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Absurd Alhazred
Mar 27, 2010

by Athanatos

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license

If I understand correctly, it's not a matter of them not liking 4e, it's a matter of there being quite a few publishers annoyed at WotC ending 3.5E so abruptly that it left them with recent OGL stuff they couldn't offload unless someone else took up the mantle of "3.5", which Paizo were positioned to do, as well as consumers with dozens of splatbooks which they were reluctant to just throw away to make room for the new.

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Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

OtspIII posted:

One thing I was surprised to learn recently, but that makes sense once you think about it, was that one of the big drives behind the OGL in the first place was that WotC felt that adventures were terrible deals on a production costs vs profits balance, and they just wanted to be able to offload the cost of producing them onto third parties while still having a big library of adventures for sale.

I wonder to what degree this is still the case--I wouldn't be surprised if organized play becoming such a big thing has changed the math.

The changed the math, They now make bank on DM's guild. So are making money from any creator's work that gets posted and sold on DM's guild.

Which is where a number of organized AL play stuff can be purchased.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license

It was one of either Jason Bulmahn or James Jacobs (I forget which), both high-up designers in Pathfinder, who said when they were playtesting pathfinder 2e "we were wrong to dismiss 4e and its design, it had a lot of smart ideas and we just weren't ready to recognize them." or something similar when he was called out on pf2e being similar to 4e, it was a really good mea culpa

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

bewilderment posted:

An interesting thing I witnessed as part of running Lancer's No Room For A Wallflower campaign, which I think I also would have seen if I had been a recent DnD GM, is how much a community invested in a game supports itself and others when running what is effectively 'the latest adventure path'.

Because everyone is more or less running through similar scenarios, this means you can share tips with other GMs on the internet of "yeah this encounter is a little too easy, so if you wanted to drop a custom boss, this is the place to do it" or "this plot thread never gets tied up if your PCs don't do x, so here's how I did it" so everyone who runs through the campaign subsequently in theory has an easier time of it thanks to the earlier trailblazers.
Since it's impossible to get the adventure without an internet connection this also means that the lack of premade maps (which was a notable omission) was only a problem until someone posted their own maps online for sharing.
I'm currently running Wallflower and have found the community drive folder to be invaluable...

But no, in my mind it's drat near unforgivable to not even have the bones of a map in the only - and by default introductory - campaign for Lancer. A new Lancer GM needs more than pictures to throw under a Roll20 grid. How big should the map be? How much cover and difficult terrain? Where are the setup zones? How should enemies be placed? It's a tactical RPG. Maps are loving critical to it working as it should.

Don't misunderstand - I'm loving the campaign as a whole - but figuring this poo poo out without solid guidance was miserable and led to some lovely sessions.

disposablewords
Sep 12, 2021

There was at least a little naked opportunism on Paizo's part, kind of like White Wolf's weird marketing campaign where they offered the Exalted 2e core if you turned in your 3.5 PHB to be destroyed around the same time.

bewilderment
Nov 22, 2007
man what



dwarf74 posted:

I'm currently running Wallflower and have found the community drive folder to be invaluable...

But no, in my mind it's drat near unforgivable to not even have the bones of a map in the only - and by default introductory - campaign for Lancer. A new Lancer GM needs more than pictures to throw under a Roll20 grid. How big should the map be? How much cover and difficult terrain? Where are the setup zones? How should enemies be placed? It's a tactical RPG. Maps are loving critical to it working as it should.

Don't misunderstand - I'm loving the campaign as a whole - but figuring this poo poo out without solid guidance was miserable and led to some lovely sessions.

Not to turn this into Lancerchat but I didn't have the same issues despite having a similar level of Lancer inexperience.
I guess for me this was pretty much answered by the sitrep descriptions in the book? You combine "this is a Gauntlet sitrep, it has an endzone and enemy ingress points placed along the map with poor cover in the middle" along with "here's a community map, that place looks like the endzone" and just go with that in terms of length.

While sweet maps used with mapmaking programs do a lot for a game, you don't need them for a good time. My first time running Lancer (not Wallflower, was just a two-mission thing) was a fun time and the aftermath of the first scene just looked like this (not the whole map, but that's where everyone ended up clustered).



disposablewords posted:

There was at least a little naked opportunism on Paizo's part, kind of like White Wolf's weird marketing campaign where they offered the Exalted 2e core if you turned in your 3.5 PHB to be destroyed around the same time.

