Table Top Industry Defeatism

[kzt]

To be honest, I don't care how big and heavy the world book for the Dresden Files RPG, because that content is the main reason I bought it. The system you are supposed to use seems pretty awfully large and complex for a supposed rules-lite system, but I don't care. That isn't why I bought the game.

[FatR]

Yeah, those dirty Japs amirite? Xenophobic civilian murdering savages, the lot of them.

You're assuming that murdering civilians requires xenophobia. This assumption is very, hmmm... Western.

Japanese under the neo-Shogunate of 1930s, at least those in charge, were, of course, very strongly convinced in their racial and spiritual supremacy. Regardless, their cruelty to civilians and PoWs was chielfly motivated by deeply-seated general lack of belief in things like rules of war, which was much in evidence throughout the Japanese history, and reemerged as soon as Japan thought itself strong enough to not care about the opinion of the Western powers. On the command level, Japanese resorted to extermination of undesirables, scorched earth tactics and bombing civilian populations whenever seeing even the faintest possible ghost of advantage to be gained from it. On the troop level it was largely the human-universal "because the worst were allowed to get away with it, and the rest were peer-pressured into going along". Except allowing the worst to get away with it was incredibly common and did not seem to degrade the troop discipline.

Not like proper Americans, who... uhh... well okay I mean there was all the racist propaganda and the internment camps and the civilian bombings, but do those really count?

No, of course not. You seem to subscribe to the absurd notion - the pervasive influence of which, to think of it, is another thing why I finally dropped mainstream comics - to the notion that one should stick to all the rules when fighting an enemy, which pointedly disregards said rules whenever it is advantageous to do so. So when Thor bombs Chinese with their own atomic-powered superhuman they unleashed on US soil that is somehow crazy enough to be brought as an example of ridiculous propaganda. I think, before sinking further in the real-world political debates, the current state of Marvel and DC universes illustrates amply enough why such position is both absurd and outright evil.

For the record, those few rules of war that Japanese restrained from violating, such as not sinking hospital ships or not using chemical weapons, were observed by their Allied opponents as well.

Or Germans, who... oh boy. You know, I'm sure that whole Holocaust thing is just one big exaggeration.

Why do you think that Germans consciously trying to become as bad or worse by overdozing themselves on a crazy and ruinous ideology (whether they succeeded depends on whether you think the total bodycount or the rate of civlian/PoW extermination per year is more important) somehow makes their Japanese allies less repulsive?

Or Soviets who... uhh... mass rape isn't murder, technically, so really if you think about it the point stands.

Well, Soviet mass rape actually is nothing more than a piece of Cold War propaganda/German projection which seems to have been popularized relatively recently, when media became obsessed with rape.

Not that the Soviet regime wasn't overall terrible and self-destructive, mind you. But when you fight an enemy intent on extermination and enslavement, and after you win, that enemy largely cannot bring any better charges against you than crimes which, oh, accidentally leave no clear evidence (such as mass graves and ruins) behind, you are an admirable example of restraint.

Note I'm not actually strawmanning you, you're just offended that I'm paraphrasing your position in a way that makes your bigotry as blatantly offensive as it is.

And now you're denying your strawmanning.

The "political agenda" behind making Thor a woman (and Captain America black) is that "women and minorities can and should serve as leading roles equal to white men in popular entertainment," and you apparently do not agree with that political agenda.

(1)I do not agree with any blatant political agenda in my entertainment, because that, like any obvious preaching, is an indication of storytelling failure.
And if Marvel cannot make Black Panther or Spider-Girl comics (to name some of my old personal favorites) sell to save their lives, maybe the solution is to write and market well enough to not depend on legacy character for pulling sales, not to give those legacy character sex changes and skin lifts.

(2)As you insist on resorting to this sort of rhetorics, I must say that the political agenda you are actually defending is "women and blacks should have the rights to everything white men have earned, while shouldering none of the responsibilities". Because see, that's exactly what Marvel is currently doing - giving women and black characters the popularity that white men have earned, while absolving them of the responsibility to pull their own sales. I suppose defending a position like this makes you a bigot, a racist, and in general a principled enemy of the idea that all humans are born equal.

