Robin Laws posts a column about the industry that's actually salient and sane

[mearls]

Comparing RPG production to car manufacturing is a good analogy. You buy a car expecting to take the time needed to learn how to work the radio, change the oil, deal with maintenance, and so on. I just bought a Honda this week, and it does feel a bit like getting into a new RPG. The owner's manual is right next to my computer - I still haven't learned how to set the clock.

It's interesting to contrast RPGs with miniatures game. With minis, you're happy to buy the next figure that comes out. The fact that there's a cool new figure coming out next month doesn't make you feel sad that you bought a new figure this month. If anything, half the fun is waiting to see the cool new stuff. You don't buy a miniature expecting it to fill your "miniatures needs" for the next five years. Best of all, you can tear open the mini as soon as you get home, assemble it, prime it, and start painting.

An RPG requires a lot of time to read, and a bit of effort to get a group together.

Boardgames and CCGs are also a lot more like miniatures games than RPGs. For both of them, it's fun to buy new ones to increase the scope of options. If you buy and play Settlers, you might play it a bunch of times, get a little bored with it, and move on to Puerto Rico or Ticket to Ride.

With an RPG, you just move on to the next campaign. Judging by sales numbers, the staggering majority of people play D&D, or Vampire, or Exalted, or GURPS, and just stick with it. A GM can just generate a new campaign and run it, and it can feel nothing like the previous campaign.

In some ways, WotC has moved to the model that you mention. D&D minis, the upcoming dungeon tiles, these are things that you're happy to have lots of (or at least with the dungeon tiles, we hope so!), they're easy to just break open and use, and they fit in with the idea of playing D&D for years on end.

I'm really curious to see how the dungeon tiles do. I have a set that I'm using while working on the D&D Open for GenCon, and they've been really fun to use. The playtest sets we had were also a lot of fun - they made dungeons really easy to map out and easier to plan for. They're a little like D&D minis in that if you start with the tiles and then build a room, it goes by quicker and it's easier to build something interesting.

 

[2WS-Steve]

It's interesting to contrast RPGs with miniatures game. With minis, you're happy to buy the next figure that comes out. The fact that there's a cool new figure coming out next month doesn't make you feel sad that you bought a new figure this month. If anything, half the fun is waiting to see the cool new stuff. You don't buy a miniature expecting it to fill your "miniatures needs" for the next five years. Best of all, you can tear open the mini as soon as you get home, assemble it, prime it, and start painting.

An RPG requires a lot of time to read, and a bit of effort to get a group together.

Boardgames and CCGs are also a lot more like miniatures games than RPGs. For both of them, it's fun to buy new ones to increase the scope of options. If you buy and play Settlers, you might play it a bunch of times, get a little bored with it, and move on to Puerto Rico or Ticket to Ride.

Not only that, but with a miniature or MtG card my attention-deficit-disorder self can use it one gaming night, feel satisfied, then get bored and want to buy a new bunch of minis to use next week. With MtG there's always the "I'd like to try a red/blue deck next" thing to keep me trying and buying new stuff.

With an RPG, you just move on to the next campaign. Judging by sales numbers, the staggering majority of people play D&D, or Vampire, or Exalted, or GURPS, and just stick with it. A GM can just generate a new campaign and run it, and it can feel nothing like the previous campaign.

The group I played with in NJ were still using their GURPS 3e core books (only) after maybe a decade.

Now that I've left I figure they'll stick with their D&D 3e core books until maybe something like armageddon.

That ability to get incredible mileage off a small cash investment is fantastic for the hobby -- but not so great for the hobby business.

What struck me as particualrly problematic for business is that you, individually, could (and when you were freelancing, had to) write books 10 to 20 times as fast as your customers could use them.

Compare that to novels, songs or movies. Even a novel, the slowest of those, can be read in a few days and takes maybe 3-6 months to write. A movie employs scores of people for a year, then is consumed in two hours.

I'm glad to see WotC experimenting with support materials. The pre-painted, inexpensive minis have turned out very nice but I'm not so sure about the tiles yet, since we've had those for a while from other sources and they haven't really taken off.

It does seem that computer support in some form would be a natural, since software has the nice (from a business perspective) property of becoming naturally obsolete, and thus replacable, every time a new generation of processors and graphics chips comes out.

