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State of the Pen and Paper Industry
Syberghost writes "Kenneth Hite's annual 'State of the Industry' report has been released in his online column Out of the Box for gamer news site http://www.gamingreport.com. Among other interesting bits; Margaret Weis Productions is the sixth-largest RPG maker, on the sales of their sole RPG product line, the Serenity RPG. Sales overall were down, again; the RPG industry as a whole isn't doing well." Sad but not surprising.
So I checked out the site and the simple truth is that I can not get enough people together long enough to play this game.
Same holds for D&D and all the others. Hell we have trouble getting three hours together for a poker game, much less a game of Risk or Conquest of the Roman Empire. RPGs are just out.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I'm surprised to find out there even is a 6th largest RPG company...
I thought after the first few it was pretty much guys self-publishing their home game campaigns, unlike the good old 80's when variety thrived.
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The new hotness is Burning Wheel. Independent games written and published by creative individuals beat the hell out of the book-spam WotC has been promoting these days.
Of course, WotC also has the problem of selling a durable good: these books don't just wear out. Once they're sold, they're on the market forever. No gamer will ever buy more than one. They've tried to mitigate this with tricks like "3.5th edition," but few gamers ever bothered updating. Throw in the rampant piracy of the books and rules themselves, and there's really no way WotC can continue with D&D as it is.
(I prefered AD&D 2nd Edition anyway ^_~)
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Pen and Paper RPGs have always been more niche than industry. This is a business that cannot survive on terms of growth, only in servicing the niche. TSR collapsed under the weight of their attempts to grow outside of the confines of the niche. They were producing far too many boxed games built on expensive liscences (Indiana Jones RPG?) and simple name shufflings of the D&D rulesets (Star Frontiers, Gamma World). Rather than focus on a fixed set of products that would be profitable, they kept spending to try and grab more marketshare where there wasn't any. Hasbro/WOC were smart- they realized that the real power in D&D is the liscening, not the game itself. All of the startups and ex-TSR company people are at a huge disadvantage by not having a compelling IP to go along with the pen&paper products. Even White Wolf, arguably the most successful RPG system outside of D&D has only a sliver of the name recognition that D&D has.
Waste several hours of your life for the purpose of getting glare in your eyes, breaking the binding on your hardcovers, and collating a huge pile of tilted bitmaps, when what you want is searchable text and clear graphics? Damn that's a stupid suggestion.
In contrast, I pick up and look at Complete Warrior, see that it costs $35, and put it right back down. There's not even any consideration. I don't just play fighters, or wizards, or clerics, so I would want all of the books, and at $175, there's no chance in hell, so why bother with even one?
It is the consumer that should determine the price, not the industry. If I vote with my wallet and choose not to buy your product because it's overpriced, you don't win me back by raising the costs even more.
The problem with lowering the cost of RPG books is the quantities and profit margins involved. If you compare RPG books with, say, coffee-table books or academic works like textbooks ($100+ for 2-400 pages!), you'll find a similar price to pagecount ratio. The reason for this is low-number print runs. Unless you're D&D, the 800-pound gorilla of RPGs, a large print run for RPG publishers is 1000-5000 copies. Once you consider paying the artists, writers, license holders (if any), shippers, distributors, and retailers, it's not really all that unreasonable to pay $40 for a glossy full color 3-400 page hardcover book.
Now, it's an entirely different argument whether full color artwork, hardcovers, and glossy paper are really necessary for enjoyment of RPGs. Some people have come to expect them, but some see them as unecessary window dressing. I think the relative success of the RPG PDF industry (http://www.rpgnow.com/ http://www.drivethrurpg.com/ http://e23.sjgames.com/ etc.) is an indicator of that. By cutting out the cost of printing and distributing hard copy, you can get a searchable, cut and pasteable copy for usually half the cost of a hardcopy (even from Amazon). This isn't a perfect model--there's a lot of complaints about piracy, and most people don't game with a computer at the table. And some of the larger publishers are intentionally sandbagging PDF sales by pricing them at nearly the same cost as the hard copy (Fantasy Flight Games, I'm looking at you).
But as far as the small-press hobby publishers are concerned, I think PDFs are going to be the wave of the future (Add in the rise of very low print run Print on Demand services, and you can get a decent hard copy (softcover, black and white, perfect bound) for much less than you used to).
