Okay, I'm sorry I derailed the other thread.  My bad.

I'll be the first to brag...err admit...that I'm not a fan of D&D.  I have at times been known to say it would be lovely if it just died out and something else took the lead in the market.  I may have snickered a bit when Pathfinder blew fourth edition out of the water but that doesn't make me a Pathfinder fan.

What I get sidetracked by is the discussion of format and marketing.  Personally the old splat book model has failed and died.  It's on the scrap pile of history where it belongs with boxed games with a single booklet in them.

As I've mentioned a time or two I'm a big fan of the boxed set full of miniatures.  Nothing says serious product commitment like a big boxed set full of miniatures.

But enough of that.  What other formats and arrangements might work?

Could a LARP be packaged in a wooden chest full of props and costumes?

Wasn't there a game that came with hand puppets?  TSR's Rocky and Bulwinkle Party Game maybe?

Anyhow, for some of my games I'd like a very subdued format.  A simple digest sized cloth bound book with a symbol on the front and the title on the spine.  I think it would really stand out in the current sea of noise on the new releases stand.  It's very functional and nobody would be embarassed to be seen reading it on the bus.

One that I'm actually planning to do in a very limited fashion is a boxed set full of 54mm metal figures with a rules booklet.  It'll probably retail for $500 so it's not for everyone.  It's just something I've wanted to do.  I'm working on the sculpts but I'll need to upgrade my home made spincaster a bit to do the production work.  As busy as I am with the store these days I'll admit it's coming slowly.

So anyhow, got a pet format?  Cool ideas about marketing games?  A product that everyone needs?  Let's hear about it.

An app.

A whole table top playable game contained in an app. Everything you need to play, expandable via micro-transactions (adventures, new monsters, magic items, etc...)

Not a computer RPG, but an app that contains everything you need to run/play a face-to-face tabletop game with your friends. Rules, maps, tools, etc...

I assume it hasn't been done simply because the opportunity cost is far too high, why spend time and money on this when you could make another angry birds clone?

Apps are pretty popular these days.  Actually a Rolemaster one would be pretty nice.  The blurbs on the tables are just the right size for a cell phone screen.  It'd be hard to do the maps at a reasonable size on something that small but maybe on a tablet.

Quote from: David Johansen;645857Apps are pretty popular these days.  Actually a Rolemaster one would be pretty nice.  The blurbs on the tables are just the right size for a cell phone screen.  It'd be hard to do the maps at a reasonable size on something that small but maybe on a tablet.

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure how it would be implemented (I'm not a developer) but it's clear that there is no easier/surer way to reach the market of people in search of entertainment than an app.

I would like to see some games have a playable playtest solitaire app.  So you want to try the game and you load the app and you play the game and see how it works and decide if you like it.  It kinda crosses over with the idea that games need to be tested in computer simulations to check for balance but balance isn't even something I care about much in miniatures games, let alone rpgs.  What I want is to see the game in action and get a feel for it without having to get a group together and try to get them excited about it and try to talk them into dropping the current Rolemaster campaign.

On the miniatures front I still want to see a dirt cheap plastics set that can do half a dozen armies from a single sprue.  But I'm not sure anyone else does.  Personally if I need 200 figures on the table I'd like at least 180 of them to be nice simple figures that are easy to paint and require minimal assembly.

More rolled up poster maps on vinyl or pleather would be nice too.  I hate creases in my posters.  The campaign maps for Flames of War come in courier tubes and they're awesome.

I also want a set of 1 inch hexes with cast on terrain for building maps.  Kind of like the Games Workshop Mighty Empires ones but set up so the pieces are geomorphic and look more naturalistic.  So you could build a beautiful three dimensional map of your world and the hex grid would be automatically there without scanning or messing around in photoshop.

Quote from: David Johansen;645866On the miniatures front I still want to see a dirt cheap plastics set that can do half a dozen armies from a single sprue.  But I'm not sure anyone else does.  Personally if I need 200 figures on the table I'd like at least 180 of them to be nice simple figures that are easy to paint and require minimal assembly.

Reaper Bones are a very cool step in the right direction.

My distributor thought I was nuts when I ordered two full racks of them back when nobody knew what they were.

Much as I love it, metal is dead.  Even lead is too expensive these days.  Well not so much the lead as the tin, zinc, and bismuth you need to mix in with it to get a good casting.

But it's the tip of the iceberg.  It'd be nice if there was a nice spin castable solution that wasn't a toxic resin or metal.  Resin is just too much work.  I know you can use glue gun hot melt sticks to get a casting out of Prince August's moulds but they never were the best figures and the melting point is too low.  I should have gone to school to learn plastic chemistry I guess.

