The Gaming Den, Inc.

[Chamomile]

Hi. I'm new.

The idea of using the Gaming Den's talent pool to make a gaming company has been floated a couple of times. A friend of mine and I have been casually working on a TTRPG for the past six months or so. We often hash out ideas for video games, novels, and etc., and TTRPGs are pretty much just the latest of what we've been creating. The difference being that we realized that what we've created is not just a pipe dream but 60% of a rough draft for an actual, finished product (which should be finished within a few weeks now that I've stepped up production from "when I feel like it" to "get something done everyday"). At least one other person on this forum has at least one system completed to the point where you could play a campaign in it.

So what obstacles stand between those of us who'd like to be a part of something like that and a successful game company? I know of three off the top of my head, but having never worked in the industry before, I'm betting there's more.

1) We have no art. Looking at the PHB for D&D 3.5, roughly 25% of all pages have some art in it. Higher in certain sections, like the chapter on classes.
2) We're going to need some method for people to send us money in exchange for our game. This isn't exactly uncommon or hard on the internet (and it's really straightforward in meatspace), but unless someone here has the skills needed to set this up online, knows of a website that will do it for us, or has the contacts to print and sell a game in meatspace, it's going to be a problem.
3) We need some way to advertise our game. Even assuming we sell online and have no production costs and all effort put in is totally volunteered, we still need to actually sell our product in order to consider ourselves successful. And I really doubt we'll be able to push a game to market with zero costs in the first place. If nothing else, we're going to need some copyrights.

[Doom]

4) You can't make any money at it, you're better off investing your time scrubbing toilets.

[fectin]

selling online is easy. Dreamhost is free for a year, and $100/year after that, and do most of the work of setting up a store (or a blog, or a wiki, or whatever you happen to like). That runs you squarely up against #3.

Doom isn't quite correct; you can make money just fine. It won't be enough to live on, but it might be enough for your hobby to support itself.

[Josh_Kablack]

Art is cheap.

Just go hang around a comic shop or art school and you'll find suckers who will work for lunch or "exposure". You could probably find similar deals on deviant art or even *shudder* facebook if you're persistent about it.
Alternately Do a bit of study fine art, art history and 19th century illustration and you can fine stuff in the public domain.

However, appropriate, quality art on deadline is something you still have to pay for.

***

Advertising isn't all that hard either. What you need is a webstie and then group of groups who all go run demos at the various gaming Cons around the country. (In fact the only sane financial reason be in the gaming "industry" is to be able to deduct your convention expenses from your Schedule C receipts)

[the_taken]

It looks to me like you're at the product development stage and are thinking about getting some advertising done. You're jumping ahead of yourself if you think you can make a playable game, glue some pretty pictures on it and call it a winning product.

You need to take a step back from the game design and do some Market Research if you want this to be a successful business venture. You need to know who's going to buy your game and why? What need is you TTRPG going to full fill? What is missing from the current market that you can provide? You're going to want a good idea of what the market has and what people are looking for to see if you have a profitable idea.

After you have a what you think is a good idea of what you can provide all your potential customers, segment them all based on their desires and pick the most profitable group you can fine tune your RPG to get the most amount of money out of. If group A will buy allot of your stuff at an inflated price, but there's only a few people in group A, it may better to drop the gold pressed book cover to appeal to group B. Unless there's already tons of competition appealing to Group B that will cut down your profits.

After you've picked you're ideal customer, you need to adjust your product to appeal to them. Is your target customer of shorter attention span? have less things to keep track of. Adjusting your product to your ideal customer will mean that they'll have less complaints about your game. Follow the rules for good game design, but also take into consideration your chosen market segment when designing things. And don't be shy, ask your customers what they think of your product with prototypes and play tests.

Then, you can start thinking about advertising. The pictures that go on or in the book are part of the advertising, and that helps with word of mouth advertising. Your chosen market segment will give you clues as to how to tell them about your TTRPG and where to reach them in other ways.

[Chamomile]

Alright, market research.

...

