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Message: <blockquote data-quote="seankreynolds" data-source="post: 2770423" data-attributes="member: 3029">And considering the general state of the economy, that means RPGs are doing pretty well.And considering all the cries for the last ten years that the RPG industry is failing (Magic, Everquest, the d20 bubble, etc.), that means RPGs are doing pretty well (in that they're not failing like everyone things they are).I'm pretty sure ham radios sold fewer units this year than they did 20 years ago, but that doesn't mean the communications-electronics industry is worse off. The market changes, some things get left behind. Non-d20 games seems to be one of them. Yet there is a wealth of d20 product out there. You seem to be focusing on the non-D&D stuff as indicative of the health of the overall hobby; that's like focusing on declining sales of the Winchester rifle as an indicator that military spending is down and there is less war going on in the world.Pardon my candor, but boo hoo. They're releasing almost no movies on Betamax or laserdisc any more, either.To repeat: boo-hoo.So not only are you judging the health of the industry based on games that aren't related to the industry leader (D&D), you're specifically excluding PDFs, which means you're really only including non-D&D publishers who have a large amount of capital that they can afford to blow on a print run of a product that has a good chance of never breaking a profit. Seems awfully arbitrary, no wonder you are worried about the health of the industry.But why stop there? Why not limit it to non-D&D print products that aren't traditional fantasy (elves, dwarves, etc.)? Why not limit it to non-D&D print products that aren't traditional traditional fantasy but still draw on real-world historical time periods? Or that plus absurdist themes of prejudice based on hyperbole of real-world examples? If you judge the health of the industry by the lack of RPGs about left-handed Egyptian nobles persecuted by the clergy for financial scandals deriving from the need to pay tutors to make their children right-handed so they can enter a secret society of artists that rule the world, yeah, the industry is sickly or even dead because there are no games like that out there.Basically, if you're going to draw some arbitrary (to you) line and use things on one side of that for determining if the RPG industry is healthy, then we might as well end this discussion, because according to your definition of "healthy," if every household in America plays a d20 game at least once a week and buys one d20 product per month but the non-D&D market is the same size it is now, then the RPG industry is dangerously unhealthy ... I guess because there isn't enough diversity in the rules systems people are publishing.Or there are fewer consumers buying these products, so the people who make them are able to afford to produce less of them? That's capitalism and a free market: if there's no demand for a product you can't sell it, and if you can't sell something you can't make a profit, and if you can't make a profit you go out of business.Then again, this industry started with the actions of hobbyists who wanted to make games that they liked and usually did so as a side thing unrelated to their day job. Even if there's no money in the non-D&D RPG industry, you're going to find people who make these games for the love of making games.Or d20 in general.Ah, but the hobby does include non-D&D games, and it's not D&D's fault that there are so few of them--some people really dislike d20 or the d20 license or the system that they own or have some neat innovative way to handle a game mechanic that doesn't fit d20 ... those people are going to write their game the way they want, d20 or no d20.There's nothing forcing people NOT to make or buy non-D&D games (which I'm assuming also means non-d20 games). Yet they aren't, perhaps because of familiarity and compatibility issues (they don't want to learn new rules, they want to play a game where their favorite type of character is doable, etc.). I'm not suggesting that, though other people here may be. White Wolf's games were still quite strong at the time, and I don't think the hobby would have disappeared. Changed, maybe, but not disappeared, and odds are you'd continue to have the many D&D-clones on the market that you had back then, especially as you wouldn't have lawyers from TSR breathing down your neck to stop you (not that they really did that before).</blockquote>

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