'Graduate Your Game' is still the funniest unironic TTRPG marketing I've ever seen.

Tibalt
May 14, 2017

What, drawn, and talk of peace! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee

dwarf74 posted:

Maps are loving critical to it working as it should.
Which, I think, is another major obstacles faced by anyone who wanted to make a 4e Retroclone or something that builds on it. Creating an appealing, fun map & AP to sell your game on top of making the game itself and making a killer app for it feels like a lot.

Lurks With Wolves
Jan 14, 2013

At least I don't dance with them, right?

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license

In addition to what everyone else said, Paizo was best known for making 3.5e adventures. When they lost their magazine licenses, not even WotC knew how to write good 4e adventures. If Paizo followed them into 4e, none of their encounter design experience or expectations about player power would carry forward. Sticking with the OGL and releasing their own unique reprint of it is, at the very least, less risky when you look at it from that perspective.

dwarf74
Sep 2, 2012



Buglord

bewilderment posted:

Not to turn this into Lancerchat but I didn't have the same issues despite having a similar level of Lancer inexperience.
I guess for me this was pretty much answered by the sitrep descriptions in the book? You combine "this is a Gauntlet sitrep, it has an endzone and enemy ingress points placed along the map with poor cover in the middle" along with "here's a community map, that place looks like the endzone" and just go with that in terms of length.

While sweet maps used with mapmaking programs do a lot for a game, you don't need them for a good time. My first time running Lancer (not Wallflower, was just a two-mission thing) was a fun time and the aftermath of the first scene just looked like this (not the whole map, but that's where everyone ended up clustered).
I did the same, because that's literally all I could do. But, frankly, I didn't find that at all sufficient, and I particularly don't think something that critical should require community resources. For an introductory adventure it is, like I said, pretty inexcusable.

I ran 4e for like 8 years, but Lancer has its own flow of combat. Cover and terrain and map size are all non-obvious.

TheDiceMustRoll
Jul 23, 2018

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

This is also 100% correct

the dirty little secret (except it's not really a secret) of Edition Warring is that the vast majority of it is not nerds going "here are the flaws I have identified in this iteration of a game's mechanics, perhaps we should find a way to address that" - it's nerds going "I don't like this edition of a game, and I will throw out whatever justification I need to in order to get you to shut up and agree that it is worthless" and shouting reasons past one another into the void, which is why it becomes toxic and threads need to have rules prohibiting it. The mechanical argument, or the virtues of one edition over another, are secondary at best, far behind the primary motivation of "I want you all to tell me how smart I am for not liking a thing that I don't like, and I'll use whatever arguments I can find to bludgeon you into this admission." 'Cause, again... nerds will still have 1e/2e Edition Wars despite 2e being published in 1989.

Mind you, this isn't super-relevant in the Industry thread except to note that the worst excesses of the TG Industry are generally fostered by their audience, and how the 'hobbyist' trajectory of the industry means many of those lovely traits about the audience will reinforce the lovely traits of the industry as the audience becomes the next generation of designers, so I'll drop it here; still, I do think it bears noting, if only because so much of the lovely industry behavior has sprung from lovely audience behavior over the decades.

I think its not just edition wars - people have unconscious biases that pop up all the time. With the OSR, a lot of people just go "yeah the only people who like older RPG games are just racists who hate the objectively superior new editions and cant handle change" and that...is not true. Mostly. Usually they're just saying "the only people who like the OSR are people who find a good companion in the RPG pundit or Varg Vikernes" with extra steps. This is an unconscious bias and they won't examine it(mostly because its generally relatively harmless, there are worse unconscious biases to have for sure).

Kestral
Nov 24, 2000

Forum Veteran

Leperflesh posted:

I think a much better approach is to ask you guys - all of you, especially lurkers, to just clearly communicate what you actually want. If we need to re-label this as an "industry and also random chat thread" and have two chat threads in TG? Ok? If that's what the community genuinely wants.

