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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 3316817" data-attributes="member: 10201">Well, while you might expect that in the abstract, i wouldn't expect it in the case of Babylon 5 D20 RPG. I haven't seen much publicity for the 2nd edition, and the 1st edition was designed in about the worst possible way for selling to non-gamers: as an incomplete game, requiring the non-gamer to go out and buy another, pretty-much-unrelated $30 RPG book (D&D3E PH, D20M, etc.), and without clearly identifying either what parts of that other book you actually needed (only a couple dozen pages, maybe less), or conversely explicitly identifying what portions of the "original" rules were changed by the B5 RPG rules. I suspect that most proto-RPers that did buy it never cleared that hurdle, or already had gamer friends that had been trying to get them into RPGs. And i wouldn't expect anyone burned by that, or turned off by that, to still be looking at the B5 RPG by the time the 2nd, complete, edition came out a couple years later. Mongoose pretty much wasted any opportunity to be a crossover hit with non-gamer B5 fans, so the fact that it's Amazon rank is lower than other licensed properties that *are* accessible to the non-gamer license fan isn't much of a surprise.That's long been my point, and my experiences support it: IMHO, the market for games of the complexity and expense and outside-of-game time investment of most commercially-visible RPGs is near maximum--there just aren't a lot of people out there who would like to play D&D3E or V:tR, and aren't. [I mean, i'm sure there are people who can't find a group, or who can't find the time, just not a lot of people who would like to if they were aware the game existed, but haven't had a chance to check it out or try it.]However, IME, there're a lot of people who are very much interested in RPing in the abstract, but are turned off by the vast majority of commercially-visible RPGs for reasons not inherent to their RPG-ness. So, if you actually want to grow the RPG market, i don't think you'll do it with D20 System--or anything else familiar-looking to the vast majority of current RPers. Because if that sort of game (and, let's face it, the vast majority of RPGs are pretty much the same mechanically, with just different ranges of numbers and names for stats) appealed to these people, they'd already be playing it.Heck, in essence both the freeform chat-based online RPing communities, and a subset of the MMORPG and adventure/"RPG" console&computer gamers are exactly these sorts of markets--they're interested in the essential activity of the RPG (the RPing), but not in the specific details of implementation that come with the vast majority of published tabletop RPGs.</blockquote>

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