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Pen & Paper Roleplaying Central => Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion => Topic started by: This Ends Tonight on February 09, 2021, 01:36:57 PM

Title: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: This Ends Tonight on February 09, 2021, 01:36:57 PM
2020 WAS RECORD YEAR FOR 'MAGIC,' 'D&D'

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/47547/2020-was-record-year-magic-d-d

I know ICV2 ran an article about them selling WotC before, but it seems like a great time for Hasbro to find an excuse to divest themselves of these troublesome Millennials, and avoid worrying about staying on top of a volatile market. Not to mention the impending end to 'geek culture' being cool, at which time they run the risk of losing half their fanbase. It may not be true in the very short term, but it just feels like there's nowhere to go but down for most of the TTRPG industry, especially for those who don't focus on veteran/alpha gamer types who are less likely to quit on a whim.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 09, 2021, 02:06:58 PM
Hasbro never sells anything. Ever.

If it’s profitable, they sell it themselves. If it’s not profitable they either A) rebrand the trademark to another product (ex. D&D action figures), B) let it go out of regular production, but release a small run (limited run “anniversary edition” figures) every few years to maintain the trademarks (the same reason comics do limited series of characters few even remember every half-dozen years), or C ) license it out to a third party to do something with (which also maintains the trademarks).

And even IF they would sell it now, just who do you think could afford it’s price tag? The only ones who could are other massive companies.

The idea that D&D will ever again be free of a big corporate entity is a pipe dream.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: hedgehobbit on February 09, 2021, 02:23:34 PM
The article doesn't state what "record" the sales set nor does it split the increase in sales of D&D from that of Magic: The Gathering. All it states is that ALL of Hasbro's games, including Monopoly and Jenga, were up 15% in 2020 from 2019.

I'm am surprised that games represents 32% of Hasbro's overall sales. That's much higher than I would have expected.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 09, 2021, 05:21:22 PM
The now shell company White Wolf is more likely to get sold.

Aside from the tabletop scene being riddled with scandals ranging from writers being pedophiles to inciting an international incident, Paradox has been whoring out the IP Games Workshop-style to produce games. These are mediocre low-budget mobile shovelware or "visual novels" on Steam. If the reviews and SteamSpy estimates are any indication, they're not exactly what you would call amazing critical or commercial successes. Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars was apparently way more popular despite a mixed reception.

The first big budget title to release so far was Werewolf: Earthblood, which had mixed reception at best according to Metacritic. Vampire: Bloodlines 2 has been subject to a bunch of interference that will likely cause it to suffer similar failure, in addition to just failing to live up to its predecessor.

Question is... who would be both willing and able to buy White Wolf?

I can describe two huge reasons not to touch this IP with a ten-foot pole.

Firstly: It has never had a successful video game release, to the point where the superstitious might claim it is cursed. Vampire: Bloodlines was a flop on release and is only remembered as a cult classic (and that was due solely to Troika's writing rather than any inherent strength of the IP), and Paradox was apparently unwilling and/or unable to remaster the game. Its continued livelihood seems to riding entirely on the success of Vampire: Bloodlines 2. (Before anybody chimes in, no company that isn't already a tabletop company is going to buy it just to sell tabletop games and I don't see many tabletop companies being both willing and able to buy the IP when they could just invent their own.)

Secondly: The IP's value in general is questionable at best. It's firmly stuck in this weird 90s proto-SJW zeitgeist that probably won't appeal to normies or modern SJWs either. Every individual aspect is either awesome, stupid, or insane with nothing in between and nothing in the way of any cohesive aesthetic: time traveling vampires, eco-terrorist werewolves, militantly luddite wizards, reincarnating fairies who are allergic to concrete, etc. It's not remotely creative (VtM's clans are mostly direct rip-offs of popular and obscure works of vampire fiction, such as Necroscope and 3×3 Eyes, as well as non-vampire fiction like Conan the Barbarian) and while mildly diverse in concepts it has no monopoly on the many tropes of the urban fantasy genre. The existing fanbase is extremely toxic, cultish, twenty years ago sent so many death threats to writer Jess Henig that made him afraid to open his inbox for years, other negative descriptors... I'm not sure why any sane company would want to court these loonies.

IMO, if what you want is a profitable vampire-themed CRPG et al, then you're probably better off either inventing your own or licensing a vampire IP that isn't seemingly cursed. Like Bloodlust: Shadowhunter or Red Embrace.

What do you think?
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on February 09, 2021, 06:25:53 PM
The usual stated objection is the value of the license.

Which I've always been dubious about virtually - but I guess the success of the movie will determine that.

So, in any case, if I was Hasbro, I wouldn't be about to sell before the movie - which seems to actually be coming this time.

After the movie...well then.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Marchand on February 10, 2021, 03:25:38 AM
Buried in a footnote to slide 12 of the earnings presentation: "Hasbro believes its gaming portfolio is a competitive differentiator and views it in its entirety." Sounds like management are committed to the gaming segment.

D&D gets exactly one mention in the conference call remarks on p. 3, near where they say: "Gaming has long been a priority investment category for Hasbro".

Talk is cheap, but investors hate management flip-flopping on core strategy. Switching focus without very strong reason would be job-loss territory for execs involved.

Apparently Chris Cocks, Wizards president, is doing a virtual investor event on Feb 25th. Tune in for that, I guess.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 10, 2021, 10:26:31 AM
The now shell company White Wolf is more likely to get sold.

Aside from the tabletop scene being riddled with scandals ranging from writers being pedophiles to inciting an international incident [...],

Wait! what? Really!?