But I thought I saw somewhere that WotC or Hasbro sold much of its rights to D&D in that regard.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I hate shopping for RPG books over the internet. I hate paying electronically, and waiting on the mail to deliver what I want (or paying with a money order and it taking even longer as I have to wait for the money to get there). I want to hand over actual physical cash and walk out with an actual physical book, when I want it, after browsing it on the shelf and seeing what's in it.

I'm with you. Not only do I avoid buying real books online, every .pdf I own is either a gift or a prize. If the hobby goes completely electronic, I'll just stop buying the new stuff.

(Of course, I'm also going to be buying CDs long after sites like I-Tunes are the primary distribution method for music... I have an I-Pod- still in the box- I just like cover art & liner notes & discovering tracks on albums I hadn't heard before buying the disc. Eventually, I'll start using it for the best of my collection, but until then...)

My first RPG purchases were in comic shops & bookstores in Denver, CO and Manhattan, KS in the late '70's. I didn't discover hobby stores for a long time.

 

[Hussar]

Another point I noticed in the article is the oft mentioned bleeding of gamers to MMORPGs. Again, I'm not entirely sure if this is true. I'm not so sure that it's a zero sum game: if people are playing WOW, they aren't playing DnD. There are quite a number of people who do both. Yes, both are competing for entertainment dollars, but, I'm not sure if the competition is as direct as its being painted.

For example, Everquest was released in 1999 and pretty quickly overtook Ultima Online as the number one MMORPG. Yet, a year later when 3e was released, we saw player numbers and sales numbers that hadn't been seen in the hobby for over a decade. Everquest and 3e continued growing rapidly at the same time. Now, the d20 bubble burst, and lots of people got out of the game. But, that doesn't mean that people stopped buying D20 books to go play Everquest or WOW or whatever. It just meant that people stopped buying d20 books.

There's a lot of finger pointing at MMORPG's as the cause of the d20 blues and I'm not sure if that's justified.

 

[wmasters]

In many ways I wonder if MMORPGs are a good thing for the RPG industry. Yes, they're competing for the same 'entertainment dollar' but maybe there's more to it than that.

I remember when M:TG was released, and there was a fear that TCGs would take players from the roleplaying community. Having worked in a games store for a while, albeit a very short while, I saw first hand the imact. In some cases, yes, roleplayers were playing, but for the most part were still playing whichever roleplaying games they enjoyed. On the other hand there were gamers playing M:TG, which meant more people going into games stores, and that lead to more people finding out about the game and more roleplayers.

The same thing is possibly true of the MMORPGs, DnD online in particular. It strengthens the DnD brand, and potentially creates an interest in a game which people hadn't really looked at before.

 

[DaveMage]

In some ways, WotC has moved to the model that you mention. D&D minis, the upcoming dungeon tiles, these are things that you're happy to have lots of (or at least with the dungeon tiles, we hope so!), they're easy to just break open and use, and they fit in with the idea of playing D&D for years on end.

I'm really curious to see how the dungeon tiles do. I have a set that I'm using while working on the D&D Open for GenCon, and they've been really fun to use. The playtest sets we had were also a lot of fun - they made dungeons really easy to map out and easier to plan for. They're a little like D&D minis in that if you start with the tiles and then build a room, it goes by quicker and it's easier to build something interesting.

I hope WotC continues to put out useful DM tools that are usable in any campaign. Fiery Dragon's Battlebox is used in every session I play in - either for the tiles, the combat cards, the spell "area of effect" sheets, or the representative counters. I need things like this much more than I need the next new rules manual that contains prestige classes that will never see the light of day in my game.

I think the real difference in D&D (and d20) today is that with 1E and 2E, there was the possibilty that you'd be able to play all the different classes if your gaming life. With 3E/d20, there's no way we'll be able to try to play the 100s of classes and prestige classes, and that means we've bought things we will never use. That's where the frustration sets in a bit.

 

[Henry]

General - Robin Laws posts a column about the industry that's actually salient and sane

With Robin "the fundamental" Laws, I expect no less.

I will admit one thing -- as much as I love the RPG industry's expansiveness, of multitudes of small-pressers with tons of product to choose from, there's more out there than I can get my one group to try in a LIFETIME of play. Heck, we just switched to D&D 3.5 in late 2004, and we're playing an Eberron game with as many WotC supplements as I can stomach right now (up to 13 allowable currently) and we still haven't touch anywhere near on any 3rd party stuff. I can get in the occasional one-shot of alternate systems, but traditional D&D is what keeps them coming back repeatedly. We've maybe tapped 1% of what is all available.