How? How do you go about getting an accurate idea of what people would be interested in what our game has to offer? If it helps, the game my friend and I are designing has basically four things that make it different: 1) It's a swords and sorcery game set in a world that is not just a Tolkien rip-off (i.e. no goblins, orcs, or halflings), 2) Power increases slower and caps out at a lower point than D&D, 3) The primary mechanic is different from what I've seen from D&D, OWoD, Shadowrun, and Coda, and I'm fairly certain it's original, and most importantly 4) Mass combat, realm management, and politics are all integral components of the end-game, something which apparently doesn't happen in the current market but which there is quite possibly some demand for. If it turns out that there's very little overlap in the appeal of these four factors, we can change some of them to suit others. But how do we find out who'd be interested in the first place?

Also: Thanks to Fectin, Josh, and Taken for your help.

[Josh_Kablack]

You have mistaken my jaded cynicism for actually useful insights.

[the_taken]

Mass combat, realm management, and politics are all integral components of the end-game, something which apparently doesn't happen in the current market but which there is quite possibly some demand for.

Quite possibly isn't enough. You need to know you have customers to sell to, and you need to know if there is enough of them to be profitable. I think the answer is yes, but hard evidence is way better than a hunch because hard evidence is wrong a lot less.

What you have here are four things you think your TTRPG is providing.

1) It's a swords and sorcery game set in a world that is not just a Tolkien rip-off (i.e. no goblins, orcs, or halflings)

How big is the demand for a non-tolkian rip off? How important is it, really?

2) Power increases slower and caps out at a lower point than D&D

Again, who cares about this? Who actually goes looking for a game with slower power progression and smaller power scale? How many of those people are there.

3) The primary mechanic is different from what I've seen from D&D, OWoD, Shadowrun, and Coda, and I'm fairly certain it's original

Is being different actually important for a customer? Is there a big enough demand for a very different game, or would a sort of different game be enough?

4) Mass combat, realm management, and politics are all integral components of the end-game

I can get behind this personally, but how big is the demand for this kind of content? What kind of people want this kind of stuff and what sort of value are they looking for?

Now the next question. How many people are looking for all those things, and not one part and another separately?

But, really, this isn't good enough. This is what your TTRPG is doing, but is it what the potential customers want? That's what you have to check. What do the potential customers want, and how can you provide it?

Now, how do you answer of all those questions? Go talk to your potential customers. Don't try and sell you product (it's not ready), but log on to a bazillion forums and start asking questions and lurking to see what people want. The best feedback for what people want is the people themselves.

[Chamomile]

@Josh: You provided jaded, cynical answers to potential problems. I am not above exploiting the naivette of others to help make my game design hobby pay for itself. Help with tax evasion is just a bonus. My friend may have a few more reservations, but...Probably not.

@Taken: Bazillion forums. Got it. What I've dug up (or just knew about already) is the RPG Site, EN World,Critical Fumble, RPG Life, RPG Net, the Erfworld forums, and the Giant in the Playground forums.

Question posited to the forums in general: As far as you know, will any of these places be bad to go poking around for market information (and if so, why)? Do you know of any other places I might go looking? Also, suggestions as to what questions I could ask to gather information?

[Judging__Eagle]

Chamomile, you need to get in with the unwashed masses.

You don't count as doing research unless you can say you've peered into the horror of /tg/ on 4chan.org. I'm completely serious. The fact that people say whatever the fuck they want means that you'll get the most biting and publicly submerged thoughts within a field of interest. You need to be able to tap into what people don't actually talk about most of the time, or when they can be logged, in order to give them something they want to talk about.

When Frank was working on "what the fuck do people want for magic/speshul items?" he got two main points that kept coming up again and again. Both were completely and utterly reasonable and plausible. Taken together, they were completely opposed; and realizing that fact, was able to spell out why the concept of "magic/speshul items" is so conceptually mishandled in games.

People do those contradictory things all the time, and don't even realize it; and you're going to 1) be able to realize that people want opposed things, that are perfectly reasonable when taken separately, and 2) somehow allow people to have a semblance of what they wanted of those opposed things.