[Kaelik]

(1)I do not agree with any blatant political agenda in my entertainment, because that, like any obvious preaching, is an indication of storytelling failure.

This doesn't even make sense. Blatant political agenda is sometimes an essential part of entertainment and storytelling. And there is no way that making someone else pick up the Hammer that has already had multiple owners be a woman is "blatant political agenda" in the story. We know it is political agenda because it happened in a world where thousands of people bitched about it, and thousands of people counter bitched, but in universe, it is just another person picking up the hammer, and zero times has she sung the "anything you can do, I can do better" song while insulting manly man thor.

And if Marvel cannot make Black Panther or Spider-Girl comics (to name some of my old personal favorites) sell to save their lives, maybe the solution is to write and market well enough to not depend on legacy character for pulling sales, not to give those legacy character sex changes and skin lifts.

(2)As you insist on resorting to this sort of rhetorics, I must say that the political agenda you are actually defending is "women and blacks should have the rights to everything white men have earned, while shouldering none of the responsibilities". Because see, that's exactly what Marvel is currently doing - giving women and black characters the popularity that white men have earned, while absolving them of the responsibility to pull their own sales.

Yes, because there is no reason at all to think that Marvel will expect Jane-Thor to continue to sell comics at a commiserate rate, and expect her to pull her weight.

You can tell because never in history has anyone ever expected the new person to come in and live up to the standards of the old or get sacked. That never happens.

EDIT: Wait Why the FUCKITY FUCK IS this conversation still occuring in this thread. I just assumed it was in the other thread because the entire post was nothing but comics shit. MODDDDD pls save me.

[Blade]

have the rights to everything white men have earned

I'm curious about the ordeals you had to go through to earn your white male privileges. For me, it was mostly about getting born and then everything fell into place.

[DSMatticus]

Moved to the thread it's actually supposed to be in.

I'm trying, okay? Blame these shitheads for making it so difficult.

[Dominicius]

Here is my prediction on what is going to happen. Table top companies are not going to recover. Instead what we will see is videogame companies are going to move in and snatch up the free pie. Not only do they have more money to toss around but they have smarter people at the helm as well.

We already saw Blizzard come in and snatch up the CCG genre via Hearthstone. Now we just need to wait for the same thing to happen with D&D.

[Mord]

We already saw Blizzard come in and snatch up the CCG genre via Hearthstone. Now we just need to wait for the same thing to happen with D&D.

Is Hearthstone really doing as well as all that? Last I heard, it was a thing, but not the thing.

[nockermensch]

How much of TTRPG decline can be attributed to the "golden age" for board games? From a casual player standpoint, something like Descent has a lot of pluses going on for it: single-session commitment (but still able to span multiple sessions), lower total play-time per session, rules explanation and setup is minimal compared to chargen for a lot of TTRPGs, explicit and definitive rules cover interactions between the "MC" and the players (including leveling and loot). It seems like getting into D&D is more of a fanatic's choice that wants the ability to freeform by comparison.

Well, my own RPG group was destroyed because boardgames. My FLGS survives on Magic and board games, with proper RPGs having less shelf space than comics.

So yeah, there's what Frank said, but there's also a completely different entertainment landscape nowadays: If you want to get seriously committed to some game there are videogames you can sink thousands of hours into, with objective settings allowing you to objectively tell others how good you are, and if you want to play something with friends for some hours, there's Zombicide.

[Stahlseele]

We already saw Blizzard come in and snatch up the CCG genre via Hearthstone. Now we just need to wait for the same thing to happen with D&D.

Is Hearthstone really doing as well as all that? Last I heard, it was a thing, but not the thing.

Do you know any others?
If the discussion came to computer based CCGs, could you, without looking something up, name more than the yugioh series and heartstone?

[Kaelik]

We already saw Blizzard come in and snatch up the CCG genre via Hearthstone. Now we just need to wait for the same thing to happen with D&D.

Is Hearthstone really doing as well as all that? Last I heard, it was a thing, but not the thing.