Put my vote toward preserving topicality. We have chat thread / topic thread distinctions for a reason, and it's worked just fine up until now. Personally, I want to know that when there are new posts in Industry or what-have-you, it means that something is actually happening in the Industry. Having threads get drowned in off-topic posts erodes their usefulness: "just scroll past it" just means "I don't respect your time." I could post chapters of my Let's Read Mouse Guard writeup in response to every 4e post, and people could "just scroll past it," and the content would be informative and interesting, but it would still be obnoxious.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Kestral posted:

"I don't respect your time." I could post chapters of my Let's Read Mouse Guard writeup in response

Again, the 4e chat spun off of industry talk and was largely aimed at why 4e style games are so hard to do/failed in the market and business talk around the 4e era. This is a very disingenuous representation of the discussion.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Lurks With Wolves posted:

In addition to what everyone else said, Paizo was best known for making 3.5e adventures. When they lost their magazine licenses, not even WotC knew how to write good 4e adventures. If Paizo followed them into 4e, none of their encounter design experience or expectations about player power would carry forward. Sticking with the OGL and releasing their own unique reprint of it is, at the very least, less risky when you look at it from that perspective.
They were also never getting back the license to make the official D&D adventure magazines. So following WotC into 4e in whatever fashion the new license allowed would require new brand building anyways.

Puppy Time
Mar 1, 2005


As a mostly lurker, I don't know that the D&D edition discussion and so on is necessarily off topic, but it is a topic that leads to a lot of people typing a lot of letters, for pages and pages, which is kind of a problem if you're not interested in that particular topic. "Just scroll," is the usual advice, but I still have to skim all those posts to see if there's anything about not that topic that I might be interested in. "Just post other topics," is the other advice, but again, if that other topic gets stuck in the middle of several posts made of words about D&D editions, it's not going to get a lot of eyeballs.

In this case I think that even if the discussion is on topic, it would be better in another place, just to allow the other topics some room.

(I will admit a slight bias in that I find D&D related topics to be intensely boring, so scrolling through pages and pages of it and never seeing any other topic is a huge pain.)

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013

Bottom Liner posted:

Again, the 4e chat spun off of industry talk and was largely aimed at why 4e style games are so hard to do/failed in the market and business talk around the 4e era. This is a very disingenuous representation of the discussion.

:yeah:

Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.
What is this topic/thread supposed to be about?

Is it just supposed to be about sexpests and assholes? Or are people allowed to talk about things related to the industry such as systems or companies and why they succeed and fail. Which is what outside of a couple of posts, which people rightfully called out as edition warring, people have been talking about?

My general belief is so long as it's talking about the industry, and doesn't get completely silly about Edition war bullshit it's whatever.

Dexo fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Nov 13, 2021

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!
Judging by the OP: "This thread is for discussing the business side of tabletop gaming, including current events, release schedules, what artists and writers are paid, getting into the business or encouraging others to do so, the do's and don'ts of running a business, community management, and so on."

I'm wondering if some users want this thread to be more for industry news than industry discussion? Some posts here seem to be suggesting the thread should go dormant when there aren't current events happening, or treat spikes of new posts hitting the thread as misleading proof that something big's happened recently.

TheLoneAmigo
Jan 3, 2013

Bottom Liner posted:

Again, the 4e chat spun off of industry talk and was largely aimed at why 4e style games are so hard to do/failed in the market and business talk around the 4e era. This is a very disingenuous representation of the discussion.

This is exactly how I feel - it seems like a reasonable topic of discussion for the TG INDUSTRY thread.

Sincerely, a lurker.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license

Pretty sure it's the latter - they needed people to keep playing 3.5 for Paizo to have any kind of feasible business model - even if they liked 4e, they couldn't shift to it because the GSL was so restrictive that it would have killed them.

But not enough people will play 3.5 if 4e is already out and is mostly unchallenged

So they had to create a something that was
A. close enough to 3.5 that it was backwards-compatible with everything Paizo aready did for 3.5
B. was its own separate IP so that Paizo controlled it and couldn't ever have it taken away from them again AND wasn't subject to the GSL
C. has enough of an audience that Paizo can still sell books with it

A and B were accomplished by writing Pathfinder itself, but they wouldn't be able to get to C without convincing people that 4e was bad and people needed to jump ship (or not adopt it altogether)

Caustic Soda
Nov 1, 2010
As a lurker, I'm somewhat ambivalent. The 4e discussion sometimes interests me and sometimes makes my eyes glaze over. That said, I'm glad this thread isn't just a gossip column where most of the gossip is people being literal rapists, racist as gently caress, particularly exploitative capitalists and what-have-you. It's important news, but reading nothing but is emotionally exhausting.