Firstly: It has never had a successful video game release, to the point where the superstitious might claim it is cursed. Vampire: Bloodlines was a flop on release and is only remembered as a cult classic (and that was due solely to Troika's writing rather than any inherent strength of the IP), and Paradox was apparently unwilling and/or unable to remaster the game. Its continued livelihood seems to riding entirely on the success of Vampire: Bloodlines 2. (Before anybody chimes in, no company that isn't already a tabletop company is going to buy it just to sell tabletop games and I don't see many tabletop companies being both willing and able to buy the IP when they could just invent their own.)

Secondly: The IP's value in general is questionable at best. It's firmly stuck in this weird 90s proto-SJW zeitgeist that probably won't appeal to normies or modern SJWs either. Every individual aspect is either awesome, stupid, or insane with nothing in between and nothing in the way of any cohesive aesthetic: time traveling vampires, eco-terrorist werewolves, militantly luddite wizards, reincarnating fairies who are allergic to concrete, etc. It's not remotely creative (VtM's clans are mostly direct rip-offs of popular and obscure works of vampire fiction, such as Necroscope and 3×3 Eyes, as well as non-vampire fiction like Conan the Barbarian) and while mildly diverse in concepts it has no monopoly on the many tropes of the urban fantasy genre. The existing fanbase is extremely toxic, cultish, twenty years ago sent so many death threats to writer Jess Henig that made him afraid to open his inbox for years, other negative descriptors... I'm not sure why any sane company would want to court these loonies.

IMO, if what you want is a profitable vampire-themed CRPG et al, then you're probably better off either inventing your own or licensing a vampire IP that isn't seemingly cursed. Like Bloodlust: Shadowhunter or Red Embrace.

What do you think?

I agree almost 100% with your first point, because I think "Hunter: The Reckoning" released in 2002 for Xbox and Game Cube was quite good back then. I remeber it had good visuals, animations and character designs. But I don't know if it has stood the test of time. Probably I'd find it quite outdated nowadays.

The second point, you nailed it. I remember in the 90s the most fanatical WoD players were regarded as pedantic at the best and simply weird at the worst (and not the good, "geeky" weird. Really weird and sinister people). I can see why it would appeal to the worst of the worst among the wokemob now.

I run a lot of werewolf games back in the day and a very close friend of mine run a fantastic Changeling campaign in which I was a player. But we always excised those aspects of the game that bothered us back them. In the case of Werewolf: the Apocalypse it was its angsty, nihilistic atmosphere; the ecological militancy; the idiotic "Captain Planet" style villains and the most gross aspects of the game (like the 7th Generation). In fact I run a heroic Werewolf game that would be considered "superversive" by today's standards.

But now? I don't think I'd ever play it again. As you said, it's too rooted into the 90s zeitgeist, which has no appeal whatsoever to me. 
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 10, 2021, 10:28:13 AM
Double post. Sorry.  :(
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 10, 2021, 10:46:39 AM
The article doesn't state what "record" the sales set nor does it split the increase in sales of D&D from that of Magic: The Gathering. All it states is that ALL of Hasbro's games, including Monopoly and Jenga, were up 15% in 2020 from 2019.

I'm am surprised that games represents 32% of Hasbro's overall sales. That's much higher than I would have expected.

They have said, repeatedly, in interviews that revenue from D&D is up over 30% from last year, and last year was up strong (they put a number on it i just don't recall) from the prior year, and that every year since the release D&D has oldsold the prior year.

I had posted this elsewhere, but it's a nice comparison snapshot of the #1 RPG, and the #2 RPG, concerning Amazon sales:

Tashas: #147 in all books
5e DMG: #354 in all books
5e PHB: #371 in all books
5e MM: #404 in all books
Xanathar's: #612 in all books
5e Core Book Gift Set: #791 in all books
Candlekeep Mysteries (pre-release): #1,007 in all books
5e Essentials Kit: #1,120 in all books
Volo's Guide to Monsters: #1,131 in all books

Pathfinder 2 Core Book (P2): #11,627 in all books
Pathfinder Advanced Players Guide (P2): #14,313 in all books
Pathfinder Beginner Box (P2): #20,273 in all books
Pathfinder Beastiary (P2): #26,004 in all books
Pathfinder Beastiary 2 (P2): #26,159 in all books
Pathfinder Core Rulebook Pocket Edition (P1): #28,478 in all books
Pathfinder Gamemastery Guide (P2): #32,064 in all books

Hasbro isn't going to sell D&D and the "fad" might not fad. Instead, the plan (which looks possible right now) is to come out with the movie and leap the next step. Not as strongly as Marvel comics did, but unquestionably Marvel comics went from "fad" in terms of comics to "pop culture icon permanently" in a matter of a few years once the movies started to come out. D&D won't succeed that well, but it definitely can take the next leap into pop cultural acceptance rather than simply fade back as a trend that ebbs.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Dimitrios on February 10, 2021, 11:08:40 AM
The existing fanbase is extremely toxic, cultish, twenty years ago sent so many death threats to writer Jess Henig that made him afraid to open his inbox for years, other negative descriptors... I'm not sure why any sane company would want to court these loonies.

Heh. These days any third tier YA fiction writer can attract a weird toxic online fanbase, but White Wolf was doing it before it was popular. They were trailblazers. 8)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 10, 2021, 12:34:06 PM
But now? I don't think I'd ever play it again. As you said, it's too rooted into the 90s zeitgeist, which has no appeal whatsoever to me.
I’ve gotten pretty good non-90’s zeitgeist mileage out of my V20 campaign by reframing everything in explicitly Catholic themes.

