So when should a publisher ditch d20 and develop their own system?

[eyebeams]

I know a group that plays Serenity. My friend's 14 year old brother runs it for his friends. Their adventures are sequences of killing more and more people with increasingly bigger and more potent guns. I find it pretty funny that, with all the Intenet arguments about genre emulation and staying true to the property, that what could be the longest running Serenity campaign in the world is basically D&D in space.

Is there an rpg played by 14 year old males that isn't this? Also doesn't make it D&D in space unless the definition of D&D-style gaming is sretched absurdly.

As for Serenity's actual success, the book is showing up in liquidators like threefreegames.com. Make of that what you will.

Who knows? WLD is in there too, and it wasn't a failure.

The discussion of system is mostly irrelevant, since you can't sell a game without a compelling hook behind it.

I don't agree. If there's an existing, active fanbase with certain expectations, not meeting them is bad. Making the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game a d20 hack with magic that didn't match the expectations of Tolkien fans (thanks to balanced elves and human wizards, among other things) was a mistake, for instace. In Firefly's case, there was already a roleplaying comunity without an official system (and in many cases, without a system at all). Or look at The Wheel of Time.
Then again, as I've said elsewhere, I don't think RPG producers understand self-starting fan communities. They think they can dictate product characteristics to them, but they're utterly wrong, as these communities *will* turn their backs on games that don't think work.

The people making TRPGs today are in their mid to late 30s, and it shows. Licenses that hit their peaks 25 years ago, endless retreads of the same old same old (pulp, pirates, supers), these are all trotted out in front of a generation of gamers that simply doesn't care. In most cases, the question of d20 or not is irrelevant, since the game or license is dead out of the gate.

You can always find people to buy something, just not necessarily at the expected scale. But when it comes to mass appeal you're absolutely right.

 

[eyebeams]

Well, here it obviously is an "actual play" thread.

Good for them. It's nice to find a non-contrived AP thread in a sea of contrived mutual promotion from that community.

There are enough games around that are shock-full of Star Wars and Star Trek material, they just don't say so. None of them sells. Material that doesn't come with the original names of persons and objects doesn't have any commercial worth whatsoever. This has been shown time and time again.

Again, I'm not talking about logic for the hobby. I'm talking about whether someone managing IP would want to marry it to an open scheme.

But there's really no need for the umpteenth iteration of this discussion between us. There are enough solid reasons not to use the d20 system at the moment, like the unwillingness of distributors or shops to stock anything with a d20 on it.

I'm not really sure that's true. Besides, the stock n' pray model of brock and mortar is dying anyway. With the exception of a small number of specialty stores, all the stores in my area (counting Toronto) are moving to ordering to customer request and maybe stocking an extra copy of the most popular requests on the shelves.

 

[mearls]

Is there an rpg played by 14 year old males that isn't this? Also doesn't make it D&D in space unless the definition of D&D-style gaming is sretched absurdly.

Yeah, that's exactly my point. A designer can obsess over details all he wants, but in the end the gamer determines how a game gets used. Their campaign (as described to me) is pretty much dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl in space; enter room, zap guards, take their stuff, move on to the next room.

You are definitely spot on about designers and how gamers are the ones who dictate where something goes. That does speak to creating rules that fit, but obviously that's irrelevant if the game doesn't speak to anyone. This extends even to RPGs. One of the most presistent comments I heard about 3e circa 2000 was that it felt like the D&D that gamers always wanted to play, but TSR wouldn't give them.

I distinctly remember the art for 3e as the first D&D images since the mid-1980s that actually synched with my personal view of what a D&D campaign looked like.

I think that the gaming zeitgeist rests in the 20 year olds, and what the TRPG industry struggles with is speaking to those gamers. We can skate by on some evergreen concepts (WoW and about 20 billion Japanese CRPGs show us that going into dungeons to clobber stuff is still popular; Star Wars still sells billions of dollars of toys), but there are a lot of subtle shifts out there.

For instance, I think the concept of evil megacorps has fallen by the wayside. They're not the major bogeyman to a 20 year old in 2007, as opposed to a 20 year old back in 1990. There's an entire genre of game, first person shooters, that speaks to the concept of a one man army taking on an entire planet of bad guys; that flies in the face of a trend in gaming for high lethality worlds. If you look at the best selling console games of the past year, and you look at what's out there for TRPGs, is there really much crossover?

Anyway, that brings me back to my initial point. To go d20 or not is a question you can answer only after you've built your game's initial hook. I think that's when you make the call.