Do you know any others?
If the discussion came to computer based CCGs, could you, without looking something up, name more than the yugioh series and heartstone?

He is claiming that computer games will replace table top. And he uses as an example hearthstone replacing tabletop CCGs. So... yes, I can name another example. Magic the Gathering. The comparison is not "most popular CCG" if there were four million computer CCGs equally as profitable, his point would still be true (if it were true otherwise). But a single table top CCG contradicts him.

[MisterDee]

(Paraphrase) Some stuff about Magic(/paraphrase)

One thing MTG has going for it is that it's so goddamn great at putting the rules right where you need them.

You buy a starter deck and you get exactly all the rules you need to play the game with that deck, and it fits in a palm-sized twenty-page flyer. And you're out ten dollars.

You're beginning to get the hang of it and graduate to building your own decks and buying single cards and stuff, or someone plays a card you've never see? Even if for some reason you don't have net access at the moment, chances are the extra rules you need to know are right there on the card as reminder text.

You have a relatively complex question about something? Tons of official online resources for that (or a level 1 judge if you're at any tournament).

You're building a rogue deck for the next Pro Tour and have just located a particularly obscure rule interaction? THEN you bring out the big guns and get in touch with a local high-level judge or break out the encyclopedia-sized comprehensive rules.

It's amazing how RPGs do this backward, when you think about it: here's the encyclopedia-sized basic rules (for a cool hundred dollars or so), in six months some sperglords will be telling you how they houserule stuff, in a year and a half we'll have official errata and if you're lucky, in three years someone else will come out with reminder cards for conditions, a SORD for the system, or something else.

[OgreBattle]

I've heard a loooot of developers making it on "free core, pay supplements, and an OK marketing campaign." You need more -- better marketing, good art, etc. -- to have a really big thing, but that seems to be the 21st century pattern of success.

What developers are making it and how did they do their marketing?

hearthstone

Hearthstone's currently the 37th highest grossing game in the US iOS store and doing well in various other countries. (https://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/top/?device=iphone)

Activision-Blizzard also recently bought the makers of Candy Crush, King.com, really increasing their presence in mobile.

[Jeff W]

Hearthstone generates $20 million per month in revenue, which is about the same as MTG.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Hearthstone generates $20 million per month in revenue, which is about the same as MTG.

[citation needed]

[virgil]

Hearthstone generates $20 million per month in revenue, which is about the same as MTG.

[citation needed]

http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/hea ... n-monthly/

[angelfromanotherpin]

Okay, that's impressive. Last year the estimation was that it was bringing in less than half of that.

[vagrant]

Which is my point. The second a CCG went fully digital and mobile, it matched the industry leader in 2 years. And this is a well-regarded brand.

[Lokey]

angelfromanotherpin tends to bring up the points I would, but I might have some idears that aren't me-too right now.

US comic books might be an interesting analogy as the numbers might be similar. I.e. tons of titles with today's top ten/twenty circulation were dropped for low sales in the 90s. Of course it was a huge bubble market, and after the crash everyone but DC and Disney had a foot on the ledge. Of course we have those sales numbers and have a better estimate of time it takes to create and costs involved (higher cover prices might be a wash, Walmart is going to take a bigger cut than Jim's Comic shop and all that).

There's been a few posters that have said premium paper/binding and top drawer art or GTFO...I'm not sure that's an insurmountable obstacle (smaller scale publishing is easier/cheaper now China a decade ago notwithstanding), but sounds a tall order for a startup to make a sale to you. I don't know the industry well enough to figure the break even points money-wise. That might be an interesting conversation but not one I can really participate in. (Should bring up that game rules aren't IP. You can TM some things that's about it...and it costs big money to defend that IP. Fluff and art, those are protected to an extent, art moreso. Oh, on the computer/phone is harder than it seems. There are tons of ways to screw that up and lose all your customers...)

There's a specific question about cost of production v can the actual creators afford to live off this that I don't have time to articulate well enough right now.