The Caine origin is real, though Lilith wasn’t the first wife of Adam, but a demonic temptress who stoked Caine’s bitterness against God and taught him to twist the divine power of the curse by calling upon the power of Hell (which is the Beast within each vampire).

This includes redefining any cross-splat elements too. The Lupines are not the Gaia-worshipping Garou; instead they are the cursed bloodline of Lycaon (though I use an adaptation of the Pausanias/Lycophran version of the myth and Graves interpretation that it was a repudiation of human sacrifices once made to Zeus by the Arcadians where rather than a punishment by Zeus, it was infernal blessing by the demon in the guise of Zeus with the blood sacrifice as the payment). They do not power their supernatural abilities with spiritual gnosis, but from the lifeblood of victims they consume.

The Shadowlands are the uppermost reaches of Hell and every lost soul there is one the damned that has chosen its own desires over God (which is why the practice of Necromancy is forbidden to Christians... it only connects with damned souls whose interests are to lead you astray in pursuit of their interests rather than God’s).

Fey are similarly the angels cast out of Heaven, but not wicked enough for Hell.

Likewise, the Tremere were right that the ancient pagan magics were weakening (they were derived from pacts with demons pretending to be gods); there is no consensus reality or Traditions in my version of VtM; there’s just vampiric blood magic (twisting of the power behind a divine curse), infernal pacts (resurgent with the loss of faith) and (Catholic) True Faith.

Likewise, vampiric society is depicted as debauched and depraved; the PCs regularly forced to choose between advancement in Kindred society or holding onto their humanity. There’s not one vampire NPC in the setting with any power that isn’t also a monster (there are some heroic, even saintly, NPCs as well, though the PCs presently waver between paying them no mind and contemplating selling them out for political favor with the Prince... what fools these mortals be; if they prefer a tragedy to a tale of redemption that’s their own choice... I just set the stage).

The result largely throws out the dated Punk aspects in favor of a greater focus on the more timeless themes of Gothic literature.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BronzeDragon on February 10, 2021, 03:19:16 PM
Hasbro isn't going to sell D&D and the "fad" might not fad. Instead, the plan (which looks possible right now) is to come out with the movie and leap the next step. Not as strongly as Marvel comics did, but unquestionably Marvel comics went from "fad" in terms of comics to "pop culture icon permanently" in a matter of a few years once the movies started to come out. D&D won't succeed that well, but it definitely can take the next leap into pop cultural acceptance rather than simply fade back as a trend that ebbs.

I think the chance the D&D movie will do well is about -5 million percent.

D&D by its very nature is completely derivative, and anything that comes out will be directly and inevitably compared to Jackson's LotR and GoT. I'm not a fan of either, but a lot of people are. Their opinions will likely decide the fate of the product.

Even a well-funded D&D movie (I'm talking 200+ million here) would be hard-pressed to compete with those IPs. Now that I think about it, there's a third, namely Harry Potter, which seems to live rent-free in the minds of the current generation.

The only hope would be something like Dark Sun, which could establish itself as different from those fantasy IPs that have entrenched themselves in movie audiences' minds. Then again, it would probably butt heads with Dune, which is coming out soon (doesn't matter that Dune is Sci-fi, the comparisons would still be made).

Hasbro better have a backup plan if their idea is getting D&D to make a leap into full mainstream relevance.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 10, 2021, 04:44:46 PM
D&D by its very nature is completely derivative, and anything that comes out will be directly and inevitably compared to Jackson's LotR and GoT. I'm not a fan of either, but a lot of people are. Their opinions will likely decide the fate of the product.

Even a well-funded D&D movie (I'm talking 200+ million here) would be hard-pressed to compete with those IPs. Now that I think about it, there's a third, namely Harry Potter, which seems to live rent-free in the minds of the current generation.
Leaving aside that I think it nearly impossible for Woke Hollyweird to produce anything but garbage these days, I DO think there’s an avenue a D&D could take that would set it apart from those other IPs...

Do a slightly more serious live-action version of the 80’s cartoon... Teens from the modern world get pulled into a fantasy world by the Dungeon Master and have to survive a terrible dungeon and defeat the dragon within to get home.

The concept allows self-aware references to all of the above IPs (just as happens around a real game table) as the main characters deal with all the gonzo that is D&D. You can also get self-referential about how derivative things are and how certain things just don’t make sense if actually DO stop to think about them.

If you really wanted to ping the nostalgia part, you could make the protagonists updated versions of the cartoon characters, throw in Venger and make the dragon an aspect of Tiamat.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Shawn Driscoll on February 10, 2021, 07:43:02 PM
Hasbro never sells anything. Ever.

If it’s profitable, they sell it themselves. If it’s not profitable they either A) rebrand the trademark to another product (ex. D&D action figures), B) let it go out of regular production, but release a small run (limited run “anniversary edition” figures) every few years to maintain the trademarks (the same reason comics do limited series of characters few even remember every half-dozen years), or C ) license it out to a third party to do something with (which also maintains the trademarks).

And even IF they would sell it now, just who do you think could afford it’s price tag? The only ones who could are other massive companies.

The idea that D&D will ever again be free of a big corporate entity is a pipe dream.
D&D and Monopoly will forever be connected at the hip, as far as Hasbro commercial culture is concerned.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Spinachcat on February 10, 2021, 08:03:55 PM
I see a D&D TV series / streaming series happening before a major movie.

And Hasbro will ride D&D corpse into the earth long before selling it off.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BronzeDragon on February 10, 2021, 08:43:26 PM
I see a D&D TV series / streaming series happening before a major movie.

And Hasbro will ride D&D corpse into the earth long before selling it off.