 

[Turjan]

I'm not really sure that's true. Besides, the stock n' pray model of brock and mortar is dying anyway. With the exception of a small number of specialty stores, all the stores in my area (counting Toronto) are moving to ordering to customer request and maybe stocking an extra copy of the most popular requests on the shelves.

I agree that, nowadays, most stores don't stock much besides D&D and, sometimes, WoD. My point was that the "d20" logo seems to have lost its promotional effect. Then a disadvantage, like telling people that they have to buy a book like d20 Modern or d20 Future in order to play the game, easily outweighs the work on an own system. Well, most "new" systems are permutations of the always same ideas, anyway.

 

[buzz]

They also are not usually tied to Josh Whedon bandwagons either.....

FWIW, I am part of the problem. I bought the first printing, and then I bought the 4th printing; the lure of corrected errata was too strong, even though the paper quality went down. My friend ended up buying multiple copies as well (including PDF). We're going to be starting a campaign in a month or so.

I bought the game because I'm a Firefly fan. I'm playing in the campaign because I'm a fan, and because the is the first time anyone in our group has been able to convince the others to try something that was not D&D, much less not d20. I am not nuts about the mechanics (and neither is the rest of the group, so far), but I am not going to pass up an opportunity to play something different for once.

That said, I have not bought either of the two supplementary products MWP has released, and I also have no plans to buy BSG, either. I don't see their newly-named Cortex system doing anything that 80% of the systems on my shelf can't already do, and I don't really think it reflects the source material very well.

Regardless, I think all this talk of Serenity doesn't really touch on the subject of the thread, other than to say, "If you've got a license that will sell, the mechanics are likely going to be irrelevant." IMO, Decipher's LOTR RPG is probably a good example of how Serenity will play out over time.

 

[rgard]

Compare to Star Trek.



You can't really call something a flash in the pan when it hits another reprint well past the first few months of sales. A 4th printing of any RPG outside of D&D, WW, Palladium is not too common.



I can link you to one right now:

http://wavesintheblack.aimoo.com/

And here's one that's been quite for a few weeks:

http://afterserenity.com/modules.php?name=Forums

And of course, threads like the below:

http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=17&t=20372

Feature multiple reports of playing with the official system. Aside from that one instance (which talks specifically about Serenity), I've omitted boards where people discuss Firefly in addition to the RPG or discuss multiple systems.

Asking for the game to have the same online presence as the WoD -- a setting that in various incarnations is over 15 years old -- is of course silly. But given so short a time *and* the fact that MWP doesn't even have its own forum (which is a big, big mistake on their part) for the game, they're not doing too bad at all.

I'm not sure that 4 print runs are significant. It depends on how big the 4 runs were, yes?

 

[eyebeams]

Regardless, I think all this talk of Serenity doesn't really touch on the subject of the thread, other than to say, "If you've got a license that will sell, the mechanics are likely going to be irrelevant." IMO, Decipher's LOTR RPG is probably a good example of how Serenity will play out over time.

If it was like LotR, then it would already be self-evident; the line started failing a year after release. Plus, I don't know if you remember, but LotR's promotion included things like the brand manager getting on RPGNet and telling people that Exalted's prospects sucked compared to his game because its designers didn't truly understand how to reach a mass market.

The moral of this story is that measursing the inverse of the level of hubris involved tends to be the best indicator for a game's success.

 

[rgard]

I agree that, nowadays, most stores don't stock much besides D&D and, sometimes, WoD. My point was that the "d20" logo seems to have lost its promotional effect. Then a disadvantage, like telling people that they have to buy a book like d20 Modern or d20 Future in order to play the game, easily outweighs the work on an own system. Well, most "new" systems are permutations of the always same ideas, anyway.

Hi Turjan, I don't doubt that someplace, somewhere there are folks who don't like the D20 logo and find it a turn off. That said, I don't see that in my personal experience selling this stuff.

Also, time has passed by the argument that folks don't want to buy a d20 setting because they have to buy d20 modern or the player's handbook...there are too many gamers out there with those books on their shelves to make this an issue.

Edit: re-read your post and I think we agree on the second part.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[eyebeams]

I'm not sure that 4 print runs are significant. It depends on how big the 4 runs were, yes?

You'd have a softcover run of a few hundred for the convention, but after that, I seriously doubt we're talking about anything as small as 1000 books a run.

 

[rgard]

You'd have a softcover run of a few hundred for the convention, but after that, I seriously doubt we're talking about 1000 books a run.

K, thanks.