Quote from: HaffrungIn my experience, RPG groups typically have one or two very motivated and active gamers who read message boards, buy books, and learn the rules. The rest are casual players, who enjoy playing and socializing, but who aren't caught up in system and rules sets. They don't buy RPG books. They just show up and play. And the guys who do buy the books and read them are the DMs. And the players want them to do all the work and run everything except the PCs. And it works.

This is my experience of over 25 years.  I do all of the work.  All they do is show up, play their characters and (every once in a while) beg for relationship porn.

OK, what is relationship porn?

Quote from: Pierce InverarityOK, what is relationship porn?

"Relationship Porn" is the term I coined for things like fangirls playing Mary Sue characters so that they can hook up with their fantasy pretty boy through some sort of soap opera-style melodramatic romance.  (Though, in my case, I have as many guys as gals asking for this stuff.)

OMG. The horror.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityI don't think anyone's debating the RPG market has seriously shrunk over the years. What *is* being debated, and what hasn't been proven, is that MMORPGs are responsible for that shrinkage.

I'll even grant that MMORPGs are a major competing media, I'll argue the "why" of it.  I don't think it has much to do with TRPGs not doing gaming well, but with the inherent time sink and scheduling problems TRPGs of any kind represent.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen(Popping back in briefly.)
PI: Correct. Also being debated and by no means proven, is that the "Power Gamer" portion of the RPG market is eroding at a higher rate than the other portions.

Plus a bunch of other contentious assumptions.

I'll argue with the contention that all power-gamers will eventually be playing only MMORPGs.


All that aside.  What I find most unsupported are the assertions that because (1) MMORPGs can't do "story teller" well and (2) the only hope for TRPGs are "story teller" games.   I see no inherent reason why (1) is true, based on my understanding of what is being proposed as the "story teller" solution.  On (2) I think Ryan's own numbers show that this is false.  On hard numbers the "indie games" of the top two designers seem to account for 0.1% or less of the market, even accepting the assumption that all indie games combined account for $500K, that is slightly less than 1%.  

I think this is a damning number on the real drawing power of these games, assuming they all represent the new story teller paradigm.  If only a fraction do then things look even worse.  

Given that one of the supposedly lead games of this group, Burning Wheel, has been around for 5 years almost, if the non-power gamer or even "story teller" players of D&D had always just been waiting for this kind of game, then you would expect at least 22%-44% of the D&D players to have bought the game.  Accordingly, if Story teller games are the last best hope for TRPGs, they have been around long enough that they should have far more than 1% of the market.  But they don't after at least 5 years of trying, despite awards and viral marketing.

Which, Xanther, if I was being a conspiracy theory nut, would be the reason for trying to take d20 and make it Story20. The attempt to hitch the wagon of the story-building games to the horse power of the most widely played game (J. Arcane's objections that really it's just D&D that's so popular) makes sense.

It would be nigh short of a miracle to alter D20 enough for Story-Builders but leave it in tact enough for the Role-Players. If Mr. Dancey can do it...all I can say is Wow.

But I think Mr. Dancey is of the belief that he can change it beyond that point - that he will not have to worry about the Role-Players because most of them will be playing MMORPG's instead. Again, I have my doubts...

Quote from: SettembriniYou want videos of the pros from Dover creating Story, Now! ?

Here you go:
http://spione.adept-press.com/?actualplay

I actually found listening to Hal's group at RPGMP3 was entertaining -- although almost entirely for the banter, funny characters, jokes, and other non-"story" elements.  The story itself wasn't very spectacular, but I don't think that's really the appeal of RPGs anyway.

It was also *very* useful to hear when the game would grind to a halt over debating / looking up certain rules, or otherwise run really slowly because of the way the rules work in play.

MUCH more useful than an "Actual Play Report" which is usually nothing like "actual play".

You know, there's one thing missing in all this talk about sales.

Age distribution versus percentage of population.

I'm a Boomer.  Most Boomers I know who played RPGs 25 years ago no longer play them.

They do not play MMORPGs, either.

Some of us Boomers do play RPGs, but usually much more casually and much less frequently.  The same for MMORPGs.  We dabble in them.

The Baby Boomers no longer are college age.

Has there been any serious work done on the subject of the average age of RPGers?  Because believe you me, it makes a HUGE difference.  If the average age of RPGers is younger than Baby Boomers, the NEXT question to ask is "Is the percentage of people in this age bracket who play RPGs within statistical bounds of the percentage of Boomers who played RPGs when they were this age?"

If your target audience has shrunk, your sales will too.

Something like that was discussed, if not earlier in this thread, then in the Landmarks thread that was accidentally nuked but is now preserved over at jhkims's site.

Quote from: Elliot WilenSomething like that was discussed, if not earlier in this thread, then in the Landmarks thread that was accidentally nuked but is now preserved over at jhkims's site.

Linky?

Eh, I was thinking of the wrong thread. Stats discussions start around here in the thread "Ryan Dancey's Storyteller's Guide to the D20 System".

More in the same thread around here and the two following posts. Shortly thereafter Stuart calls RSD's use of stats strongly into question, and I give some supporting points to Stuart's argument. This continues through post 219 (note my post 214 which seems to hit on the same question as you've raised) before going off into an argument between Seanchai and others comparing AD&D1e with D&D3.x

Quote from: RSDanceyI have no visibility on sales of Spirit of the Century, but based on ancedotal evidence, I put it between Burning Wheel and Sorcerer.

I'm by and large not reading this discussion, but thanks to various search tools I came across this statement.  Just wanted to provide some data for the curious.

Visibility into Spirit of the Century's sales is very easy, as I tend to talk about it constantly on my livejournal.  Here's the sales numbers filter:

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/tag/sales+numbers

Of specific interest:

http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/302851.html (sales numbers)
http://drivingblind.livejournal.com/303210.html (pretty graphs)

Spirit of the Century moved about 1800 print units in its first full year (and another 300-or-so PDFs, I believe).  Don't Rest Your Head moved about 800 units (though that's a print and PDF mix; I think about 1/3rd of those were PDF) in its first year.

I should probably point out that only a very approximate half or less of those print sales were through retail stores -- which might play odd with some of your thinkery, as it seems like you're talking with a retail sales focus.  The other half was direct sales to customers through IPR's site (and, limitedly, Lulu).

Other publisher stuff, in brief:

- Ken Hite reviewed Burning Wheel Revised back in 2003, so the game's probably been out for 3 to 4 years in order to achieve the 6000 units number.  I dearly hope and pray that Spirit of the Century can sustain its sales the way Burning Wheel Revised has -- it's definitely one of the tops.

- Can't speculate about Ron's numbers; I haven't looked into them.

- I've heard from Vincent Baker that Dogs in the Vineyard sells about 700-ish copies a year.

At any rate, I'm definitely not refuting your speculation here, just offering up some data.  An average of 2000 unit-sales per year across all products per publisher, ten top publishers?  Sure, I'd buy that.  Though that said, I'd buy a lot of other scenarios too, as this is a dark territory in which there's very little disclosure.