|
Rand Brittain posted:I, on the other hand, can't, because there's no such store without making a two-and-a-half-hour drive. I feel like the shift to PoD has much less to do with the convenience of digital storefronts and a lot more to do with the fact that the non-digital storefronts are sinking. This is way more like my experience. We had a store that sold nerdy stuff, then that vapourised. Now we have a game store again but it sells a couple of 5e/PF books and the rest is wargames, board games, and card games. RPGs aren't worth stocking anywhere I've been recently.
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 21:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 08:11 |
|
|
Is Mage 2e out yet? Will it be out soon? I want to buy mage books.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 21:12
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:The switch to nWoD also cost them a bunch of fans- there were a bunch of people who didn't want to buy Requiem and would've kept buying Masquerade but suddenly had nothing new to buy. And for all that RPG proponents like to go on about "all you need is the corebook for infinite adventures!" and so on, a game which isn't getting new books is going to bleed players. And of course when the corebook's no longer in print and prospective players have to hunt down used copies, your acquisition of new players is also headed down the shitter. My understanding is that sales picked up over time to where nWoD was at its peak selling about as well as oWoD was when it ended, but nWoD never had oWoD's reach outside of the dedicated TTRPG enthusiast crowd. And that non-enthusiast crowd are the ones who'd pick up the book on an impulse buy in a bookstore or borrow a copy from a friend; without brick-and-mortar mainstream bookstores carrying hardcopy WoD books, that market's more or less gone for good.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 21:20
|
|
|
Having books in physical store is vital, in my opinion. I picked up Antagonists, Ordo Dracul, Mekhet, Gangrel and Daeva books just because the giant store near me happened to have them tucked away in a corner. Without that, I probably would have never bothered.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 21:28
|
|
|
drgnvale posted:Is Mage 2e out yet? Will it be out soon? I want to buy mage books. Real Soon Now, but not yet. The first supplement for it is all the way up into redlines already. I'm confident that there'll be a much shorter gap between Awakening 2e and Signs of Sorcery than there has been, say, between Forsaken 2e and The Pack.
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 21:43
|
|
|
Without books in stores, how do you get new people in?
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 22:52
|
|
|
I dunno, how have you been doing it for years now?
|
|
#
?
Dec 13, 2015 22:54
|
|
|
It's hard. Pretty much the only way people without brick and mortar access get into new games is by word of mouth. Requiem didn't start really bleeding players until the whole PoD thing. I remember there was a time I had to drive around the three stores because nobody could keep Ordo Dracul in stock. Now if I mention Requiem there's even odds they'll ask me if WW went out of business, if they even know what I'm talking about. Storefront access is absolutely vital for presence. There's this terrible problem in the rpg industry where the vendor and the customer have contrary interests. There is demand for brick and mortar sales, and I would go so far as to say that the majority of potential sales lie in that direction. At the same time there's not enough potential sales to keep the traditional method afloat.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 00:49
|
|
|
Even though I owned a Masquerade book, I didn't play any WoD until a friend started a Requiem game and I haven't gone more than 6 months without playing since. Well, it wasn't always vampire, just mostly. Considering that I've played the vast majority of RPGs with the same group of friends for so long, I'm always curious how other groups play. The only time I had a truly bad experience was a PBP 3.5 game where the GM was CAPTAIN TANTRUM RAILROAD.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 01:01
|
|
|
Yeah, I always wonder if this is some massive UK/US split or something. Every town I've lived on new RPGs are reliant on people who visit internet sites (i.e. usually me) to get any exposure. I've never been to a place where there's a vibrant community of people just organically picking up games from their local environment and encouraging a flourishing scene of diverse gaming. Maybe this is why I'm the only GM I've ever known who's run a game that's not dark heresy or some flavour of D&D, though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 01:06
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Yeah, I always wonder if this is some massive UK/US split or something. Every town I've lived on new RPGs are reliant on people who visit internet sites (i.e. usually me) to get any exposure. I've never been to a place where there's a vibrant community of people just organically picking up games from their local environment and encouraging a flourishing scene of diverse gaming. It's hard to get people to try new things and learn new things, and a lot of indie and smaller elf games live on the Internet. DH and D&D variants were and are the biggest games in town, so you get more people likely to play them. Coincedentally, this is also why the 20th Anniversary editions exist. And speaking if which, I wonder if CtD 20th will still have the furry underage kids who make people want to gently caress them and the lactating underage kids who make people want to gently caress them and the other furries who make people want to murder the player? Because if you added some ~*anime*~ art to the book /tg/ would never stop talking about/masturbating to/playing it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 02:46