The movie is already in production, isn't it? Or did the coof delay it?
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 11, 2021, 02:02:02 AM
Hasbro is not going to sell the D&D IP.

Never ever.


Hasbro isn't going to sell D&D and the "fad" might not fad. Instead, the plan (which looks possible right now) is to come out with the movie and leap the next step. Not as strongly as Marvel comics did, but unquestionably Marvel comics went from "fad" in terms of comics to "pop culture icon permanently" in a matter of a few years once the movies started to come out. D&D won't succeed that well, but it definitely can take the next leap into pop cultural acceptance rather than simply fade back as a trend that ebbs.

5e sales have been outstanding – and I think you rightly guess that its success has prompted Hasbro to try and “Take the next step” for the IP and grow it into a brand like the transformers franchise that can bring in big $$ independent of toy/game sales. 

Just look at Marvel as a good example. The Marvel print Comics division is shit. Perpetual declining sales numbers, annually laid off staff, with no upswing in sight.

But the Marvel IP/Brand is riding high! No one at Disney corporate seems to be overly concerned about the print comics side of things.

When they are making Billions off of the hit Marvel Films, why would they be?

For D&D as a Brand, the ideal would be to not have to rely on RPG sales to be profitable.

If Hasbro is able to take the D&D brand IP to the next level, they may not actually care overmuch how woke WOCT goes with the D&D RPG.

After all if they are otherwise making tens of millions more off the D&D brand in Movies and other assorted IP marketing, next time WOTC screws the D&D edition pooch it gives corporate the excuse to downsize things further and basically run the D&D RPG side with a skeleton crew.

 i.e. I saw the D&D ‘Essential Kit’ for 19.95 at target the other day. Essentials only goes to level 6 – so it is basically crippleware as a game. (which is the whole point – they want you to go on to buy the big core books.)

But it would not take much more page count to have a 1-20 level evergreen “D&D” game on big-box store shelves in a box for $19.95…

If Hasbro can manage to turn the current high D&D is on into a pop culture staple, then there are far more profitable things that they can do with the IP in terms of ROI than go through the trouble of paying for a bunch of people to support and churn out a hardcover print RPG line.


Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on February 11, 2021, 03:25:42 AM
It really does remain to be seen whether the D&D brand really can be leveraged beyond tabletop role-playing games.

So far there has been little success in that regard.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 11, 2021, 04:50:36 AM
It really does remain to be seen whether the D&D brand really can be leveraged beyond tabletop role-playing games.

So far there has been little success in that regard.

That is true. D&D is more challenging than transformers and especially Marvel were to translate to the big screen.

No history of fan favorite iconic characters. And no backlog of storylines of those characters to mine for movie and tv plot ideas.

Yes there are some D&D novels and modules that have gained a degree of popularity within the D&D fan base, but for some reason when it comes to D&D movies the powers that be seem to want to make things all new - but that probably has had a lot to do with the movie rights situation D&D has been in.

Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 11, 2021, 06:45:23 AM
Totally unironically I think D&D movie would be best made in 3d animation like more mature pixar version
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Torque2100 on February 11, 2021, 10:23:05 AM
It's also worth remembering that once a Corporation gets to Hasbro's size, they become increasingly unmoored from actual sales as their primary source of income.  Increasingly the primary source of income for Corporations is the imaginary universe of stock valuations and venture capital.   In short, you cease to be the customer.  The customer is the Shareholders.  Not you.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RandyB on February 11, 2021, 11:00:05 AM
It's also worth remembering that once a Corporation gets to Hasbro's size, they become increasingly unmoored from actual sales as their primary source of income.  Increasingly the primary source of income for Corporations is the imaginary universe of stock valuations and venture capital.   In short, you cease to be the customer.  The customer is the Shareholders.  Not you.

And shareholders today are overwhelmingly financial institutions. The implications are left as an exercise for the reader.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 11, 2021, 11:36:58 AM
And shareholders today are overwhelmingly financial institutions. The implications are left as an exercise for the reader.
I can sum up the implications for you.

D&D is currently worth umpteen bajillion critical theory evaluation points and 359,403 Twitter followers.

If that sounds like a nonsense value to you then you're wiser than 75% of the entities currently invested on Wall Street.

* * * *

More seriously, it means that our entire financial system and concepts of value are so screwed up in the present that you can't even predict what a dollar will be worth a year from now, much less the value of an company division where 99% of its value is almost entirely conceptual and based on enough people being willing to pay money for legal access to the conceptual items. Throw away the rule of law and all that IP may as well be soap bubbles in terms of value.

Frankly, the entire entertainment industry is basically a mobius tube of madness trying to sort out how to handle IP in an age when its easier to pirate than to seriously protect anything. There are days where I think Kickstarter and all the gimmick dice and such in modern RPGs are just to make it harder for someone to digitally pirate a playable version of the game before the content producers at least get SOME money out of the product themselves.

There are also days when I think content producers who put up a Patreon or similar account and just give exclusive access for X days to every new bit of content while raking in $5/month from 100 or so fans are the geniuses because $500 a month is probably way more than I'd get if I actually published my book wholesale, when I could release a race, a class and a new set of monsters every week and make 5-10x as much with Patreons getting it a month ahead (and a few things would just be exclusive).