I think ultimately D&D/specific-RPG discussion is most on-topic when it covers the business end of things: how well they sell, what tie-in materirals there are, fan-and-other-customers reactions, that sort of thing. Discussion on what constitutes a good or well-balanced RPG is relevant only insofar as it touches on customer reception. So, for example, the discussion on how 4e was apparently a bridge too far for many people, or the customer base for OSR compared to 5e, or the like.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Again, anybody who wants to bring more into this thread about what they think is "industry thread appropriate" is welcome to do so at any time rather than dropping by just to complain whenever the discussion isn't to their tastes, if you've got something you want to discuss then be the change you want to see in the world, nobody's stopping you.

Puppy Time
Mar 1, 2005


I will say I also find sex pest discussion to be intensely boring. They're always the same story and there's not much need for anything beyond "This person sucks, don't give them money/work with them, here's receipts."

Though I feel like those discussions don't usually last more than like a page or two.

I also feel like a lot of the "Uhh, this is about the industry!" posts are kind of rules lawyery.

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Puppy Time posted:

I also feel like a lot of the "Uhh, this is about the industry!" posts are kind of rules lawyery.

Seems backwards when they're not the ones telling people to :getout:

The 4e talk directly spawned more thread relevant discussion like how and why Lancer succeeded and more. There's now more posts rules lawyering what this thread should be than there was initially about 4e lol.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Nissin Cup Nudist posted:

Did Paizo not like 4e because they genuinely disagreed with the design philosophy or because they were still mad about WOTC pulling the magazine license
They started the smear campaign before they, or even the people making it, knew what the final product of 4e was going to look like. They didn't have a chance to find out what the design philosophy was first.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Caustic Soda posted:

As a lurker, I'm somewhat ambivalent. The 4e discussion sometimes interests me and sometimes makes my eyes glaze over. That said, I'm glad this thread isn't just a gossip column where most of the gossip is people being literal rapists, racist as gently caress, particularly exploitative capitalists and what-have-you. It's important news, but reading nothing but is emotionally exhausting.

I think ultimately D&D/specific-RPG discussion is most on-topic when it covers the business end of things: how well they sell, what tie-in materirals there are, fan-and-other-customers reactions, that sort of thing. Discussion on what constitutes a good or well-balanced RPG is relevant only insofar as it touches on customer reception. So, for example, the discussion on how 4e was apparently a bridge too far for many people, or the customer base for OSR compared to 5e, or the like.

I second this as a really good idea on where to draw the line. "I think 4E is a good game" is as relevant to a tabletop industry thread as "Big Macs are better than Whoppers" is to a fast food industry thread, but exploring, say, what makes Lancer more of a success while 4E was a lot more controversial is incredibly on brand.

I think one elephant in the room we're ignoring in that discussion, by the way, is that Lancer isn't Dungeons and Dragons. If there's anything I've learned about DnD, it's practically a genre or industry of its own at this point, and all the design work in the world isn't going to change the fact that people have expectations about what Dungeons and Dragons is that'll color their perspectives. For another example, look no further than Dungeon World, and how it took PbtA design but added a ton of DnD elements because it needs to feel like DnD. Maybe not having that same tether, and the expectations of carrying a venerable brand name, is part of what let Lancer find its own identity and audience instead.

Arivia
Mar 17, 2011

The Bee posted:

I second this as a really good idea on where to draw the line. "I think 4E is a good game" is as relevant to a tabletop industry thread as "Big Macs are better than Whoppers" is to a fast food industry thread, but exploring, say, what makes Lancer more of a success while 4E was a lot more controversial is incredibly on brand.

I think one elephant in the room we're ignoring in that discussion, by the way, is that Lancer isn't Dungeons and Dragons. If there's anything I've learned about DnD, it's practically a genre or industry of its own at this point, and all the design work in the world isn't going to change the fact that people have expectations about what Dungeons and Dragons is that'll color their perspectives. For another example, look no further than Dungeon World, and how it took PbtA design but added a ton of DnD elements because it needs to feel like DnD. Maybe not having that same tether, and the expectations of carrying a venerable brand name, is part of what let Lancer find its own identity and audience instead.

i wonder how many people complaining about the D&D edition talk are just tired of D&D and wish this thread was a haven from D&D talk (while pretending that D&D isn't the vast majority of the rpg industry this thread is mostly devoted to)

Bottom Liner
Feb 15, 2006


a specific vein of lasagna

Arivia posted:

i wonder how many people complaining about the D&D edition talk are just tired of D&D and wish this thread was a haven from D&D talk (while pretending that D&D isn't the vast majority of the rpg industry this thread is mostly devoted to)

Agree with this too.

