There is a reason KISS is nigh dictum; approachability matters.

For all the phenoms that exploded on the gaming stage, note that they often started in approachable productions, besides the novelty factor. M:tG cards are like all these crazy new effects and tricks from the get go. But note two things: a) in the beginning the text amount was smaller on average (albeit often contextually vague), and b) they still keep such simple cards nowadays in small pools in the commons spread just in case for new players.

You'd think selling imagination wouldn't be so hard, since it sells relatively well everywhere else (and then gets ground into dust with sequels). But catering only to any elitist fan base is always a bad idea. A simple, approachable foundation keeps the market big enough to indulge in diverse fan specialties on the side.

I reject the OP's assertion that there is in fact a "debacle" going on; if anything, the Debacle happened with 4e.

Trying to jump in with some big D&D-beating project now would be very stupid, as you risk having your entire investment swept away when 5e comes out.

RPGPundit

If the most recent 5e playtest is any indication of what 5e is going to look like, you are going to be screaming how nobody at WotC would listen to you because that piece of shit is going to redefine debacle.

But who knows, maybe there is some super secret internal version of 5e that is totally badass and they are just keeping us playtesters fooled with PDFs full of lukewarm crap.

Quote from: RPGPundit;645999Trying to jump in with some big D&D-beating project now would be very stupid, as you risk having your entire investment swept away when 5e comes out.

RPGPundit

Hah. So I'm a Fantasy Flight, Steve Jackson or Joseph Goodman and want to bring out my biggest idea with the biggest budget yet, and you would advise me to sit on it for a couple of years so 5e won't sweep it away?
I guess Samsung should wait until the iPhone 6 before they release their new tech too.  Forgive me for wiping away my tears of laughter.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645576So why hasn't any 2nd tier (or 3rd) company taken the initiative?

I know it's not what you want to hear, but FFG's Star Wars game is the product you're looking for. It's landing in the market lull period; it's already enjoying huge success; and FFG must have been doing fucking happy dances when Disney bought LucasFilms and announced a new trilogy of films.

More generally, the idea that D&D is quiescent right now doesn't seem to be true. While it's true that WotC is not selling anything right now, D&D Next playtest groups are plentiful -- which means that the budget of available time for RPG gamers is, in fact, being consumed by D&D.

Paizo, of course, continues to do what it's had great success doing: Turning out consistent, monthly releases in their multiple subscription lines; launching new product lines; expanding their organized play network; yada yada yada.

Quote from: Spike;645592I mean, he'll keep GURPS in production perennially because it makes enough money to be worth it, but he's just sitting down there in texas smoking cigars he lights with cash from, say, Munchkin and other products at this point. I don't ascribe any malice to this, I just sort of assume he's more or less retired and living on the fat of the land he's built.

That's certainly possible. AFAIK, Jackson hasn't done any direct design work on an RPG product since the '90s. But that doesn't translate to Jackson just sitting on his laurels: He's actively designing a fairly steady stream of new board and card games.

My interpretation of SJG, however, is pretty much what Jackson says it is in his yearly reports: Munchkin makes a ton of money and board games are the new hot item. GURPS doesn't and isn't. He's a savvy businessman, so he's going to invest where he can profit.

I also think sales of GURPS from roughly 1993 onwards were being driven primarily by the library of source material. Going to 4E was a mistake because it rendered the existing source material obsolete, thus removing the only real selling point the game had going for it.

GURPS is clearly a legacy product at this point. Like others I think SJG could have done more to leverage it since the comparative failure of 4e, but a couple of user-friendly all-in-one books or whatever wouldn't have been a game changer.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645576So why hasn't any 2nd tier (or 3rd) company taken the initiative?

Quote from: FASERIP;645656They weren't aware of the scope of WotC's problems,

Apparently neither was WotC.  

JG

Quote from: Benoist;645765The problem is that, from a mass market standpoint, (those games) suck. They are overcomplicated, they are edgy to some faction of the RPG crowd for the sake of being "edgy", and in fact all they end up accomplishing is make the principles of role playing unclear, weird, and compare themselves to other media most people would rather be doing or enjoying for their own sakes, instead of playing some lame replacement for them (e.g. RPGs as emulators of other media instead of their own thing FAIL. Hard).

Thanks for explaining why I didn't like Marvel Heroic Roleplaying better than I did in my own Review.  

JG

You need to spend money to make money (advertising, production, advertising, more advertising etc) to fill the void of D&D and a product that is easy to play and won't be jumped on by the media as a means of brainwashing the next generation of kids into becoming the mass murderers who take peoples stuff.

