What Does a "Successful" RPG Look Like?

[Celebrim]

So can a non-profit venture not be a success?

It's such a general question that I don't know that I can answer. "Non-profit" here is vaguely defined.

I hold that profit is a close synonym of the word "sustainability". Things that continue do continue because they are profitable and things that aren't profitable will inevitably cease. For example, life depends on profit. It produces more of itself, through things like offspring. If life ever ceased to produce a profit, it would inevitably disappear.

Frequently when discussing profit people ignore some of the profit or some of the costs in an effort to deceive or be self-deceived. So when you say "non-profit" I don't know what you mean by it. Does it not make more of itself? Or do you mean non-profit only in a narrow legal definition, where there are legal constraints on the sort of profit you can make (but non-profits can be very profitable for some of their participants, as for example PACs or vaguely defined endowments or trusts with very well-paid fund managers).

When discussing a game, were discussing something that usually depends on various material goods. I think it's fair then to think of the success of a game - it ability to produce more copies of itself - in terms of material profit. Money that doesn't produce more of itself invariably disappears. Now there are some "non-profit" game concepts like the OGL that were very successful, in that they produced more copies of themselves, but then the games and books derived from that "non-profit" concept where themselves grounded in profit.

 

[Celebrim]

In 2000, John Wick released a game called Orkworld. From the beginning, Orkworld was designed to be a single book with a limited production run. No additional books. No reprints. It's done. As far as I know, Wick made a profit. He met his goal and made money which seems like a success to me. I bet a lot of people either don't remember or never knew Orkworld even existed. I used to own the game and I hardly ever think about it.

I would say Orkworld was successful as a business venture and probably provided people hours of lonely fun, but it was probably never successful as a game. And I wonder at this point, how many people are actually happy with their purchase? Or was Orkworld successful as a scam, the RPG as micro-fiction that doesn't quite hang together problem that has just overwhelmed so much indy gaming that it's become a trope.

See

 

[soviet]

West End Games had the Star Wars line from 1987 through 1999, during which they produced two different editions of the game (three if you count the revised & expanded rules) and more than 100 sourcebooks, adventures, and supplements which is an astonishing number. If it wasn't a successful game then there's no such thing.

+1

Not only that, they named a bunch of stuff that didn't have names and those names became canon.

 

[soviet]

Falling off is just a natural part of life. No matter whether we're talking about games, bands, television shows, or even empires, even the biggest and the best of them will fall off eventually. I imagine there are many young people in the United States today who have never seen an episode of I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H, or The Andy Griffin Show.

And any metric of 'successful TV programmes' that didn't include at least the first two would be a faulty metric.

(I'm not American, the third programme didn't reach my shores)

 

[Celebrim]

West End Games had the Star Wars line from 1987 through 1999, during which they produced two different editions of the game (three if you count the revised & expanded rules) and more than 100 sourcebooks, adventures, and supplements which is an astonishing number. If it wasn't a successful game then there's no such thing.

And I will note I finished the 69th session of my current Star Wars D6 campaign on Tuesday, which ended at the beginning of a fire fight between the PCs and some stormtrooper allies, and some separatist holdouts riding giant agricultural combine droids, and a bunch of probe droid exploding and dropping buzz droids, while a dogfight between the PC's armed freighter and some TIE fighters and some Z-95s and Genosian gundroids occurs in the skies overhead.

But at the same time, it's really hard for me to notice a couple of things.

Like, the game is dead. I own some of the books, but most of the information is only available now from fan content and pirated pdfs.

The game is unsurprisingly dead, because for all the great work that went into that game it was horribly managed as a brand and the supplements while filled with a lot of great lore and fluff, have terrible almost unusable and frequently contradictory crunch. There is no coherent system for anything. There is like three separate ideas about how powered armor should work scattered over equipment entries from multiple supplements. There is no evidence of a product owner or a managing editor anywhere in the game's supplements. Races, creatures, ships, equipment, prices, and every crunchy part of the game system are just all over the place in terms of ideas and balance and mechanics. Chase scenes are supposed to be core to the system, but after they abandoned the speed die in 1e, they just don't really work in 2e in any coherent way except fiat and brushing aside the problems. There is so much basic to what I need a Star Wars game to do that it just doesn't do.