Other piece of anecdata: I've noticed that random IP board games/RP-lite products that I've played in the last yonk seemed to be of higher quality than the garbage with hot property tie-in I've seen in the past. Like the Walking Dead board game, some interesting things going on there that don't seem accidental. Granted the devs probably worked a lot of unpaid overtime on that too

[Sacrificial Lamb]

So I've noticed the general acceptance among roleplaying enthusiasts that the entire industry is doomed. To accept that the new normal for a game's sales is outrageously bad compared to where things were just a few years ago. This seems very strange to me.

What set me off of course was people claiming that Onyx Path was an industry leader that was doing well. That's insane. Onyx Path has major products that sell a few thousand units and minor products that sell a thousand. Like, one thousand. And it has a development schedule that is literally years behind for products that are already supposedly funded and finished. In the last decade of White Wolf's existence (1996-2006), it sold more books every year than Onyx Path has sold during its entire run. Fourth Edition D&D was shit canned and the head of D&D fired every single year for its entire run because it only sold hundreds of thousands of books in a ten month period. To say that V20 is a "success" in the "current marketplace" with its 7,900 likes on Facebook is to accept that the market place is a thousand times smaller than it was a decade ago.

So... why and how would the industry have shrunk so much? The usual vague claim is that somehow internets have eaten up everything and the old economy is fuxxored. But how can we take that claim seriously? People downloading didn't make the music industry or the film industry go away. And more importantly, electronic books sales are still less than 1/6th of the book sales market. Sales of e-books is growing, and until this year (where physical book sales are growing again), physical book sales have been falling. But we haven't reached parity yet. E-books aren't 50% of the market, let alone the 99.9% of the market required to account for a one thousand fold drop in book sales. The reality is that overall, sales of books just aren't that bleak at the moment, with yearly sales up almost 5% from this time last year.

Have the genres that inspire RPGs dried up and blown away? Well, the Twilight novels sold over 120 million copies and the Harry Potter novels sold nearly half a billion, so that seems unlikely.

Is nerdiness just not "cool" the way it was in the early two thousands? Again, with the Avengers movies being a billion dollar a year industry, that seems like a difficult argument to make.

It is an undeniable fact that the games that dominated the scene in the years 1995 to 2005 just don't have as a big presence anymore. The latest editions of D&D, World of Darkness, Exalted, Earthdawn, Call of Cthulhu, and Shadowrun are punchlines to jokes. They have put up sales numbers that would be rounding errors of the sales of past editions. But if the industry is floundering, I think we have to go to the simple fact that all of the major products are floundering rather than invoking some magic inevitable doom for the industry as a whole.

The products we have out right now are shoddy, bloated, unfinished, and poorly marketed. If Ford Motors decided to stop advertising and make rickety Model Ts with a skeleton crew, we wouldn't be surprised if their sales tanked. If all the auto manufacturers did that kind of shit at the same time, we wouldn't be surprised when people bought less new cars.

Sad as it is, we are in a dark age of role playing because the industry is producing garbage that people don't want to buy. Not because people wouldn't buy products from the industry if there was good stuff to be had.

-Username17

Despite popular belief to the contrary, the rpg industry is not necessarily doomed.....but it's definitely in a terrible slump. You're right; this is a "Dark Age" for roleplaying games.

However, the company to fix this will not be WoTC. They probably can't unfuck themselves, and fix this situation. A third party gaming company (Paizo, a new company, an angel investor, etc.) would have to pick up the slack. For that to happen, a new game would need:

* a well-organized SRD
* a re-embrace of the OGL
* an online character builder
* at least one decent boxed set
* high production values
* good marketing
* modularity
* the core rules should have a semi-low barrier to entry (in regards to both price and game mechanics), with the OPTION of greatly increased complexity
* a decent glossary
* a well-organized index
* a more intuitive character sheet that feels a little bit less like doing your taxes
* pre-generated characters
* random encounter tables based upon weather, location, and time of day
* sensibly-priced PDFs
* a constant release schedule, so that the game line does not feel "dead" (ignore 5e fans pretending that a nearly non-existent release schedule is good for the D&D brand; it's not)
* a campaign setting that is interesting enough for people to become emotionally invested in it
* include cool dice (people love dice)

There's more, but you get the picture.