Whatever special snowflake things your game has needs to be able to stand up to all sorts of stress tests if you want it to be long-term viable. Some such tests will be trying to achieve contradictory goals.

[Chamomile]

So...I can't really pick out a single piece of actual advice from anything past the first three sentences of that. And your justification for that is that some elements of tabletop roleplaying are just so unspeakable that people refuse to speak of them where the public eye might be watching. It's gonna take more than one guy's say-so to sell me on that idea. Where's Frank's bit on the conflicting desires of magic items, though? That looks interesting.

EDIT: Also, having taken a glance through /tg/...Is there seriously enough discussion of actual game mechanics in here to justify the time sunk into trawling through it, when that's all time I could spend on forums where finding topics relevant to what I'm looking for is much easier, or using the results of that information to revise the game? Is there anyway to sift through the banal conversations to something interesting?

[Judging__Eagle]

It should be noted that /tg/ actually finishes, releases, and uses products developed on an image board, where threads are auto-deleted. That's saying a lot compared to other boards that develop nothing, release nothing, and produce nothing except for the occasional poorly written spot-fix.

I recommended /tg/ because it's a constant froth, and you're going to see themes rather quickly. Only the most tractable memes survive on an image board, and knowing what are, where from, who are, why are and how those memes are so tractable is important if you want people to give a shit about your content.

Remember, places like 4chan are the cutting edge, and they're the only places that create the ideas that result in icanhascheezburger.com. The signal to noise ratio is low, but you have to adjust your dial to the right frequencies, and keep listening to signals that come through clearly.

The place generates new art ideas/characters/memes based on existing content, and rehashes existing art into new ideas.

[Chamomile]

Well, okay, cool. But I'm looking to do market research on what people want, not what other people are making.

[FatR]

Judging Eagle speaks truth about /tg/ as the closest reasonable representation of what people actually think within one board. Rpg.net, ENworld, Paizo.com and GITP forums all have moderation that suppresses discussion of major RPG products by forbidding strongly negative opitions in general at best; and engaging in outright defensive fanboyism for products of companies, they are associated with in some way, at worst. TGD is basically the club for people who want to express such negativity and write take thats to the published RPGs... without having their views challenged, except by an occasional troll.

And Frank and, IIRC, Koumei are about the only people here who actually systematically produce content that can be seen as valuable (even if I personally care very little about most of it), so I'm not sure what is talent you're talking about.

[Chamomile]

I saw the idea come up from established members, and I assumed they knew more about the abilities of the forum population than a guy who's been lurking for a week.

[icyshadowlord]

Now the only challenge for you is to convince Koumei and Frank into this. And don't underestimate the power of lurkers. I might have been lurking here for quite a while, but that doesn't mean that I COULD maybe write up something good given time and motivation (problem is that I usually have neither of those).

[Chamomile]

Frank's busy. I mean, if he wants to help, I certainly won't turn him down. If the pixie dust pays off, I might even be able to pay him a bit for it. But at no stage was I planning on his contributions, because at his level of availability, it'd be absurd to expect him to write anything other than "whatever he feels like."

[MfA]

As I said in the other thread ... I had an idea for an entirely different kind of sales platform for TTRPGs (it would still need content). How much demand do you think would there be for a framework which lets you not just buy the book ... but also the ability to easily create a houseruled version of the book and access to a website version of the rules?

Concretely you'd buy the right to make a branch of the Docbook XML sources of the book in a versioned source repository (Calenco) and generate epub and HTML versions (with product identity, which includes art, so not freely copyable). You'd have to pay extra for a print version at for instance Lulu. You could give other buyers of the original book access to your branch (concretely you'd tell your players to buy the book and provide them with a link directly to the epub/html of your branch, they would not be confronted with Calenco or XML ... don't want to scare anyone off).

The stylesheets for conversion and the sources of the artwork would remain private ... but you'd provide a preconfigured toolchain with schemas to make editing as easy as possible (not trivial, but as easy as it can be for something which has to be both pretty printable and convertible to an easy to use hyperlinked ebook/website).

