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

[jaerdaph]

I'm fairly confident that most publishers base these decisions on actual sales figures and not on the posts of a few blowhards on a messageboard.

 

[Psion]

I'm fairly confident that most publishers base these decisions on actual sales figures and not on the posts of a few blowhards on a messageboard.

I suspect that just as many base it on the (often misguided) conceits of the designers, judging by craptastic system choices like the Marvel Universe game.

I think the thing that some people advocating a switch here need to realize is that for every well done contender like WFRP, there are 10 Serenitys and Marvel Universes.

 

[buzz]

I suspect that just as many base it on the (often misguided) conceits of the designers, judging by craptastic system choices like the Marvel Universe game.

I think the thing that some people advocating a switch here need to realize is that for every well done contender like WFRP, there are 10 Serenitys and Marvel Universes.

QFT X billion.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Wasn't Serenity just the Unisystem from Buffy? Wasn't that game just gushed and gushed over? Or was that because it was from Wheadon?

 

[Umbran]

But we hear from publisher all the time about the d20 market is a shadow of its former self.

This, in and of istelf, does not help one decide, though. If the d20 market has shrunk because the entire rpg market is a shadow of its former self, moving into a sub-niche becomes an even worse move, in a business sense.

When running a game, I pick a systemt hat does what I want it to do at the table, in terms of flavor, setting, probabilities, forms of tension, and so on. d20 works for soem things, but not for others.

Same, then, goes for game design - you work with a different system when d20 doesnt do the job. Of course, if the job you want to do is not popular enough, your new game will flop. And if you dont market it well (and good marketing is difficult), your new game will flop. And if you don't get good distribution, your new game will flop...

Many things go into success of a game that have absolutely nothing to do with the game's design. Most of those things tend to push one back to doing d20, as a business matter.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

Sales are not the equivalent of market penetration....

 

[Gundark]

I suspect that just as many base it on the (often misguided) conceits of the designers, judging by craptastic system choices like the Marvel Universe game.

I think the thing that some people advocating a switch here need to realize is that for every well done contender like WFRP, there are 10 Serenitys and Marvel Universes.

lol

 

[Gundark]

I'm not saying d20 is a "do it all" system by any means.

Ryan Dancey sez

" You feel that Hit Points, Armor Class, Vancian spellcasting, classes, levels, etc. restrict or limit, or in some other way restrict you from expressing your “vision” (all those things are designer options, not features of the system, and can be discarded, modified, or ignored once you understand how to use the whole D20 toolbox)."

I guess that I feel different. The strength of d20 is that you can modify it. I can't think of a genre that d20 couldn't be modified to fit.

 

[Pramas]

If you can imagine this conversation going on for over a year via e-mail, you'd have a rough approximation of Green Ronin's internal debates about what to do with Freeport. With the original Freeport: The City of Adventure book long sold out and unreprintable because of the 3.0 rules it was attached to, when it came time to contemplate a re-launch of the setting we had to weigh our options carefully.

We discussed all sorts of things, from a simple 3.5 update all the way to a full Freeport game. We ultimately decided that we could not just give up on d20 because to date nearly all Freeport fans were D&D players. Doing a new game or switching it over to True20 entirely would almost certainly alienate a bunch of people. On the other hand, going just d20 was not really an option with the current state of the market. To give you an idea of how things have changed since 2002, Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary--a 256 page hardback detailing one of the most famous cities in fantasy fiction--sold about 25% of what Freeport: The City of Adventure did and Freeport did not have 20 years of fiction and famous authors behind it. Despite the name recognition and the pedigree, Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary was viewed as "just another d20 book" by distributors and retailers.

Ulitmately this is what led me to come up with a new strategy for the Freeport re-launch. The Pirate's Guide to Freeport is a 256-page hardback detailing the City of Adventure and containing no game stats for any system. We are then publishing a series of companion books that give rules info and stats for many different systems. First on deck are the True20 Freeport Companion and the d20 Freeport Companion, but there will be others as well. This should allow us to broaden Freeport's appeal to fans of fantasy gaming in general, while providing good support for the city's original fanbase as well.

FYI, the Pirate's Guide to Freeport includes an optional chapter on the World of Freeport that blows it out to a full campaign setting. This includes a detailed overview of "the Continent", which no coincidentally is where we've been setting our line of Bleeding Edge Adventures.

As for Privateer I think the wargame is popular enough that they could do their own RPG if they wanted to. The advantage to this is that its launch would be a much bigger event than any new d20 sourcebook. The disadvantage is that it would take a lot of work and that effort is likely better spent on their minis games.

 

[Terath Ninir]

The question is not "should you try to do another system than d20?" The question is "WHY do you want to try to do a system other than d20?" If you are answer is, "Because d20 sucks!!!!", then you're not doing it for the right reason.

I've been working, on and off, on a completely new game system, from the ground up. It's not because I think d20 sucks. It's because I have found specific things that I feel d20 can't do the way I want it to. It works in fundamentally different ways to do fundamentally different things than d20 does. But, then again, I wouldn't use it to do a dungeon crawl -- that's something that I'm not designing it to do.

It is as unlikely that any system will "take down" D&D as it is that anyone will ever take down Microsoft. They're the market leader and they're going to stay that way. But that's not to say that someone couldn't make a (relatively) successful, interesting niche product.