So that it is dead despite all of its quality also doesn't surprise me. Give me the IP, and maybe I could do something with it to resuscitate it. If I can figure out what a good solution to its wound system is over the long haul, because those die pools + relative success acquire the worst aspects of both predictability (2D advantage is pretty huge so balance is really hard) and randomness (you're always one Yahtzee of '1's away from dying to almost anything and so implementing the plot/narrative protection of hit points is hard and no spending character points as narrative currency and XP is just not a good solution).

 

[soviet]

To me a successful RPG is one that is being played, or has influenced other games/players to the extent that some part of it lives on in the next generation of RPGs that are being played.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I would say Orkworld was successful as a business venture and probably provided people hours of lonely fun, but it was probably never successful as a game. And I wonder at this point, how many people are actually happy with their purchase? Or was Orkworld successful as a scam, the RPG as micro-fiction that doesn't quite hang together problem that has just overwhelmed so much indy gaming that it's become a trope.

See

It's only a scam if John Wick intended to scam people.

 

[soviet]

It's such a general question that I don't know that I can answer. "Non-profit" here is vaguely defined.

I hold that profit is a close synonym of the word "sustainability". Things that continue do continue because they are profitable and things that aren't profitable will inevitably cease. For example, life depends on profit. It produces more of itself, through things like offspring. If life ever ceased to produce a profit, it would inevitably disappear.

Frequently when discussing profit people ignore some of the profit or some of the costs in an effort to deceive or be self-deceived. So when you say "non-profit" I don't know what you mean by it. Does it not make more of itself? Or do you mean non-profit only in a narrow legal definition, where there are legal constraints on the sort of profit you can make (but non-profits can be very profitable for some of their participants, as for example PACs or vaguely defined endowments or trusts with very well-paid fund managers).

When discussing a game, were discussing something that usually depends on various material goods. I think it's fair then to think of the success of a game - it ability to produce more copies of itself - in terms of material profit. Money that doesn't produce more of itself invariably disappears. Now there are some "non-profit" game concepts like the OGL that were very successful, in that they produced more copies of themselves, but then the games and books derived from that "non-profit" concept where themselves grounded in profit.

So, let's say I write an RPG in my spare time and it's perfect. Everyone that reads it wants to play it and everyone that plays it stops wanting to play anything else. I release it anonymously as a free PDF. It's so good that it brings thousands of new people into the hobby. World leaders and religious figures settle their differences by playing it. Statues of the imagined creator of this game (I'm anonymous, remember) are put up across the globe. Hurrah for the mysterious creator!

However, I didn't make any money on it, and no-one except me even knows I wrote it so I can't profit from it later, so it was a failure?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I would say Orkworld was successful as a business venture and probably provided people hours of lonely fun, but it was probably never successful as a game. And I wonder at this point, how many people are actually happy with their purchase? Or was Orkworld successful as a scam, the RPG as micro-fiction that doesn't quite hang together problem that has just overwhelmed so much indy gaming that it's become a trope.

See

Whilst the presentation is extremely funny (especially initially with the Cyberpunk 2077 pisstake music/sound) and the punchline is good, the big problem with this is that "RPG as micro-fiction" pretty much never has impenetrable or bizarre rules like that (at least in my experience). Those are basically straight-up Shadowrun-type rules (from one of the bad rules editions - which is all of them - yeah I went there!). The "I don't even have to roll" flaw described is a Shadowrun flaw, too, basically. Certainly a flaw most common in fairly complex 1990s and the 2000s RPGs.

And quite a lot of fairly well-designed games have sort of "failed novelist" vibes - c.f. for example Mutants and Masterminds for example, which has a whole line of M&M novels which I am very confident would never have seen the light of day outside the context of merch for an RPG.

I mean, you say this genre has "overwhelmed indy gaming", which seems like you'd have tons of ready examples, but you provide exactly zero examples, and I'll be honest, I can't immediately think of any recent examples. Orkworld is from over 20 years ago and didn't overwhelm anything! In fact, the only "indy RPG" I can immediately think of that has "failed X" vibes and a lot of silly lingo and complicated rules is the recent Hellpiercers, which is pretty cool but does have "I wanted to make a tabletop wargame but I ended up having to make an RPG" vibes, and definitely has some initially impenetrable stuff going on (why yes I did back it because the art/vibes were cool, why do you ask?).

 

[Morrus]

It's such a general question that I don't know that I can answer. "Non-profit" here is vaguely defined.

Non-profit ventures:

Nonprofit organization - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org