* * * *

So to sum up my sorta summary; don't go producing stuff for RPGs (or anything creative) right now if you're actually interested in making money for it. The only reason to produce right now is because you actually LOVE what you're producing.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 11, 2021, 11:44:03 AM
Totally unironically I think D&D movie would be best made in 3d animation like more mature pixar version

Agreed. However, in the West (unlike Japan, for instance) animations are still seen by and large as "kids' stuff" for the most part and thus do not reach an audience as broad as a live-action movie.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RandyB on February 11, 2021, 01:25:59 PM
Totally unironically I think D&D movie would be best made in 3d animation like more mature pixar version

Agreed. However, in the West (unlike Japan, for instance) animations are still seen by and large as "kids' stuff" for the most part and thus do not reach an audience as broad as a live-action movie.

laughs in Pixar
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 11, 2021, 01:51:39 PM
It really does remain to be seen whether the D&D brand really can be leveraged beyond tabletop role-playing games.

So far there has been little success in that regard.

That is true. D&D is more challenging than transformers and especially Marvel were to translate to the big screen.

No history of fan favorite iconic characters. And no backlog of storylines of those characters to mine for movie and tv plot ideas.

Yes there are some D&D novels and modules that have gained a degree of popularity within the D&D fan base, but for some reason when it comes to D&D movies the powers that be seem to want to make things all new - but that probably has had a lot to do with the movie rights situation D&D has been in.
The appeal of D&D has always been about having your own adventures... rather than watching somebody else's adventures and wishing you could be them.

There are loads of video games and cartoons that take obvious cues from D&D without using the trademark. Dragon Quest, Tower of Druaga, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, World of WarCraft, Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, etc. To say nothing of the many amateur productions like Standard Action, JourneyQuest, One Hit Die, 1 For All, and Dark Dungeons.

There is a huge market for D&D-themed video games and cartoons that Hasbro has simply failed to tap into. In fact, I'm sure that Hasbro could simply license a bunch of existing productions and re-release them under the official D&D brand. Disney did something like that with those licensed Alien short films.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 11, 2021, 02:59:53 PM
But now? I don't think I'd ever play it again. As you said, it's too rooted into the 90s zeitgeist, which has no appeal whatsoever to me.
I’ve gotten pretty good non-90’s zeitgeist mileage out of my V20 campaign by reframing everything in explicitly Catholic themes.

[...]

The result largely throws out the dated Punk aspects in favor of a greater focus on the more timeless themes of Gothic literature.

Very interesting stuff, Chris. That friend of mine I mentioned also used Christian themes in his Changeling campaign (which I don't think it would work with Werewolf, because that game has a very particular worldview). And it was great.

As for my Werewolf campaigns I excised all of the punk, nihilistic and tree-hugging aspects of the game. It was pretty much heroic urban "superversive" fantasy. And my players loved.   ;)


Totally unironically I think D&D movie would be best made in 3d animation like more mature pixar version

Agreed. However, in the West (unlike Japan, for instance) animations are still seen by and large as "kids' stuff" for the most part and thus do not reach an audience as broad as a live-action movie.

laughs in Pixar

Point taken, but Pixar is its own thing and it makes "family friendly" movies. Sure, many Pixar movies have adult themes (Up and Soul come to mind), but they're still kid friendly and even small children can - and do - enjoy it. 

I was thinking about animated movies and series directed specifically at a mature audience. Stuff like "Tokyo Ghul", "Bubblegun Crisis", "Akira", "Ghost in the Shell", "Goblin Slayer", "Vinland Saga", "Parasite", "Attack on Titan", and so on. Things that are too mature and or violent for kids.

I can remember from the top of my mind very few western animated movies aimed that adults that have been as successful as some of the examples above.  Ralph Bakshi's Wizards was one of those.

But Titan AE was a flop, as were some attempts by Disney to produce stuff to older kids (Treasure Island, for instance, which had Mike Mignola as one of its designers).

Direct to video DC Animated movies are great and very successful, but they are aimed at a a niche market.

Unfortunately the stigma that "animation is only for kids” is all very real, to the point that "adult animation" has become either anti-establishment (Rick & Morty, South Park) or over-the-top violent, with very few exceptions.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on February 11, 2021, 05:01:03 PM
It really does remain to be seen whether the D&D brand really can be leveraged beyond tabletop role-playing games.

So far there has been little success in that regard.

That is true. D&D is more challenging than transformers and especially Marvel were to translate to the big screen.

No history of fan favorite iconic characters. And no backlog of storylines of those characters to mine for movie and tv plot ideas.

Yes there are some D&D novels and modules that have gained a degree of popularity within the D&D fan base, but for some reason when it comes to D&D movies the powers that be seem to want to make things all new - but that probably has had a lot to do with the movie rights situation D&D has been in.
The appeal of D&D has always been about having your own adventures... rather than watching somebody else's adventures and wishing you could be them.

There are loads of video games and cartoons that take obvious cues from D&D without using the trademark. Dragon Quest, Tower of Druaga, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, World of WarCraft, Slayers, Record of Lodoss War, etc. To say nothing of the many amateur productions like Standard Action, JourneyQuest, One Hit Die, 1 For All, and Dark Dungeons.
All of which do just fine without the D&D brand on them.

This is the issue.  Does actually owning the D&D brand, even if it is the inspiration for this, really convery much additional value here?

You obviously don't need the D&D brand to make a successful fantasy computer rpg franchise (and there may even be some advantages in not having it).  Even in the case of Baldur's Gate 3 it seems that the makers are relying on the memory of two 20 year old games that were well received rather than simply the D&D brand.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 11, 2021, 05:19:47 PM
Quote
Agreed. However, in the West (unlike Japan, for instance) animations are still seen by and large as "kids' stuff" for the most part and thus do not reach an audience as broad as a live-action movie.

Chances for good D&D blockbuster movie for adults are... non-existent. I mean there is not even good material for it really - D&D worlds are bloody kitchen sinks for kitchen sinkey RPG, they lack focus even those more themed one, and nature of D&D campaigns are unfilmable. In Animation you'd at least avoid bad special effects.