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Yeah, I always wonder if this is some massive UK/US split or something. Every town I've lived on new RPGs are reliant on people who visit internet sites (i.e. usually me) to get any exposure. I've never been to a place where there's a vibrant community of people just organically picking up games from their local environment and encouraging a flourishing scene of diverse gaming. Yeah, I think the only gaming shops near (ha) me that stock RPGs (so aren't just board games and 40K) are in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Even Dundee, which has a big nerd community, doesn't have one. In my experience RPGs are almost entirely run and played by people who get poo poo off the internet or were RPG players back in like the 90s. I'm the only person in my circle who has run anything published past 2000 except 3.5. I introduced everyone except one girl in my Mage game to RPGs in the first place. A lot of the gamers I know are very much of the "play the same game for 20 years" variety, so will happily play homebrewed in-name-only Space 1889 or Aberrant variants, but won't try Mage because they didn't like the 90s World of Darkness, or don't like 4e because it's tabletop WoW for babbies.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 03:05
|
|
|
Any nerd shop around me is purely board and card, no RPG stuff at all, and I only live in New England.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 03:12
|
|
|
Would anyone be interested in some flashcards I made for all the Conditions in 2e Werewolf and Vampire? I made them using a very quickly edited flashcard template in Word.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 03:23
|
|
|
If something does something first in fandom (comics, movies, RPGs) and does it to a moderate degree of success, it'll almost always overshadow later versions unless there's a very large gap between the two. Even Cee-of-Dee has a fairly constant feed of callbacks to the older game - not overwhelmingly so, but notably so. It can't really escape the shadow of the earlier version and, frankly, didn't really ever seem to try.Josef bugman posted:What happened to them then? Did the bubble burst or something? Well, you have to realize that it was a longer-term issue. Basically, all RPGs suffered during the mid-90s due to CCGs eating into their market share, and White Wolf was no exception. Then when the CCG boom burst, suddenly they were taking a loss on things like Rage and Arcadia. Which is why games like Wraith were cancelled, and Changeling was downgraded to their low-overhead imprint Arthaus. Moreover, they were just having diminishing returns on the World of Darkness games in general, and I don't think anybody can claim they were doing much but scraping the bottom of the barrel towards the end, even if some innovative books came out of it. Sales were consistently dropping, and the newer games weren't selling. Then d20 hit. Granted, White Wolf was one of the first to grab onto the d20 license - they got out their monster book before WotC's Monster Manual hit the shelves - and were pretty successful with it. But World of Darkness was hit again by that. If that wasn't enough, d20 started a downward spiral around 2003, and though they'd publish successful d20 material for awhile, it was another boom and burst. With both d20 and the World of Darkness failing... well. It was a desperate sort of logic that got the World of Darkness revised. CCP bought them, and though that was gravy for a few years, the recession of '07 led to them experimenting with PDF and then PoD before being essentially shuttered and refocused into the MMO, which was also shut down after many years of development. Pope Guilty posted:I thought I read somewhere that the rules weren't complete and it wasn't actually playable. It was a functional game, but the first printing of rules was a mess, some of which was fixed in the second printing. The real issues with Rage was that it just had wording issues all over the place, appallingly bad balance, and though it rarely had timing issues (most cards just took effect "when you played them") when it did it was a mess. But the game itself played very fast and was fun and simple when it functioned properly. Unfortunately it had other issues like horrifically bad card distribution. I just sold off my Rage cards this year, and though I had over 1500 cards from one expansion, I was still about 20 cards short of a set. It's had continued life in the furry community, though, and there were at least continuing fan expansions for awhile.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 04:46
|
|
|
Kibner posted:Would anyone be interested in some flashcards I made for all the Conditions in 2e Werewolf and Vampire? I made them using a very quickly edited flashcard template in Word. Yes! I'm a sucker for that stuff.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 04:49
|
|
|
Inzombiac posted:Yes! I'm a sucker for that stuff. https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9BXVbROcovfaG9sR1Q5M1BnaHc&usp=sharing It has the .dotx template file I used, the .docx files for the Werewolf and Vampire sets, and .pdf versions of the sets. You would print out the set, then cut, fold, and glue/tape the backs together to create the little pocket flashcard.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 04:55
|
|
|
Prison Warden posted:Yeah, I think the only gaming shops near (ha) me that stock RPGs (so aren't just board games and 40K) are in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Even Dundee, which has a big nerd community, doesn't have one. In my experience RPGs are almost entirely run and played by people who get poo poo off the internet or were RPG players back in like the 90s. I'm the only person in my circle who has run anything published past 2000 except 3.5. I introduced everyone except one girl in my Mage game to RPGs in the first place. A lot of the gamers I know are very much of the "play the same game for 20 years" variety, so will happily play homebrewed in-name-only Space 1889 or Aberrant variants, but won't try Mage because they didn't like the 90s World of Darkness, or don't like 4e because it's tabletop WoW for babbies. I think the problem there is that as you move away from rpgs as products that are bought and sold, you approach a point where rpgs are more valuable as a shared activity that everybody knows. It's kind of insulating. I think that rpgs need to look at cutting costs and explore selling paperback products in smaller batches. For all people say about the book industry dying they still, you know, exist; they mostly don't sell rpgs. Not because rpgs are too niche or whatever. God knows a book store will keep a copy of some obscure romance novel on backlist for six years. But because the cost to sales ratio is too high.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:31