How many obsessive houserulers are there?

[MGuy]

If you can get 3 people in on your project from here at all I'd actually be surprised. So far I can't tell if anyone on this board can even agree on what a good TTRPG should look like much less that they are willing to work on one for an extended amount of time or for profit. I'm pretty sure Frank is about free exchange of ideas, I am already invested heavily into my own system though I like to mine other people's stuff for ideas, and many people are fairly satisfied with the Tomes. I'd love to read over the product you have if for no other reason than to mine it for ideas on my own private ruleset but if you find enough people to get in on it and dedicated I'd also help with what I can.

[Judging__Eagle]

Chamomile, I don't think you got it. /tg/ is your market research. RPG.net, the WoTC boards, etc. etc. etc. are all self-congratulatory fan-wank sites. They're not willing to cut apart with absolute pragmatism the products that they so love; meaning that they will never tell you what is actually wrong with the stuff they currently use, nor what they're looking for in products. In other words, they're less than useless, since they give you data that is in conflict with what is actually fact.

The most horrible things people say, with complete lack of censorship and/or scrutiny into identity means that people will only say what they want to.

You're really not going to be able to hope to know what people want unless you can bear to watch them completely destroy products, and understand what and why they say what they say. If your own content doesn't make the same fuck ups as the commercial mainstream, as identified by rabid product users, then maybe you'll have a leg up on other people.

Getting people from here on-board is something that is a dubious prospect. If your material doesn't pass muster with them (for whatever reason), they will tell you, and if you're not willing to make changes, then you can kiss their help goodbye. A lot of good work is done here, but many people here have put a lot of points into Willpower, and take strongly opposed stances on many key parts of the storytelling that comes from games.

Of course, if you are very clear about your design goals, then maybe you can get people to accept the material you're using. If those design goals are not contradictory, whether you realize it or not.

I'd recommend looking up the Game Design Flowchart via the search engine. It's probably the simplest way to see if your game will do what you want it to do.

[Leress]

I'd recommend looking up the Game Design Flowchart via the search engine. It's probably the simplest way to see if your game will do what you want it to do.

Here you are Chamo,

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=31521

[Chamomile]

Link was interesting. Thank you.

Forums actually run by an existing gaming company are unreliable. Moderated message boards will always have a certain degree of bias, sure. /tg/ is probably a useful market research tool. But it's going to take some seriously hard numbers to convince me that there is exactly one demographic that ever buys new products, and they all go to /tg/.

[CCarter]

Well while thinking on /tg/ may be unfiltered, its still going to be biased based on who goes there - whatever that demographic is. The more data you can get from multiple forums the better.
Of the forums I'm familiar with RPGnet has a large population base even if the moderation is draconian, playing a fairly wide variety of games, though it has darlings of various sorts.
therpgsite has limited moderation and is largely older gamers with a broad knowledge of lots of games but without much deeper understanding of system design - many of the people there are actively against theorized or game balance (and the chief mod is more or less at war with the Forge).

On the four selling points: a novel game mechanic is potentially a sales hook but really it has to not just be different, you need to find and develop/sell what advantages your system has over the known options. (I'm somewhat skeptical you've actually discovered a new mechanic too...)
One way to target an audience might be to locate a similar product that already exists and market to them, since they're likely to be interested. If the setting for your game is a drawcard, perhaps include conversion notes or otherwise make it accessible to gamers who use d20 or whatever else.

As far as selling .pdfs go, you could try through DriveThruRPG/RPGnow. (I've done that before, but through another company - which screwed me - so I don't know what sales you're likely to get or how you'd about arranging this directly or what the costs to you would be. Perhaps send them an email). Visitors buying other stuff might notice your product at least.

[fectin]

Take all advice with a grain of salt.

[Almaz]

Take all advice with a grain of salt.

The Gaming Den's help is useful!

But you may not want the Gaming Den's help.

Kind of like how solving the Lament Configuration can be an enlightening experience.