Quote
As for my Werewolf campaigns I excised all of the punk, nihilistic and tree-hugging aspects of the game. It was pretty much heroic urban "superversive" fantasy. And my players loved.   ;)

I mean aside of drama queens wasn't Werewolf practically in 88% of campaigns played as heroic werewolves vs bad corporation poisoning crops of normie people?
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 11, 2021, 06:09:06 PM
I see a D&D TV series / streaming series happening before a major movie.

And Hasbro will ride D&D corpse into the earth long before selling it off.

Well prepare to be wrong I guess.

You...realize it's already in production and cast, right?

Lead Actors already cast: Chris Pine (Star Trek, Wonder Woman) Michelle Rodriguez (Fast & Furious, Avatar), Justice Smith (Jurassic World).

Direct and Written by John Francis Daley (from all the way back in Freaks and Geeks though better known these days for directing Game Night) and Jonathan Goldstein (Spiderman: Homecoming and also the co-director on Game Night). Derek Kolstad is also a lead writer (all the John Wick movies).

So, most of this is major blockbuster territory stuff. Star Trek, Wonder Woman, Fast & Furious, Avatar, Jurassic, Spiderman, John Wick.

It's set to release in 2022. Which should mean in actual movie theaters with pent up demand for movies.

We'll see how it does, but looks like it will be released as a major movie.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 11, 2021, 06:20:26 PM
Just look at Marvel as a good example. The Marvel print Comics division is shit. Perpetual declining sales numbers, annually laid off staff, with no upswing in sight.

I keep hearing this. I guess it made some geek news circles and nobody every questioned it and just takes it as gospel.

So let's start with comics in general:

"The comic book industry saw record growth in 2019, averaging $1 billion in the combined graphic novel and single-issue sales. The comic book industry experienced record growth in 2019, with combined sales of graphic novels and single issues in the United States and Canada equalling a total of $1.21 billion -- an 11% increase from 2018. The massive shift to graphic novels as the preferred format for comics continued in 2019, bringing sales in the book channel above the comic store channel in North America for the first time in the history of the medium. The biggest driving force behind sales were graphic novels, which tend to be sold in bookstores and comic book shops. Graphic novel sales accounted for around $765 million, while single issues totaled close to $355 million. Digital comics accounted for about $90 million, while sales made in bookstores totaled were closer to $570 million. Finally, approximately $525 million in sales came from local comic shops and $25 million in sales came via "other methods," including crowdfunding sites."

"Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share. That roughly echoes 2018’s market share numbers, with a slight uptick in Marvel’s favor."

(https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e18bc9ca854780006e842bd/960x0.jpg?fit=scale)

Now obviously Covid has messed with a lot of this for 2020. But, the comic book industry isn't like people seem to think it is.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BronzeDragon on February 11, 2021, 06:22:45 PM
We'll see how it does, but looks like it will be released as a major movie.

So was Warcraft.

$160,000,000 budget (x2 for advertising is the standard for blockbusters, more for Disney)
$439,048,914 worldwide gross (20-40% of this is retained by cinemas and distributors)

This movie, riding a far, far larger customer base and general popularity, very likely lost about 100-150 million dollars.

Now think about what kind of story will be filmed for the D&D movie and what sort of scenario is probably going to develop for the production. I am positive it's heading towards a blowout of "Cutthroat Island" proportions.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 11, 2021, 06:46:42 PM
Just look at Marvel as a good example. The Marvel print Comics division is shit. Perpetual declining sales numbers, annually laid off staff, with no upswing in sight.

I keep hearing this. I guess it made some geek news circles and nobody every questioned it and just takes it as gospel.

So let's start with comics in general:

"The comic book industry saw record growth in 2019, averaging $1 billion in the combined graphic novel and single-issue sales. The comic book industry experienced record growth in 2019, with combined sales of graphic novels and single issues in the United States and Canada equalling a total of $1.21 billion -- an 11% increase from 2018. The massive shift to graphic novels as the preferred format for comics continued in 2019, bringing sales in the book channel above the comic store channel in North America for the first time in the history of the medium. The biggest driving force behind sales were graphic novels, which tend to be sold in bookstores and comic book shops. Graphic novel sales accounted for around $765 million, while single issues totaled close to $355 million. Digital comics accounted for about $90 million, while sales made in bookstores totaled were closer to $570 million. Finally, approximately $525 million in sales came from local comic shops and $25 million in sales came via "other methods," including crowdfunding sites."

"Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share. That roughly echoes 2018’s market share numbers, with a slight uptick in Marvel’s favor."

(https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e18bc9ca854780006e842bd/960x0.jpg?fit=scale)

Now obviously Covid has messed with a lot of this for 2020. But, the comic book industry isn't like people seem to think it is.

Most of those sales are legacy sales.  A few years ago 100000 copies sold was a big triumph (which would have been sad back in the 1990s), now 40000 copies sold of a new comic would be an epic success. The supposed "super popular" SJW characters like Captain Marvel and Miss Marvel have routinely sold in the 10000 and 8000 range respectively.  The new SJW GI Joe was lucky to sell 2000.

No one is buying the new comics. Note that even those figures are inflated because marvel ships extra unpaid copies and lists them as "shipped", which most people think of as 'sold'.

The vast majority of the money Marvel and DC are making now are from, as you point out, OLD Comics in graphic novel format now. Watchmen (the original, not any of the garbage sequels) probably makes DC more money THIS YEAR than any comic they are currently paying people to make.

How long can that industry exist in this current form that way? 
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on February 11, 2021, 07:15:38 PM
The thing about the D&D movie is that we can wait and see - so it seems pointless to argue about whether it will be a success or not.  (And it's all probability anyway).

