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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.
I would imagine part of the decline of the industry is due to the expense of books. RPG books simply cost too damn much. I can't stand it when WotC releases a 100 page book and wants $35 for it. Not only do they overprice everything, but it seems like they set the price for the rest of the books out there. Considering how many books get released and put on the shelves, I think the price range should be $10-$30 not $30-$50.
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
Volume sales of those books are much lower than say.. the latest from a NY Times best seller. They're priced higher to get a return on investment for the printer, etc. Not saying I like it or agree with it.. it is what it is.
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It's not just the price or the time needed to play. It's also the fact that it's really hard to convince most gamers that they need to continue buying supplements. I'll admit that I have a lot of 3e/3.5e books, and I'll also admit that 3.5 was basically a cash-grab by WotC. Having said that, however, the truth is that most of the more recent supplements aren't things that I feel the need to buy. It's either stuff that I'd come up with on my own already, or it's material that is kind of cool, but not interesting enough to warrant purchasing. Hell, I don't even use half of the material in half of the supplements that I have now. Why would I need to buy more?
Also, there is the fact that the industry moves in cicles. If you recall, there was a significant drop-off in the market during the late 80's and 90's, which would correspond to the time between the initial frenzy over 2nd edition and the release of 3rd. I think that the same thing is happening here, and that when 4th edition comes out, we'll see a big boom in the market again (at least for a few years).
Another factor this time is the sheer glut of 3rd edition materials that were released. Everyone and their brother jumped all over the open-source nature of the d20 system, so there's even more dross to sort through and more competition in the market than ever before.
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.
So it's off topic to talk about a pen used in a pen-and-paper game. Sheesh...
I submitted it as "State of the Pen and Paper RPG Industry". I got Zonked. :)
The big, glossy, expensive games may not be doing so well. And if you're taking total revenue as a measure of health then maybe the paper&pencil gaming scene isn't doing so well. As the subject says, meh. A drop in Britney Spears sales does not indicate a crisis in music.
What TFA mostly failed to mention was the extraordinary progress in indie RPG design over the last few years. The indies may not be raking in money hand over fist, but that hasn't stopped them creating some very good games (Vincent Baker's Dogs in the Vineyard and Matt Wilson's Primetime Adventures, f'rinstance) and, more importantly, getting a solid theoretical handle on what RPGs are about and how they work. What Lajos Egri did for playwriting and Robert McKee did for screenwriting, these guys are doing for RPGs. I've been following the industry since the early 1980s, and the last few years have been a real eyeopener. No, the GM is not God. Yes, system does matter. No, throwing together a huge heap of rules and expecting fun to magically fall out is not going to cut it.
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.
"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.