If I had more time to do nothing but play, I'd be stuffing in Sidewinder games, Black Company and Conan games, Grim Tales, Feng Shui for biweekly, and the D&D game for good measure. However, work and family have to take precedence, and life ain't that empty of activities. Fact is, you CAN pick up a computer game in half an hour, and have fun with your buddies doing it, with current technology.

 

[Cam Banks]

I'm really curious to see how the dungeon tiles do. I have a set that I'm using while working on the D&D Open for GenCon, and they've been really fun to use. The playtest sets we had were also a lot of fun - they made dungeons really easy to map out and easier to plan for. They're a little like D&D minis in that if you start with the tiles and then build a room, it goes by quicker and it's easier to build something interesting.

I'm sure there's a specific audience for these. I know I'm not in that audience, and I think in general I'd rather spend my gaming buck elsewhere. Much as I am fond of minis (the kind from Reaper that you paint, not the kind you get randomly assorted in a box), I get more enjoyment out of scribbling out a map on a Chessex battlemat than I do just dropping down a piece of cardboard that may or may not work for the session I'm running.

The real innovators in the DM tools market, I feel, are those people who are putting out such things as the Steel Sqwires, or the mapping stamps. I especially like the little 10x10 metal bases that have all of the Enlarge rules written on them, for example.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Vrecknidj]

Heck, my son has almost as many Warcraft RPG texts as I have WotC, D&D-based books (3rd edition, anyway). There are a lot of choices out there, and I think that it's good if publishers can hang on.

It's true that if I have $10 or $15 or $25 and spend it on one thing, I'm not spending it on another thing at that price. And, it's true that if publishers don't make at least some money, they dry up. So, the industry is in a weird spot. It looks like maximum options is incompatible with endurance--either there are a lot of different products from a lot of different publishers, with a fair amount of publisher turnover, or there are a few very stable publishers with fewer choices for the consumer.

I think the PDF market and very small publishers can make up the difference, keeping lots of options in the mix. Someone decides to publish for a couple years, gets burned out, someone else replaces him/her.

Dave

 

[buzz]

The real innovators in the DM tools market, I feel, are those people who are putting out such things as the Steel Sqwires, or the mapping stamps. I especially like the little 10x10 metal bases that have all of the Enlarge rules written on them, for example.

I have to concur that these are brilliant; I and the other battlemat swag guy in our group jumped on these things. Personally, they obviated my need for FD's BattleBox; that was a product that sounded great to me in concept, but in execution ended up being useless to me. The counters were the only things I was at all interested in keeping.

As soon as BC Products releases hex'ed Tact-Tiles, I'm gonna be all over them as well.

Boardgames and CCGs are also a lot more like miniatures games than RPGs. For both of them, it's fun to buy new ones to increase the scope of options. If you buy and play Settlers, you might play it a bunch of times, get a little bored with it, and move on to Puerto Rico or Ticket to Ride.

We played the old Circus Imperium hover-chariot racing game by FASA this past weekend instead of our regular D&D game. Honestly, I had more fun doing this than I have playing any of my regular RPGs lately. It took minimal time to learn, and we got in two full games befre our typical quitting time. And I am very much not a war/board-gamer.

The whole time, I was sitting there trying to figure out why it was that my D&D and HERO sessions felt less enjoyable in comparison. Why the 20-minute:4-hour fun ratio with them and 4-hour:4-hour ratio with Circus Impreium?

In contrast, I ran the indie FRPG Burning Wheel for my regular HERO group the night before. As much as I was hoping that it would blow away my players, they seemed non-plussed. BW is phenomenal, IMO, but complicated enough that it could conceivably take a few sessions to get things running smoothly.

Would my group be willing to make that investment? It didn't seem so. They already know HERO back-to-front. Even the players who were excited about trying something new obviously had a lot of inertia to overcome.

So, I've got this awesome RPG that I will probably only ever get to play at GenCon or when I run events at Gameday... and it's ony one of many RPGs I own that are in the same boat. This sort of ticks me off, but what can I do? RPGs, even mechanically simple ones, do require quite a bit of time and effort to master, and run smoothest once that mastery has been achieved. Where is the incentive for my players to start from scratch all the time?