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:When was this big collapse? Early 2000's? There were multiple declines in the TTRPG market starting in 1993. One oft-quoted factoids was that in 1993 Mayfair's Underground was considered a mediocre seller at 15,000 copies. Card games are popularly thought to have cannibalized a significant segment of the hobby not necessarily directly, but by being the preferred shelf-liner for retailers. A second decline for certain *types* of games occurred from 2000-2003 due to the glut of D20 games, and after that, stresses created by poor sellers and obsolescence generated by D&D 3.5 burst the D20 bubble. These were not the only causes, and the severe decline of hobby game retail occurred for other reasons. Wizards itself closed all 80 of its retail stores. So when people try to compare how V:TM would do now compared to then, you have to work through the fact that each edition existed in a very different industry than the one before it. In the mid-90s MET LARP had probably reached its peak, and MET games as a whole were perhaps the third most popular game after V:TM, according to folks I know who worked on them. When Vampire: The Dark Ages was being prepped for release, there was some thought of developing it as a direct challenge to Dungeons and Dragons. There had been a few periods where White Wolf stuff outsold AD&D, because AD&D was in a state of serious decline. (Some of that mission's DNA remains, it paladin-like grail vampires and elder labyrinth complexes, along with erratic fantasy-oriented stuff that suited Rein-Hagen's preference for a mythic Europe general fantasy setting.) Grey book Laws of the Night was perhaps one of the few successful introductory RPGs, and perhaps the most successful non-D&D intro games ever, unless there are still people who play Pokemon Jr. The rules were rough and not exactly suited for the hyper-competitive organized play of the Cam/MES, but unlike later versions of the rules, they were not written assuming you were a Cam/MES or OWbN member, and stuck to the elemental setup of V:TM by default without integrating deep background. I'd say half of my current group plays RPGs because of the grey book -- and they left midway through Revised. It's difficult to figure out how popular organized LARP is now. MES doesn't provide a straightforward way of finding out how many active chapters play. OWbN is much easier, with 146 games. BNS' game finder lists 154. There are overlaps and dead games, and games that are the same people in multiple things, so my gut says we're talking about a sub 300, even sub-200 number worldwide. OWbN games seem to most often have 10-19 per. Maybe there are 4000-odd MET LARPers out there still? I know that in Canada, the days of multiple competing games with 40+ players (as happened in Toronto and Montreal) are goooonnnne, and my intuition is that the remainder, which BNS serves with rules tuned for what they want, are hardcore competitive organized players. So the question that is probably before the new White Wolf now is how to turn those people into a set of brand ambassadors for folks who don't want to read 500+ pages to master how to be mean to each other. V20, which was always designed as a comprehensive tribute to the game as a whole, with some minor cleanup on the side, which along with the other 20ths have outperformed their expectations even though like them, they're really for the initiated. But even though I'd love to boost that poo poo all day long, I'm also not sure what it means, because of course there are people who will buy the book and never interact with a fan community. But even if we've got a comparable number of tabletop fans, that's something for White Wolf to work with though again, that means producing a game these fans will not only want to run with themselves, but introduce to other people, and that someone can pick off of a shelf and at least partly figure out, so that these people get in line for all the other, bigger media, and say nice things about it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:40
|
|
|
Mendrian posted:I think the problem there is that as you move away from rpgs as products that are bought and sold, you approach a point where rpgs are more valuable as a shared activity that everybody knows. It's kind of insulating. I'd be down with a model where condensed, paper-back versions are what are sold in stores everywhere while expanded, hard-cover versions are sparingly available in stores, but always available with PoD.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:41
|
|
|
If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:53
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:It was a functional game, but the first printing of rules was a mess, some of which was fixed in the second printing. The real issues with Rage was that it just had wording issues all over the place, appallingly bad balance, and though it rarely had timing issues (most cards just took effect "when you played them") when it did it was a mess. But the game itself played very fast and was fun and simple when it functioned properly. Unfortunately it had other issues like horrifically bad card distribution. I just sold off my Rage cards this year, and though I had over 1500 cards from one expansion, I was still about 20 cards short of a set. From what I've heard from a fairly reliable source, the main downfall of the Rage card game was losing a major retailer due to objections over card content. That's not to say Rage would still be around, but it would have probably aged out gracefully instead of being poleaxed. The scale of the mid-90s CCG industry was always an aberration. An old friend of mine won money at an international Mechwarrior tournament back then, for God's sakes.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:55
|
|
|
