent years -- a number of new non-d20 games are being published.

It looks like the strategy of driving "support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market" has not been entirely successful.

Let's examine this assumption. One of my long term projects is to database the entire market beat section from Comics & Games Retailer. For those of you not in the know, this is an industry publication that tracks sales trends for most major hobby gaming categories. Unforuntately, their data is self-reported by retailers and is not based on POS data, so it is considered to be quite suspect in specifics. However, for the purposes of general trend analysis, espeically for marketshare leaders, it is reasonably useful.

The data for July, 1999, gives this snapshot (Descending order of unit sales, titles with no sales in previous months deleted):

All: 75.81 units

AD&D: [19.6 units]
Vampire
RIFTS
GURPS
Deadlands
Shadowrun
Werewolf
L5R RPG
Alternity
Star Trek TNG
Mage
Star Wars RPG (WEG)
Hell On Earth (Deadlands)
Trinity/Aeon
Palladium Fantasy RPG [1.06 units]
Sailor Moon
Rolemaster
BESM
In Nomine
Mind's Eye Theater
Champions
Call of Cthulhu [.26 units]


The data for July, 2000:

All: 74.3 units

AD&D [20.9 units]
Vampire
RIFTS
GURPS
Shadowrun
Alternity
L5R RPG
Star Trek TNG
Star Wars RPG (WEG)
Deadlands
Mage
Rolemaster [1.1 units]
7th Sea
Heavy Gear
Werewolf [.6 units]

Thus, the RPG market leaders (which accounted for at least 80% of sales in any given store) could be described as:

- D&D
- Storyteller RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Wraith, Changeling)
- Non D&D fantasy RPGs (Rolemaster, Palladium Fantasy RPG)
- GURPS
- Licensed SF (Star Wars, Star Trek)
- Non-licensed SF (Shadowrun, Alternity, RIFTS)
- CoC
- Deadlands
- 7th Sea
- BESM

Of this list, I would suggest that the products with a "mechanical advantage" in not being D20 games (assuming D20 had been an option from the start of the RPG era) were GURPS and BESM.

Let me clarify. Assuming that the unique mechanical aspects of the other games had been retained (like Sanity for CoC, the card play mechanic in Deadlands, etc.) all of those games could have been expressed as D20 games and been just as fun to play as they are in their "native" formats. (One could argue that attempted conversions like Deadlands D20 showed this was not true, but I'd counter-argue that those conversions were all rushed in the heat of a market bubble, were written by people who were not intimately familiar with how to write for D20, and thus are not a fair indicator of what they could have been had they been "done right").

My thesis is that the differences in these games, which I maintain exist for a number of reasons other than a mechanical need to vary from D20, all made the market "inefficient" to some degree by limiting the portability of people's knowledge of how to play one game when they played another, and by segregating design talent into small slices of mecanics that could not feed back into each other smoothly to improve the overall game experience for all players. This was, in my opinion, bad for the RPG industry.

At this point, I'd argue that we have 3 game networks that existed for mechanical advantage (or network advantage) out of about a dozen offerings.

Data for July 2005 isn't available yet. I have data for February 2005 close at hand. Let's look at where we were then.

All: 69.5 units

D&D [27.4]
World of Darkness (new)
D20 (Sword & Sorcery)
Rifts
D20 (Mongoose)
D20 (Star Wars)
Shadowrun
World of Darkness (old)
Call of Cthulhu
D20 (Castles & Crusades)
GURPS
D20 (L5R)
HERO
D20 (Green Ronin)
D20 (Alderac)
Exalted
D20 (Wizards of the Coast)
Lord of the Rings [1.0 units]
D20 (Privateer Press)
D20 (Holistic) [.6 units]

Summary:

- D20
- Storyteller
- RIFTS
- Shadowrun
- CoC
- GURPS
- HERO
- Lord of the Rings

Shadowrun and CoC are essentially static - they are the same games published throughout this entire timeframe. My opinion is that they'd sell just as well if they had been D20 from the start, but they're not, and making the switch would probably do them more harm than good - people aren't playing them due to mechanical excellence.

HERO is a revival of a game with a huge network externality, and clear a mechanical advantage (similar to GURPS).

Lord of the Rings is essentially a Dead Game, and was already in March when these numbers were compiled.

Are there "fewer systems" being supported at this time? I think the answer is clearly "yes".

There have been two noticable new games (Ars Magica 5th and Warhammer RPG) that are not D20 and are (according to industry sources) doing quite well. Both are games that predate the D20 era, both have large followings of players, and both are in the same boat as Shadowrun and CoC. I doubt that either would have been launchable had they not been D20 if they were brand new. (Although I think it is a shame that Warhammer isn't a D20 game, I'm not at all surprised that GW wouldn't let Green Ronin do it that way.)

So we've seen a move towards games that are mechanically distinct, and a move towards consolidating a lot of "genre" options (without a rational for mechanical distinctiveness) into D20. That's exactly what I thought would happen, and I think that trend will only continue. Now, when a publisher thinks about releasing an RPG, they have to explain why they're not using D20, and if they can't make the case, they don't get sales.

We've also got this odd new arrival, the PDF RPG. The Forge has been great at evolving a whole bunch of new games quickly, and PDF/internet distribution has arrived to give us a new model for sales that has a whole different set of assumptions in it than I was using in 1999 when I was trying to figure out how to fix D&D and the RPG segment as a whole. Those games are often purpose built (i.e. they're designed to do one thing really well, in a limited timeframe), and they have small, but extremely devoted followings who may or may not connect to the rest of the RPG ubernetwork. And a lot of them are just literature and thought experiments - they appeal to people who are interested in the art and science of RPG design and don't impact many actual play groups. So I'll cop to not anticipating the format, and admit that it has the potential to blow D20/OGL out of the water, but stand on my overall segment consolidation prediction until the day that a non D20 PDF/internet RPG starts accumulating a noticable player network.

