Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RyanD" data-source="post: 2403615" data-attributes="member: 3312">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.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 unitsAD&D:  [19.6 units]VampireRIFTSGURPSDeadlandsShadowrunWerewolfL5R RPGAlternityStar Trek TNGMageStar Wars RPG (WEG)Hell On Earth (Deadlands)Trinity/AeonPalladium Fantasy RPG [1.06 units]Sailor MoonRolemasterBESMIn NomineMind's Eye TheaterChampionsCall of Cthulhu [.26 units]The data for July, 2000:All:  74.3 unitsAD&D [20.9 units]VampireRIFTSGURPSShadowrunAlternityL5R RPGStar Trek TNGStar Wars RPG (WEG)DeadlandsMage Rolemaster [1.1 units]7th SeaHeavy GearWerewolf [.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- BESMOf 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 unitsD&D [27.4]World of Darkness (new)D20 (Sword & Sorcery)RiftsD20 (Mongoose)D20 (Star Wars)ShadowrunWorld of Darkness (old)Call of CthulhuD20 (Castles & Crusades)GURPSD20 (L5R)HEROD20 (Green Ronin)D20 (Alderac)ExaltedD20 (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 RingsShadowrun 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.</blockquote>

Verification