Plus for those companies who have the money, expanding the experience onto tablets and phones (with pictures, movies, sound effects etc) might help appeal to the kids. To sell to kids, anything different needs to be done, because boxed beginners sets take up shelf space and without that advertising budget, end up gathering dust. How about a cheap projector to fire pictures and movies onto the wall? Skylanders style interactive fighting mound, where you put the character figures on the mound, things light up and it tells you who attacks, misses, hits and wins with noises and stuff?

We didn't have any of that first time round, and relied on printed mags to find out about new games. Plus of course Computer Games were squares moving on a solid colour screen, usually after typing in a program that needs hours of de-bugging afterwards. When computers took a jump in the early-mid eighties I can imagine RPGs took a big hit that they only momentarily recovered from in peaks and troughs. Now, why bother with all that set up shit and taking hours to read rules when you can just stick in a disc and go? In my opinion the RPG industry needs to bring in new blood and change the way it pulls new players in, then feed them with options when game X (that brought them into the hobby) has run its course and they look for something a bit more grown up/shinier.

Otherwise the RPG industry can continue to sell to a bunch of grumpy old bastards with plenty of money but who moan about everything and buy games more to collect than actually play, cause no one has time what with jobs, kids, sleep being of higher priority than they used to be when you played first time round.

Smaller RPGs will continue to make money and cater for a smaller fanbase (who have the money to spend - see kickstarters for example) but I can't see how a small company will find the money to attempt a 'breakout' product that brings the kids in and sells in the numbers the suits required, when the big guys have already decided to push Barbie or Mickey Mouse this quarter.

I don't think RPGs are doomed - just that the market is more crowded with other options these days, and that they need to do something to stand out better, just like they did 'back in the day' and wargamers were maybe grumbling about the same stuff.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645858Why would existing gamers be the only people on the planet who could be interested in RPGs?

At conventions, I see RPGs being played by guys in their 40s, boardgames being played by men and women 20s to 60s and 40k being played by guys in their 20s to 40s.  I rarely seen teen agers anywhere. In the 80s and 90s, we were overrun with teens.

I basically agree but last weekend was a small convention here in Berlin, Germany. I didn't attend as a visitor but only came over to bring a movie for the night slot anime block.
I was very surprised about the attendance. It was way better than in the last 5-8 years, and I saw many young(er) players. Still not "hordes of teens" but it was different than before.

I don't know what they changed in their organisation/marketing style but it seemed to have worked.

Quote from: Spinachcat;645858Why would existing gamers be the only people on the planet who could be interested in RPGs?

At conventions, I see RPGs being played by guys in their 40s, boardgames being played by men and women 20s to 60s and 40k being played by guys in their 20s to 40s.  I rarely seen teen agers anywhere. In the 80s and 90s, we were overrun with teens.

I can't accept that today's teens just don't have our special snowflake imaginations that let us pretend to be elves with laser guns.

Well, I'm well below the 40s range you're talking about and so are almost all of the gamers in my particular circles.

You may wish to consider that you might be observing not a shift in the RPG-playing population overall, but a shift in the behaviour of con-goers. I, for one, have absolutely no desire to play an RPG at a con, and the same is true of most of the gamers I know. I think this comes from several factors:

- One of the big selling points of RPGs is the ongoing campaign, whereas one-shots at cons don't offer that. That by itself wouldn't completely poison the well, except...

- ...another draw is the fact that you can say or do anything that occurs to you, which is great when you're with a group of friends but lousy when you're sat next to a lawncrapper who likes to say or do obnoxious, irritating, offensive or just plain lawncrappy things. I am very reluctant to sit down and play a tabletop RPG with complete strangers unless I've at least had a chance to go to the pub with them and assess whether they are actual human beings, because you've got the combination there of investing hours of your life into a game and at the same time there often being a presumption of co-operativeness which doesn't let you simply exclude the lawncrapper. Conversely, I'd be a bit more willing to play a boardgame because boardgames tend to be over sooner so if I end up playing against a jerk I know I can get away soonish and I can at least get some joy out of beating 'em. (Likewise, with Warhammer at cons if you're looking at a tournament contest it doesn't matter whether or not you like your opponent because you're in it to win it.)

- Plus, even if your table doesn't have a lawncrapper, you're still looking at the fact that your enjoyment of a tabletop RPG is going to depend heavily on how well your tastes and preferences mesh with the other participants in general, and the GM in particular, so that's another factor against playing games with strangers.

- There are an awful lot of us who do lots and lots of gaming but don't go to cons. Why would we need to? We've got the internet for debating stuff, finding out about the new hotness, buying things, and chatting with those designers who deign to interact with their fans as equals. A lot of the time, unless there's a panel or event or a game launch which excites me, I'm not interested in cons because they just provide an opportunity to do a whole bunch of stuff I can do from the comfort of home anyway, only it costs me money to get into a con and I have to hang out with folk running the full range from functional human being to nightmarish lawncrapper (and guess which encounters are almost always the most memorable ones?).