Much like my friends in electronic music production, technology is seriously lowering the bar for entry into RPG production. There's no equivalent of GarageBand (I guess you could call MS Word an entry-level RPG production toolkit, but it's certainly not RPG-specific), but there's a lot of innovation out there.
Dan Bongert <*> http://www.tiltingatwindmills.net
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
My GURPS GM ran with all kinds of mods, and you had to remember to ask about every little bonus or mention that you did something in a certain way or you'd always fail. So the game was dumb. My D&D GM's just ran the stupid game to make sure the players had fun. Ultimately, the rules should never interfere with your ability to have fun.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
It might just mean that there's little impetus to go out and buy a role playing manual. Or even to purchase the PDF. No sale, no statistic.
One factor might be supply and demand. There are a million and one zero cost systems out there, not to mention the wealth of OGL suppliments and modifications. Why spend $90 on the Core Three Books when you can get what you need for a third of the cost or less with a similar, lesser known system?
Another factor might be the shift toward more collaborative storytelling with less mechanics, like FUDGE, FATE, or RISUS. These games are *fun* and involve significantly less algebra to play than any D&D edition I can think of. They're also much faster to learn, in part because they require a creative--rather than encyclopedic--understanding of how the game works.
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Anyone interested in pen and paper role playing might also enjoy my podcast, Dice Make Bonk.
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"A good GM tells the story and lets you play the game."
I highly suggest checking out the state-of-the-art in RPG design, games like Dogs in the Vineyard, Weapons of the Gods, and the Burning Wheel.
All of these get away from the fairly antiquated idea of 'The GM tells the story and we play the main characters'.
Rather, by PLAYING the main characters, the players CREATE the story, and the GM's task is more supporting than guiding. These new games handle this in several ways.
The Burning Wheel is built with the structure of the game being directly driven by the goals and aspirations of the characters. If the GM doesn't follow the story that is built into the characters, the game falls apart.
Weapons of the Gods has several rules-side dynamics for the players to directly alter the outcome of events, and the overall structure of the story. The players can spend their 'destiny' point to purchase story-investment in various aspects of the setting. You want the game to be about this one legendary weapon (for example)? Spend some destiny, and now your character's story is directly intertwined with it. The GM is bound to include it at some point. Additionally, the secret arts system (magic) involves a few arts that 'discover' things. And by discover, I mean you roll, and if you roll well enough, suddenly it was always the way you said, and your character discovers the truth of it.
Dogs in the Vineyard is possibly one of the single best put-together RPGs ever. It revolves around the GM setting up ugly situations for the players to resolve, where there IS no right answer, just a lot of moral ambiguity and sacrifice, and then cranks up the tension until the PCs have to act. The trick is, the choice of how to resolve the situation is ENTIRELY up to the players. The GM's job is to simply make no choice an easy one.
There are more games than this, but those are good places to start.
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
As far as time constraints, how much time do you spend playing video games? How much time do you spend watching TV, surfing the internet, reading a book, twiddling your thumbs, whatever? My friends and I play once a week, from 8-Midnight. Four hours is enough time to get in some good role-playing, do some exploring, find a few clues and get into a fight. It's a nice, well-rounded, enjoyable session, one that I can almost always end on a cliffhanger, and keep everyone's interest for the duration.
Now, I'm not trying to make this personal or anything, but it's just irritating to hear "I don't have time. I don't have friends that want to play. Other people must be the same way. That's what's wrong with the industry." You've got time, you've got friends, you just don't have the interest. Loss of interest is a real problem. Loss of interest is something that might be addressed, something that can be changed.
Sorry about that. I will agree, though, that P&PRPG companies have an uphill climb ahead of them, no matter how you slice it. It's a hobby that requires that one person either be able to pull stories out of thin air, or have a lot of time and patience for prep. It requires imagination and an attention span not often found in the age of TV. It requires a hefty entrance fee, when you take into consideration the fact that an RPG book has no other reasonable use except as an RPG book, whereas a gaming PC has many many other uses. Hell, even wargame miniatures can look cool on a shelf. The PHB is worthless if you're not actually playing D&D.
It doesn't surprise me that the P&P industry is in decline. I just think that, unlike player attention span, time constraints and storytelling ability, price is one of the factors that can be changed, and might make a difference if it was.