It's certainly not guaranteed to be a success.  Properties that are not based on a recognisable pre-exsiting narrative have often struggled (but not necessarily - eg Pirates of the Caribbean).

It may be a resounding success.  It's hardly guaranteed.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 11, 2021, 07:37:37 PM
I mean aside of drama queens wasn't Werewolf practically in 88% of campaigns played as heroic werewolves vs bad corporation poisoning crops of normie people?

Never seen the drama queens in Werewolf. Vampire, on the other hand... ::)

Anyway, you're partially correct. W:tA was pretty much like the old Captain Planet cartoon, but instead of kids with magical rings fighting bad guys who wanted to pollute the planet you had werewolves fighting a big bad corporation who wanted to pollute the planet.

Pollution wasn't their goal, however, but means to an end: turning the planet into a literal and spiritual cesspool.

I saw potential there, but removed all the tree-hugging and "punk" elements that turned the setting into a self-caricature.

I added elements of myth and folklore, planar traveling (the Umbra, with all its different Realms, was full of potential), urban fantasy, and political intrigue. I added many different villains, from secret societies (like the Enlightened Society of the Weeping Moon from "Werewolf: Old West") and corrupted werewolves and humans, to old evil spirits (heavily inspired by the Great Beasts from John Byrne's Alpha Flight) and other supernatural creatures. 

I treated the werewolves as the mythical guardians of Earth, not as eco-terrorists fighting Pentex, but literally as protectors of both physical and spiritual worlds who fought many different menaces (and, believe it or not, this was a few years before "Werewolf: the Forsaken" was published).

Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 12, 2021, 01:11:20 AM
Most of those sales are legacy sales.  A few years ago 100000 copies sold was a big triumph (which would have been sad back in the 1990s), now 40000 copies sold of a new comic would be an epic success. The supposed "super popular" SJW characters like Captain Marvel and Miss Marvel have routinely sold in the 10000 and 8000 range respectively.  The new SJW GI Joe was lucky to sell 2000.

No one is buying the new comics. Note that even those figures are inflated because marvel ships extra unpaid copies and lists them as "shipped", which most people think of as 'sold'.

The vast majority of the money Marvel and DC are making now are from, as you point out, OLD Comics in graphic novel format now. Watchmen (the original, not any of the garbage sequels) probably makes DC more money THIS YEAR than any comic they are currently paying people to make.

How long can that industry exist in this current form that way?
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

Unit sales of the comics being measured (Diamond, sliced a few ways) are down since 1997, but it's been up and down quite a few times since. There was a low in 2000, rising to a high around 2007, another low in 2010, and another high in 2015/2016. It's been down since, with a particularly steep drop in 2017, but it's still up from the previous lows in the aughts and teens. You can definitely argue there's been a drop since 2016, but 2019 (the last year) was a bit of rebound. Dollars aren't adjusted for inflation, but they're way up overall (estimates for the whole industry), and even up when only looking at comics not graphic novels (Diamond again). Graphic novels are definitely way up.

So it may be down from the years of iron and holograms in the 1990s, but in the last two decades there's been very strong growth in dollars overall, though that's more due to alternate formats like graphic novels than traditional comic books. Can't directly comment on how much of that is legacy, but just looking at traditional comic unit sales, which are probably all new as opposed to reprints, there's more evidence of a cyclical core industry than one in a death spiral.

Agree that movie sales eclipse the comic industry, that should be obvious. Can't comment on fraudulent accounting practices.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: hedgehobbit on February 12, 2021, 08:22:48 AM
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

The only segment that is growing is graphic novels and, according to comichron: "Sales of kids graphic novels in the book channel, which includes chain bookstores, mass merchants, major online retailers, and Scholastic Book Fairs were once again driving the format." These kid's graphic novels are things like Raina Telgemeier, Babysitters Club, Sunny, etc. They are not superhero comics. Traditional superhero comics are falling hard and sales of these kid's books are in no way helping Marvel or comic shops.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 12, 2021, 03:02:16 PM
Most of those sales are legacy sales.  A few years ago 100000 copies sold was a big triumph (which would have been sad back in the 1990s), now 40000 copies sold of a new comic would be an epic success. The supposed "super popular" SJW characters like Captain Marvel and Miss Marvel have routinely sold in the 10000 and 8000 range respectively.  The new SJW GI Joe was lucky to sell 2000.

No one is buying the new comics. Note that even those figures are inflated because marvel ships extra unpaid copies and lists them as "shipped", which most people think of as 'sold'.

The vast majority of the money Marvel and DC are making now are from, as you point out, OLD Comics in graphic novel format now. Watchmen (the original, not any of the garbage sequels) probably makes DC more money THIS YEAR than any comic they are currently paying people to make.

How long can that industry exist in this current form that way?
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

Unit sales of the comics being measured (Diamond, sliced a few ways) are down since 1997, but it's been up and down quite a few times since. There was a low in 2000, rising to a high around 2007, another low in 2010, and another high in 2015/2016. It's been down since, with a particularly steep drop in 2017, but it's still up from the previous lows in the aughts and teens. You can definitely argue there's been a drop since 2016, but 2019 (the last year) was a bit of rebound. Dollars aren't adjusted for inflation, but they're way up overall (estimates for the whole industry), and even up when only looking at comics not graphic novels (Diamond again). Graphic novels are definitely way up.

So it may be down from the years of iron and holograms in the 1990s, but in the last two decades there's been very strong growth in dollars overall, though that's more due to alternate formats like graphic novels than traditional comic books. Can't directly comment on how much of that is legacy, but just looking at traditional comic unit sales, which are probably all new as opposed to reprints, there's more evidence of a cyclical core industry than one in a death spiral.