Part of me is still convinced you could do something with the comic-book format.  Not comic book on the inside, but on the outside - that size, 24-32 pages, relatively cheap paper, color illustrations, low price point.  Each one is either an adventure good for a session or two (or a solo adventure, even better), or a player kit which would contain the basic rules and complete advancement stuff for your PC.  Player buy-in would be one comic (whatever type of character they wanted to play, I guess).

Pipe dream, I know.

Quote from: VectorSigma;645917Part of me is still convinced you could do something with the comic-book format.  Not comic book on the inside, but on the outside - that size, 24-32 pages, relatively cheap paper, color illustrations, low price point.  Each one is either an adventure good for a session or two (or a solo adventure, even better), or a player kit which would contain the basic rules and complete advancement stuff for your PC.  Player buy-in would be one comic (whatever type of character they wanted to play, I guess).

Pipe dream, I know.

I, for one, think this is a very good idea - one of my main gripes with comic industry in Poland is, that instead of the standard format, we have 125 pages format - which costs 5 - 6x more than the American comic format. And I, for one, would rather fork over 5$ over 5 different occasions than 25 for a comic I can read in one sitting of a loo. Pelgrane Press' Trail of Cthulhu scenarios seem to follow this page format quite well, I'd say. And there are some mighty fine adventures there, and easily turned to Call of Cthulhu (my favourite is Dying of Saint Margarete).

Quote from: David Johansen;645902My distributor thought I was nuts when I ordered two full racks of them back when nobody knew what they were.

Much as I love it, metal is dead.  Even lead is too expensive these days.  Well not so much the lead as the tin, zinc, and bismuth you need to mix in with it to get a good casting.

But it's the tip of the iceberg.  It'd be nice if there was a nice spin castable solution that wasn't a toxic resin or metal.  Resin is just too much work.  I know you can use glue gun hot melt sticks to get a casting out of Prince August's moulds but they never were the best figures and the melting point is too low.  I should have gone to school to learn plastic chemistry I guess.

Wait 5 years and print up all the miniatures you like, including copies of all the classics, in your home office.

Quote from: VectorSigma;645917Part of me is still convinced you could do something with the comic-book format.  Not comic book on the inside, but on the outside - that size, 24-32 pages, relatively cheap paper, color illustrations, low price point.  Each one is either an adventure good for a session or two (or a solo adventure, even better), or a player kit which would contain the basic rules and complete advancement stuff for your PC.  Player buy-in would be one comic (whatever type of character they wanted to play, I guess).

Pipe dream, I know.

I think it could be really cool, but I also think that what with traditional comics swirling the drain I doubt it would be beneficial to hitch yourself to that particular format.

Maybe during the last comic bubble, but not anymore.

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;645921Wait 5 years and print up all the miniatures you like, including copies of all the classics, in your home office.

Possibly but I doubt it.  Not because the technology doesn't exist but because retail demand for it probably won't be high enough to bring the materials price down enough to make it efficient.  Also, I expect it will take a fair while to print off a single miniature.

However, it is coming and compared to metal prices these days, yeah, that's probably going to do in the metal miniatures industry.  We'll see, there are a lot of technical issues with how the sculpts have to be designed to work as well that I don't think most people have a good grasp of yet.

Or at least thats what the people I know in the industry tell me.

Quote from: VectorSigma;645917Part of me is still convinced you could do something with the comic-book format.  Not comic book on the inside, but on the outside - that size, 24-32 pages, relatively cheap paper, color illustrations, low price point.  Each one is either an adventure good for a session or two (or a solo adventure, even better), or a player kit which would contain the basic rules and complete advancement stuff for your PC.  Player buy-in would be one comic (whatever type of character they wanted to play, I guess).

Pipe dream, I know.

I don't know.  I've always wanted to see cheaper products but that's partly because I've never been rich.  I think it might not be durable enough.  And comics and magazines and books are all feeling the digital pressure these days.

Quote from: David Johansen;645932I don't know.  I've always wanted to see cheaper products but that's partly because I've never been rich.  I think it might not be durable enough.  And comics and magazines and books are all feeling the digital pressure these days.

For the "Comic book game" to work it would have to be semi-disposable, like actual comics.

but again, merits aside, it's a dying format. During the comic boom it would have been smart because it could piggy back with comics into various stores (when I was growing up comics were in nearly every gas station and grocery store, FREX), now you could piggy back into the handful of comic stores left and probably sell to the same shrinking market you have with game stores.