[Blasted]

How much of TTRPG decline can be attributed to the "golden age" for board games? From a casual player standpoint, something like Descent has a lot of pluses going on for it: single-session commitment (but still able to span multiple sessions), lower total play-time per session, rules explanation and setup is minimal compared to chargen for a lot of TTRPGs, explicit and definitive rules cover interactions between the "MC" and the players (including leveling and loot). It seems like getting into D&D is more of a fanatic's choice that wants the ability to freeform by comparison.

Well, my own RPG group was destroyed because boardgames. My FLGS survives on Magic and board games, with proper RPGs having less shelf space than comics.
...

Something that's become very apparent is that the boardgame community (such as BGG et. al.) don't put up with crap rules. There's always the outlier, but in general boardgames with bad rules, or 'living' games with badly managed rules will disappear. Some of this is the obvious fact that boardgames can't hide behind 'narrative' or other similar words with little meaning in the same way RPGs can.
You can get away with high production values, pretty pieces and nice art for a while, but because of the low sunk costs in terms of player time and learning, it's easy to transition to the next game rather than persevere with the current one.

What gets me is that the production costs behind a boardgame must be higher than an RPG. Just in terms of boards and pieces being more expensive than books. With Lulu and similar book printers, I find it hard to believe that the RPG market can't be easily flooded with decent games. Is the cost of decent art that high? Could you get away with a single cover piece and then a small series of lesser pieces in the book?
I'm sure half an hour on deviantart could tell me the cost, but I'm not sure I care.

[OgreBattle]

What gets me is that the production costs behind a boardgame must be higher than an RPG. Just in terms of boards and pieces being more expensive than books. With Lulu and similar book printers, I find it hard to believe that the RPG market can't be easily flooded with decent games. Is the cost of decent art that high? Could you get away with a single cover piece and then a small series of lesser pieces in the book?

When you set the bar low, more substandard product gets through. It's been mentioned here before that digital editing has contributed to bloated, messier writing. Board games have to exist in physical reality so there's already a higher bar set (in non-game things like finding a manufacturer, getting a good price, inspecting quality, etc.) just to get one finished.

As for art I think a lot of small publishers just hire people they know or from their community, Exalted 3e looks very fan driven. If you're M:tG though you can hire artists from anywhere in the world.

[Mechalich]

I suspect market saturation is a huge part of the problem, and the digital media contributes to this extensively.

All new TTRPGs are competing against all old tabletop RPGs. Your average nerd can find a torrent containing every 3.x book or every oWoD book in about ten seconds, and even highly obscure supplements for minor games can be found with only a modest amount of diligence. Even for those who actually have the money and desire to support the industry, drivethroughrpg and similar sites are making the old pdfs readily available. Heck, the old dead tree editions are more accessible than ever thanks to online aggregation of used book sellers.

Not only is the physical support available, the community support for old games remains very strong. If you want to play 3.X or Wod (either iteration) it is easy to find people online who are talking about them and making homebrew and discussing setting fluff and so forth. And for those willing to blur the distinction between 3.X and Pathfinder and consider them one game, d20 is a giant meta-brand that has never died.

Looked at from that perspective I think a big part of the issue is that players have no real reason to adopt new games. It is perfectly possible to play any of the best games of the 1995-2005 decade - which seems to have been the height of the hobby from a publishing perspective - without missing really anything. It's not like the video game market, where at least you have advances in processing power and graphics that enable new innovations and shove the classics aside.

To really draw people into a new game would mean creating something that not only plays equally well to existing popular old games, but also a game that utilizes online tools to make it fit the current digital environment, and it would have to do that both well and cheaply - at least well enough to beat out the existing free tools people can find.

The tricky part is that there's significant investment required to do that and the potential returns are questionable, especially if you aren't rebooting a recognizable IP.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think that TTRPGs will ever really die. At least not before virtual reality is invented. The startup costs are still ridiculously low compared to any other form of entertainment.