Basically, I dislike playing tabletop RPGs with strangers, and playing tabletop RPGs with folk I know at a Con seems pointless because we could just do that at one of our houses, where we'll have more control over what food and drink is available and we know the toilets will work and I can hear myself think, and there's a fair proportion of people in my generation who feel the same.

Quote from: Warthur;646036- ...another draw is the fact that you can say or do anything that occurs to you, which is great when you're with a group of friends but lousy when you're sat next to a lawncrapper who likes to say or do obnoxious, irritating, offensive or just plain lawncrappy things. I am very reluctant to sit down and play a tabletop RPG with complete strangers unless I've at least had a chance to go to the pub with them and assess whether they are actual human beings, because you've got the combination there of investing hours of your life into a game and at the same time there often being a presumption of co-operativeness which doesn't let you simply exclude the lawncrapper. Conversely, I'd be a bit more willing to play a boardgame because boardgames tend to be over sooner so if I end up playing against a jerk I know I can get away soonish and I can at least get some joy out of beating 'em. (Likewise, with Warhammer at cons if you're looking at a tournament contest it doesn't matter whether or not you like your opponent because you're in it to win it.)

- Plus, even if your table doesn't have a lawncrapper, you're still looking at the fact that your enjoyment of a tabletop RPG is going to depend heavily on how well your tastes and preferences mesh with the other participants in general, and the GM in particular, so that's another factor against playing games with strangers.

- There are an awful lot of us who do lots and lots of gaming but don't go to cons. Why would we need to? We've got the internet for debating stuff, finding out about the new hotness, buying things, and chatting with those designers who deign to interact with their fans as equals. A lot of the time, unless there's a panel or event or a game launch which excites me, I'm not interested in cons because they just provide an opportunity to do a whole bunch of stuff I can do from the comfort of home anyway, only it costs me money to get into a con and I have to hang out with folk running the full range from functional human being to nightmarish lawncrapper (and guess which encounters are almost always the most memorable ones?).

Basically, I dislike playing tabletop RPGs with strangers, and playing tabletop RPGs with folk I know at a Con seems pointless because we could just do that at one of our houses, where we'll have more control over what food and drink is available and we know the toilets will work and I can hear myself think, and there's a fair proportion of people in my generation who feel the same.

Over the years I've found that playing with strangers vs friends/acquaintances is mixed bag.

With friends, there can be numerous problems when things go wrong during the game (both OOC and in-character).  The big elephant in the room is dealing with stuff from the "geek social fallacies".    Harder to kick out friends from the game.

More generally, this sort of stuff are issues for non-geek/non-nerd activities which involve a close group of non-geek/non-nerd friends.  (General human behavior).

Quote from: Spinachcat;645634Why not advertise in video game mags?  In the 80s, video games advertised in Dragon.

What about teen mags? Or science mags? Or movie fan mags?

Imagination is good for something. Make your own movies... in your mind.

D&D... Anything You Want It To Be.(TM)

Followed up by...

An enchanted forest, filled with goblins. A simple village, under attack.

Only you can save them.

D&D... Anything You Want It To Be.(TM)

Then...

The orc horde nears the city. The chieftan, clad in furs, bellows a challenge.

Your wizard lets loose a fireball...

D&D... Anything You Want It To Be.(TM)

(Couple these descriptions with a pic of people sitting at a table, GM screen, books, dice. And another illo, showing the situation described in the copy. Each ad should evoke some common and beloved fantasy trope, and have some tie in to D&D.)

It's a fucking fantasy game in the golden age of fantasy media. The Hobbit, Game of Thrones, and more.

Seriously, how is "you can do whatever you want" or "make your own fantasy movie" not a selling point?

(Fine, some of the above need work. But they're at least interesting.)

Quote from: Spinachcat;645634Why not advertise in video game mags?  In the 80s, video games advertised in Dragon.

What about teen mags? Or science mags? Or movie fan mags?

Because print ads are very expensive.

Even today, video games advertise in fantasy/gaming magazines in Germany (Mephisto and Nautilus). Video games advertise in anime magazines (AnimaniA and Koneko). And those ads keep those publications floating as their respective industries don't generate enough ads to finance a print magazine.

If the gaming (and anime) "industry" can't pay for ads in their own niche's magazines how should they pay for ads in media that have a ten-fold printrun?

Anybody know what the print ad rates are these days in video game type magazines?  (Whether full page ads, half or quarter page sized ads).