Speaking of, are there any industry metrics of how much the ttrpg as a whole pulls in annually (and how much of that is WotC)?

I know board games have a similar but not as extreme dynamic, with all of the hobbyist game industry combined only making up like 50% and Hasbro taking the rest.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

I don't know why asking lurkers was the solution here anyway, this isn't a play. Discussion threads are for people that are having a discussion. If lurkers want to see specific topics, I say we put up a price menu. Feet start at 40, viewers.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

The Bee posted:

I second this as a really good idea on where to draw the line. "I think 4E is a good game" is as relevant to a tabletop industry thread as "Big Macs are better than Whoppers" is to a fast food industry thread, but exploring, say, what makes Lancer more of a success while 4E was a lot more controversial is incredibly on brand.

I think one elephant in the room we're ignoring in that discussion, by the way, is that Lancer isn't Dungeons and Dragons. If there's anything I've learned about DnD, it's practically a genre or industry of its own at this point, and all the design work in the world isn't going to change the fact that people have expectations about what Dungeons and Dragons is that'll color their perspectives. For another example, look no further than Dungeon World, and how it took PbtA design but added a ton of DnD elements because it needs to feel like DnD. Maybe not having that same tether, and the expectations of carrying a venerable brand name, is part of what let Lancer find its own identity and audience instead.

I can't remember exactly who first coined it that there are two separate hobbies, the D&D Hobby and the Everything Else RPGs Hobby, but fundamentally it seems like they're correct. For a while the sentiment used to be that D&D's success would buoy smaller games up along with it in a very "rising tide lifts all boats" sort of way, but again and again it seems much more that D&D's successes only translate into more success for D&D. This isn't to say that D&D players never also play other games or vice versa, but the big blow-up of Critical Role and related scenes which have given D&D a massive shot in the arm have not demonstrably translated into a proportionate amount of additional success or popularity to other non-D&D games.

On the one hand, "as D&D goes so goes the rest of the hobby" doesn't necessarily seem to be true, but that does cut both ways; D&D is obliged to continue being the D&D-est D&D it can be, and apparently Chris Perkins et al are very, very reluctant to explore coloring outside those lines if some of the stuff reported by various freelancers and "diversity consultants" who were then unceremoniously ignored and cut loose is accurate. So yeah, I would say that not being beholden to having to placate an extremely set-in-stone vision of What D&D Is definitely helps when it comes to doing your own thing, or even just being able to say "yeah I think ability scores are pointless" without it becoming a big controversy.

I do think it's worth noting that a not-insubstantial part of the Everything Else RPGs scene includes "people who would like a D&D but different" and while Lancer not being D&D is correct, being able to go "Lancer is a mech game with a healthy dollop of 4E D&D in its DNA" is a thing that brought a number of folks aboard, so you can leverage "like D&D but X" but D&D isn't ever really going to be able to leverage "like this other game" in the same way, for whatever that's worth. That stream only runs one way.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Bottom Liner posted:

Agree with this too.

Speaking of, are there any industry metrics of how much the ttrpg as a whole pulls in annually (and how much of that is WotC)?

Annually no, but I did actually post something here a while back that touches on this.

https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1453393840765816841

That's billion-with-a-B money dollars from WotC alone. If this ICv2 post from back in February is anything reliable to go by, WotC may actually be more profitable than Hasbro's toy division.

Puppy Time
Mar 1, 2005


Kai Tave posted:

I can't remember exactly who first coined it that there are two separate hobbies, the D&D Hobby and the Everything Else RPGs Hobby, but fundamentally it seems like they're correct.

Definitely agree on this.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Kai Tave posted:

Annually no, but I did actually post something here a while back that touches on this.

https://twitter.com/CHofferCBus/status/1453393840765816841

That's billion-with-a-B money dollars from WotC alone. If this ICv2 post from back in February is anything reliable to go by, WotC may actually be more profitable than Hasbro's toy division.
It should be noted this includes Arena, which according to Hasbro's earning reports accounts for most of their increased earnings for at least 2019 and 2020. Turns out loot boxes are insanely profitable.

Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.

Terrible Opinions posted:

It should be noted this includes Arena, which according to Hasbro's earning reports accounts for most of their increased earnings for at least 2019 and 2020. Turns out loot boxes are insanely profitable.

tbf Magic's entire business model has been lootboxes since the beginning. Now they are just digital


Kai Tave posted:

I can't remember exactly who first coined it that there are two separate hobbies, the D&D Hobby and the Everything Else RPGs Hobby, but fundamentally it seems like they're correct. For a while the sentiment used to be that D&D's success would buoy smaller games up along with it in a very "rising tide lifts all boats" sort of way, but again and again it seems much more that D&D's successes only translate into more success for D&D. This isn't to say that D&D players never also play other games or vice versa, but the big blow-up of Critical Role and related scenes which have given D&D a massive shot in the arm have not demonstrably translated into a proportionate amount of additional success or popularity to other non-D&D games.

Yeah, I have friends who wanted to start playing 5e because they loved Adventure Zone. I ran some games for them, and managed to parlay them enjoying 5e into trying Starwars FFG, and Lancer and PF2e which has been fun.


But it's so dependent on someone(The GM usually) in the group pushing hard to break the inertia to try something different.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Dexo posted:

tbf Magic's entire business model has been lootboxes since the beginning. Now they are just digital

Yeah, I have friends who wanted to start playing 5e because they loved Adventure Zone. I ran some games for them, and managed to parlay them enjoying 5e into trying Starwars FFG, and Lancer and PF2e which has been fun.


But it's so dependent on someone(The GM usually) in the group pushing hard to break the inertia to try something different.

It's doubly frustrating for creators because time and again whenever someone brings up how it'd be nice if the big name actual play streamers did something other than D&D once in a while they get told that they're just jealous and bitter and anyway don't you know that the more people who play D&D, the more people might maybe play your game one day? Except that doesn't seem to be true at all! The more people who play D&D, the more people just wind up playing more D&D. Which is why people keep complaining about how D&D sucks the air out of the room. Like yeah, it's just the way it is, but that doesn't mean people have to be happy about it.

Success in the non-D&D gaming scene is basically a product of luck and whatever advantages you can bring to the table. Again, Lancer had a lot going for it including built-in internet celebrity, strong art, and creators who could afford to give their game a years-long open playtest during which time it was making 0 dollars. And Lancer is an absolute drop in the bucket compared to the, what is it, $10 million Avatar: the Last Airbender kickstarter which seems largely to be a product of "holy loving poo poo it's an AVATAR game!" which I'm sure will result in more attempts to recapture that particular lightning in a bottle. Otherwise it's a lot of hustling and trying to be heard over the sound of D&D drowning everything else out.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!
The greater tabletop ecosystem nowadays definitely seems reliant on people getting into DnD, getting tired of DnD, and someone in their circle introducing them to not-DnD. And that's a process that more often and not just ends in DnD players who complain about DnD instead of people trying different games out.

If the Avatar game leads to an 80s-esque resurgence of tie in tabletop RPGs I'll laugh my rear end off. I want to see the modern design philosophy equivalents of poo poo like the TMNT and Street Fighter systems.

Heliotrope
Aug 17, 2007

You're fucking subhuman

Kai Tave posted:

It's doubly frustrating for creators because time and again whenever someone brings up how it'd be nice if the big name actual play streamers did something other than D&D once in a while they get told that they're just jealous and bitter and anyway don't you know that the more people who play D&D, the more people might maybe play your game one day? Except that doesn't seem to be true at all! The more people who play D&D, the more people just wind up playing more D&D. Which is why people keep complaining about how D&D sucks the air out of the room. Like yeah, it's just the way it is, but that doesn't mean people have to be happy about it.

I remember when The Adventure Zone switched to Monster of the Week, a bunch of their audience got mad and basically said "Why aren't they doing this in D&D? There's no need for another system! This sucks because it isn't D&D. When are they going back to D&D?" And when the ads for their third campaign were airing, Travis very specifically said "We're going back to D&D for this one."