However, I don't think that TTRPGs can be a big thing anymore under the old model. I think that the future of TTRPGs is to be a loss leader for merchandising. That is, while there is a D&D or Vampire game and people play it, the real money is in the toys and web apps and cartoons. This is not a bad direction for TTRPGs to go in, because Transformers has been operating under this paradigm since the mid-80s and today the state of the shows and comics are healthier than they've ever been despite being completely eclipsed by the associated merchandising.

I feel that TTRPGs will be revived when someone, probably a videogame or toy company, uses an in-house writing team to crank out a TTRPG for a couple ten thousand dollars, releases it as a part of advertising, and people realize that the new system is actually pretty damn good. I don't think that the renaissance will come from any of the current traditional gaming stalwarts. They have their head too far up their ass and don't have enough resources to drive a revival.

[brized]

Something that's become very apparent is that the boardgame community (such as BGG et. al.) don't put up with crap rules...

What gets me is that the production costs behind a boardgame must be higher than an RPG. Just in terms of boards and pieces being more expensive than books. With Lulu and similar book printers, I find it hard to believe that the RPG market can't be easily flooded with decent games.

Making a decent RPG isn't about the cost of the materials you're printing it on, it's the cost of hiring writers and designers good enough to write a compelling setting to integrate with a playable system and then spend the time playtesting it to make it good.

Think of the possible actions you can take during your turn in any board game, and compare it to a TTRPG. Then compare the possible character builds, the possible strategies for approaching challenges, and so on. There's just so much more design space you have to account for that it will take 10x, 100x, perhaps more time and resources to design and playtest a TTRPG to the same quality level as a boardgame. And on top of that you need a compelling setting and some compelling AND well-playtested published adventures or else the game is DoA.

There just aren't that many writers and designers with the talent required. They're working in industries that at least give the perception of higher pay, lower risk of project failure, and higher transference of skills to other lines of work if you want a career change.

[Blasted]

Making a decent RPG isn't about the cost of the materials you're printing it on, it's the cost of hiring writers and designers good enough to write a compelling setting to integrate with a playable system and then spend the time playtesting it to make it good.

Think of the possible actions you can take during your turn in any board game, and compare it to a TTRPG. Then compare the possible character builds, the possible strategies for approaching challenges, and so on. There's just so much more design space you have to account for that it will take 10x, 100x, perhaps more time and resources to design and playtest a TTRPG to the same quality level as a boardgame. And on top of that you need a compelling setting and some compelling AND well-playtested published adventures or else the game is DoA.

There just aren't that many writers and designers with the talent required. They're working in industries that at least give the perception of higher pay, lower risk of project failure, and higher transference of skills to other lines of work if you want a career change.

BS
Most games don't have a well written or well imagined setting. Taking a look at the roll20 Q3 report, we have D&D which is a hodgepodge of kitchensink fantasy and always has been. Pathfinder is the same. Warhammer and Starwars both take settings from elsewhere and slap an RPG on. The setting isn't their own and they haven't had to expend effort on it. The first two which actually have settings written are WoD and Shadowrun. People are well able to run kitchen sink fantasy/scifi without good settings or campaign books.

As for rule complexity, that's a complete furfy. No RPG has anything like a complete resolution system. And they don't need it. The un-needed bloat of RPGs has been well documented. More than that, most RPGs focus on a single resolution system, usually combat, with the remainder of situations being a skeleton if that. Boardgames, especially dungeon crawlers, cover this better in most cases. I could literally slap a conversation system on most of those and call the RPG done.

But let's compare the last 2 BG I've received: Kingdom Death and Journey. KD has a 220 page rulebook. It's full of setting fluff and nice art (if you like the style) and I dare say that it works better than most post-apoc games when it comes to combat. Journey only runs at 72 pages, but is still a more complete system than many RPGs. And it has fluff.
The systems used by most RPGs are barely more complex at all, let alone 10x. 100x is a complete joke. Most RPGs go straight to magic tea party when something unexpected happens. There is no extra complexity there.
And so, with a limited increase in complexity there should be no need for an increase in play testing.

As for adventures, I can't remember even in the heyday of RPGs when a new RPG was released with anything more than a very barebones game. It doesn't seem to have affected them.

I fail to see why a bg designer would be paid less than an RPG designer.