Sampatrick posted:If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff? You'd better pick a specific game line to get into first, really.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 05:56
|
|
|
Sampatrick posted:If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff? Do you prefer something gonzo and over-the-top, or something more down-to-earth and mysterious?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:01
|
|
|
Pope Guilty posted:Without books in stores, how do you get new people in? With game cafes and bars, right now. The main barrier to jumping on that trend is the half-deserved rep RPG players have for being thieves and lovely tippers.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:01
|
|
|
Sampatrick posted:If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff? WoD20 has an extensive metaplot with a bunch of important figures. CofD doesn't. There's probably other significant differences between the two, but I have only played lines that just rebranded to CofD.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:03
|
|
|
The 20th Anniversary games are, on average, more gonzo and crazy because they are a 20th anniversary retake of a bunch of 90s games. They're the games you play when you want to deal with the Tzimisce Cathedral of Flesh under NYC, or being the Unabomber but a werewolf, or having grand magic wars over who gets to decide the SFX of reality. Also, the internet is basically an alternate dimension. At its best, it is an insane high of violence, chaos and grandiose plots. Chronicles of Darkness is generaly speaking lower-impact - not lower power, per se, but quieter, weirder and more subtle. Less open warfare, more shadow wars, competing over mysteries and trying to make a life out of your monstrousness. Also, the internet is not an alternate dimension, but it's easier to accidentally wander into one. At its best, it is Twin Peaks.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:08
|
|
|
Sampatrick posted:If I want to get into World of Darkness should I pick up CofD stuff or should I start picking up WoD20 stuff? ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS -- EXCEPT OLD WORLD OF DARKNESS ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:16
|
|
|
Guided landings onto Wraith are acceptable, though.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:17
|
|
|
Co'D also has more modern game elements like story beats, FATE aspect equivalents and a unified character creation and action resolution system. 1e had some...odd combat numbers and I'm not too familiar with 2e's crunch so I don't know if that got fixed. Co'D is much, much smaller scale than WoD. It pushes intimacy and alienation harder since there is no metaplot and the actual impact of your supernatural conspiracy of choice is much more low key. To put it in movie terms: WoD is Bela Lugosi and Hammer Horror, Co'D is found footage and mumblecore. If you go WoD20, just be aware there will be at least one really stupid, offensive thing in the setting.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:49
|
|
|
World of Darkness is the movie Blade, surely.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:58
|
|
|
Another strike against Rage happened somewhere around the Las Vegas (i think?) themed expansion. That release was actually a stealth second edition, which wasn't entirely compatible with the first edition.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 06:58
|
|
|
Kibner posted:I'd be down with a model where condensed, paper-back versions are what are sold in stores everywhere while expanded, hard-cover versions are sparingly available in stores, but always available with PoD. I received Vampire The Requiem For Dummies and, surprisingly, it's a great condensed rulebook.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 07:24
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:World of Darkness is the movie Blade, surely. But playing that way is badwrongfun 
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 07:24
|
|
|
MadRhetoric posted:But playing that way is badwrongfun I guess some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 07:27
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:I guess some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill. 
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 07:33
|
|
|
nWoD is objectively better if you're not a grognard
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 09:28
|
|
|
Tezzor posted:nWoD is objectively better if you're not a grognard Given your avatar, CtD would be your jam and that's oWoD. Stylistically, it's different strokes. Mechanically...who the gently caress plays the Storyteller system for its mechanics? nWoD is marginally better than oWoD Revised, which is marginally better than oWoD 2nd, which was an rear end flavored cake. I mean, nWoD went to a standard TN dice pool system and unified the mechanics between splats compared to the oWoD20, but that's like beating a one legged man in an asskicking contest.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 10:05
|
|
|
I don't know that I'm being a grognard by preferring the oWoD. I just enjoy the over-the-top 90s sunday-morning-cartoon style more, which isn't really the nWoD's thing. This isn't like 3.5 v 4E v 5E in that it's the same basic game, just mechanically improved (well, depending on outlook. With nWoD it definitely is though), because they're very different thematically. Declaring the nWoD is garbage bullshit and the oWoD is superior in every way is Grog. Liking the oWoD for its ridiculousness isn't.
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 10:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 08:11 |
|
|
Let's not forget that there are huge tonal and thematic differences between different editions of the oWoD that people can get very serious about. Early oVampire is a very different game from late oVampire, with changing focus. Likewise, 2nd ed. oMage and Revised oMage are almost completely different games. So the question is, do you want to play old old Vampire, new old Vampire, old new Vampire, or new new Vampire? Maybe new old Mage, or new new old Mage, or new-callback-to new old Mage, or old new Mage, or wait for new new Mage to come out?
|
|
#
?
Dec 14, 2015 11:57
|
|