 

[The Shaman]

Assuming that the unique mechanical aspects of the other games had been retained (like Sanity for CoC, the card play mechanic in Deadlands, etc.) all of those games could have been expressed as D20 games and been just as fun to play as they are in their "native" formats. (One could argue that attempted conversions like Deadlands D20 showed this was not true, but I'd counter-argue that those conversions were all rushed in the heat of a market bubble, were written by people who were not intimately familiar with how to write for D20, and thus are not a fair indicator of what they could have been had they been "done right").

And how would you interpret the negative responses to d20 Call of Cthulhu?

My thesis is that the differences in these games, which I maintain exist for a number of reasons other than a mechanical need to vary from D20, all made the market "inefficient" to some degree by limiting the portability of people's knowledge of how to play one game when they played another, and by segregating design talent into small slices of mecanics that could not feed back into each other smoothly to improve the overall game experience for all players. This was, in my opinion, bad for the RPG industry.

If this is true, where will the next level of innovation in gaming come from? Must everyone drink the Kool-Aid to have something to contribute to gaming?

Shadowrun and CoC are essentially static - they are the same games published throughout this entire timeframe. My opinion is that they'd sell just as well if they had been D20 from the start, but they're not, and making the switch would probably do them more harm than good - people aren't playing them due to mechanical excellence.

I suppose if you define 'mechanical excellence' by market-share, this statement probably seems true enough.

There have been two noticable new games (Ars Magica 5th and Warhammer RPG) that are not D20 and are (according to industry sources) doing quite well. Both are games that predate the D20 era, both have large followings of players...

...like Dungeons and Dragons...

...and both are in the same boat as Shadowrun and CoC. I doubt that either would have been launchable had they not been D20 if they were brand new.

One could argue that d20 would have been in the same boat without D&D branding.

So we've seen a move towards games that are mechanically distinct, and a move towards consolidating a lot of "genre" options (without a rational for mechanical distinctiveness) into D20. That's exactly what I thought would happen, and I think that trend will only continue. Now, when a publisher thinks about releasing an RPG, they have to explain why they're not using D20, and if they can't make the case, they don't get sales.

D20 is not a monolith - the past several years have developed widely diverging implementation of the d20 mechanic - Mutants and Masterminds, Blue Rose, and Dungeons and Dragons are all d20, but each has a very distinct flavor.

It's convenient if one is trying to make a case of the superiority and supremacy of the d20 mechanic to lump these games together, but I would argue this is taking oranges, grapes, and bananas and declaring their collective virtues as fruit - it may be true as far as it goes, but it glosses over a great deal of important detail.

 

[Gentlegamer]

D&D (and D20) is very good at modeling a certain kind of RPG experience (a party of adventurers forms and seeks challenges and are rewarded with increases in power). It is not well suited to many other kinds of storytelling/gaming; it cannot be all things to all people.

Quoted for truth.

 

[Psion]

Ask yourself how much of the redesigned systems are due in large part to the competition that 3e has created? When you have substantial redesign of GURPS, WFRP and Storyteller, that indicates that there is a real pressure for getting those games as good as they can be.

Oh, absolutely. Add to that that, according to the figures quoted earlier in this thread (and the state of the bookshelves at my FLGS seem to follow) that Palladium has dropped out of the double-digit market share contenders. And even now, they have announced a new edition.

I was just thinking this the other day when I was noting the quality of products I was buying and other (including non-d20) products on the market that I think that the quality of products has gone up markedly in the last few years, in terms of both production values and playability. I also notice this in the PDF market.

Also looking at figures quoted earlier in the thread, companies that suffered slippage that were putting out what I consider to be quality product were almost universally attributable to them not being US companies and suffering due to the weak dollar.

 

[Psion]

And how would you interpret the negative responses to d20 Call of Cthulhu?

I really hope your not suggesting that it was based on informed opinions? Most (in fact AFAICT, all) such deep negative hostility is from fans of the existing game who like it their way. This "people who are stuck in the system they know" thing cuts both ways.

But if you'd like, I can point you to several threads on RPGnet praising it.

(Ironically, I don't particularly think that it is the best implementation of d20, but certainly don't think it desrves the bile that gets heaps upon it, which I think stems purely from "rabid fanboy" syndrome.)

 

[The_Universe]

I think Dancey's comments are extraordinarily cogent. He's not talking about what's universally more or less fun for any particular gamer. Instead, he's talking about making a game that will balance between serving players and remaining solvent/profitable. He's talking about business, and we react as if he's critiqueing how we may or may not have fun.

As to the initial post, however, I have to say that *in my experience* rules light systems are harder to adjudicate, and ultimately result in such extensive and codified *house rules* that I might as well have started with a system with a few more rules in order to unify player and DM expectations from the get-go. You might have had a different experience, but (if it helps you tag where I'm at) I'd rather play Shadowrun than Buffy (to choose two relative extremes).

 

[WayneLigon]

I suppose if you define 'mechanical excellence' by market-share, this statement probably seems true enough....

The way I read his statement, people 'are playing' ShadowRun and CoC because of factors other than rules mechanics. I don't think he's saying 'people are 'not playing' SR and CoC because of the rules mechanics'.