Coolness Averted
Feb 20, 2007

oh don't worry, I can't smell asparagus piss, it's in my DNA

GO HOGG WILD!
🐗🐗🐗🐗🐗

bewilderment posted:

'Graduate Your Game' is still the funniest unironic TTRPG marketing I've ever seen.

It's up there with the other White Wolf late 90's/early 2000's stunt of a WWE crossover. I'm a little sad it only went 1 way, and we never saw The Brood written as the anarch rulers of Miami or something.
What was so weird about the WWE tie in and cross promotion was it happened in the era when White Wolf was the most up its own rear end and encouraged players to be the same. I remember as a teen feeling insulted my deep intellectual hobby would sully itself with such a lowbrow cross promotion, and would imagine other teens being dicks if the kid into wrestling asked to join their RPG group because he saw the ad in WWE magazine and wanted to play the game Gangrel was from.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Heliotrope posted:

I remember when The Adventure Zone switched to Monster of the Week, a bunch of their audience got mad and basically said "Why aren't they doing this in D&D? There's no need for another system! This sucks because it isn't D&D. When are they going back to D&D?" And when the ads for their third campaign were airing, Travis very specifically said "We're going back to D&D for this one."

Something that really sucks a lot and seems to happen more than once is some actual play group or another playing a game that isn't D&D, and then doing even less than the bare minimum in terms of telling people who made the game, where they can buy it, etc. Even when someone's game gets chosen to be used as someone else's podcast material, there's no guarantee you'll even get exposure.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

The Bee posted:

The greater tabletop ecosystem nowadays definitely seems reliant on people getting into DnD, getting tired of DnD, and someone in their circle introducing them to not-DnD.
5E is incredibly easy to pick up and get started. You can get going with $20 for the Starter Set and $0 for the online basic rulebook, and you're set for weeks of smashing goblins. And if you still like the game after all that you can buy the other box, or one of the big campaigns, or whatever, really.

I don't think many other games have the same kind of mix of recognizability and approachability. FFG's Star Wars RPG is probably up there, I can't imagine they would have done four box sets if they didn't move units. Most other games sit in this unfortunate place where the customer needs to know it exists and needs to be willing to drop $60 for the hardback core book that probably doesn't even come with an adventure.

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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Siivola posted:

5E is incredibly easy to pick up and get started. You can get going with $20 for the Starter Set and $0 for the online basic rulebook, and you're set for weeks of smashing goblins. And if you still like the game after all that you can buy the other box, or one of the big campaigns, or whatever, really.

I don't think many other games have the same kind of mix of recognizability and approachability. FFG's Star Wars RPG is probably up there, I can't imagine they would have done four box sets if they didn't move units. Most other games sit in this unfortunate place where the customer needs to know it exists and needs to be willing to drop $60 for the hardback core book that probably doesn't even come with an adventure.

If you extend things from hardcopy to digital, there are a lot of fully complete RPGs that you can get for $20-25 and these days digital is way less niche than it used to be, so from a certain perspective I think the "D&D is really cheap to get into compared to other games" argument isn't entirely correct. Also while knowing something exists is definitely a hurdle, the hobby is no longer really split into people who are super plugged into online and people who aren't, everybody's online these days, huge amounts of D&D fans are as extremely online as the most crusty USENET warriors were back in the day, so the barrier to discovering other games exist is if not non-existent then it's at least lower than it's ever been, I'd say. Even people who aren't super hardcore RPG hobbyists are likely to know what Kickstarter is or to have heard of itch.io even if they don't have a shopping list of specific things they're looking for.

But D&D has unrivaled market share, and that's one of the hugest and most important things going for it. It has actual store shelf space, it has its name on the lips of all your favorite celebrity voice actors, it continues to be synonymous with "RPG" in the broader consciousness, people write articles about it, it makes appearances in TV shows, it just had a new video game release, and that is pretty unquestionably an advantage it has that no other game right now can even come close to except maybe for Pathfinder. The best, most amazingly wonderful indie RPG in the world is still having to rely on word of mouth on twitter and discord servers to get anywhere.

Basically I think the approachability aspect of D&D compared to other RPGs is sort of not really true, I don't actually think it is objectively more approachable than a lot of other games (yeah a lot of people "get" generic D&D style fantasy but a lot of people get a lot of other stuff too) but the recognizability factor can't be beat.

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