Agree that movie sales eclipse the comic industry, that should be obvious. Can't comment on fraudulent accounting practices.

This past month only TWO comics, in the entire industry, was estimated by diamond to have shipped more than 100K copies. Only 17 in total (including the first two) shipped more than 50K.  SEVENTEEN COMICS in the entire industry.  The SJW-favorite Captain Marvel in a special issue that was also a number one, written by SJW writers that Marvel constantly insists are super famous and super popular writers (though numbers seem to always, always prove the opposite), DIDN'T EVEN MAKE 25K.

The "Magnificent Ms Marvel", which we are assured by Marvel is the Muslim Teen Fascist Superhero EVERYONE Loves, and they've forced her onto every cartoon, and soon into the Marvel Cinematic Universe despite ZERO actual evidence that ANYONE wants her, is shipping 13K copies (and again, anything up to 3/4s of that might be from forced free shipping to comic stores, unsolicited by comic store owners, and doomed to rot in a 5-cent bargain bin forever unread).

I don't know why you're trying to insist that the Communist-run Horse-and-Buggy factory is a thriving industry run by a proven ideology, but you're full of shit.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 12, 2021, 03:05:07 PM
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

The only segment that is growing is graphic novels and, according to comichron: "Sales of kids graphic novels in the book channel, which includes chain bookstores, mass merchants, major online retailers, and Scholastic Book Fairs were once again driving the format." These kid's graphic novels are things like Raina Telgemeier, Babysitters Club, Sunny, etc. They are not superhero comics. Traditional superhero comics are falling hard and sales of these kid's books are in no way helping Marvel or comic shops.

The Scholastics scam is Communist SJW comic writers making products NO ONE would ever voluntarily buy or read, then getting Communist Librarians to push them through Communist School Boards to get Communist Teachers to force kids to make their parents buy books that will attempt to subvert their very children into destroying the family.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 12, 2021, 04:13:24 PM
Most of those sales are legacy sales.  A few years ago 100000 copies sold was a big triumph (which would have been sad back in the 1990s), now 40000 copies sold of a new comic would be an epic success. The supposed "super popular" SJW characters like Captain Marvel and Miss Marvel have routinely sold in the 10000 and 8000 range respectively.  The new SJW GI Joe was lucky to sell 2000.

No one is buying the new comics. Note that even those figures are inflated because marvel ships extra unpaid copies and lists them as "shipped", which most people think of as 'sold'.

The vast majority of the money Marvel and DC are making now are from, as you point out, OLD Comics in graphic novel format now. Watchmen (the original, not any of the garbage sequels) probably makes DC more money THIS YEAR than any comic they are currently paying people to make.

How long can that industry exist in this current form that way?
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

Unit sales of the comics being measured (Diamond, sliced a few ways) are down since 1997, but it's been up and down quite a few times since. There was a low in 2000, rising to a high around 2007, another low in 2010, and another high in 2015/2016. It's been down since, with a particularly steep drop in 2017, but it's still up from the previous lows in the aughts and teens. You can definitely argue there's been a drop since 2016, but 2019 (the last year) was a bit of rebound. Dollars aren't adjusted for inflation, but they're way up overall (estimates for the whole industry), and even up when only looking at comics not graphic novels (Diamond again). Graphic novels are definitely way up.

So it may be down from the years of iron and holograms in the 1990s, but in the last two decades there's been very strong growth in dollars overall, though that's more due to alternate formats like graphic novels than traditional comic books. Can't directly comment on how much of that is legacy, but just looking at traditional comic unit sales, which are probably all new as opposed to reprints, there's more evidence of a cyclical core industry than one in a death spiral.

Agree that movie sales eclipse the comic industry, that should be obvious. Can't comment on fraudulent accounting practices.

This past month only TWO comics, in the entire industry, was estimated by diamond to have shipped more than 100K copies. Only 17 in total (including the first two) shipped more than 50K.  SEVENTEEN COMICS in the entire industry.  The SJW-favorite Captain Marvel in a special issue that was also a number one, written by SJW writers that Marvel constantly insists are super famous and super popular writers (though numbers seem to always, always prove the opposite), DIDN'T EVEN MAKE 25K.

The "Magnificent Ms Marvel", which we are assured by Marvel is the Muslim Teen Fascist Superhero EVERYONE Loves, and they've forced her onto every cartoon, and soon into the Marvel Cinematic Universe despite ZERO actual evidence that ANYONE wants her, is shipping 13K copies (and again, anything up to 3/4s of that might be from forced free shipping to comic stores, unsolicited by comic store owners, and doomed to rot in a 5-cent bargain bin forever unread).

I don't know why you're trying to insist that the Communist-run Horse-and-Buggy factory is a thriving industry run by a proven ideology, but you're full of shit.
I'm not insisting anything. I looked up data, and presented what I found. The results surprised me. I thought there was going to be evidence of a decline, but there simply wasn't.

You haven't presented any counterargument, at all. Because the sales of a single title, or even the sales of the top 2 comics, over a single year, don't tell us a damn thing about whether the industry is growing, shrinking, or remains relatively stable. How many were sold last year? The year before? Ten years ago? In order to assess the state of the industry, we need to have data from previous years, to compare.

Since you haven't presented any real data, or any sources, and your entire post seems to hinge on an obsession with a concentration camp worker, it's a safe bet you're just flat-out wrong.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 12, 2021, 04:25:02 PM
Evidence doesn't really support that. Here are many different ways of looking at the size of the comics industry, going back to 1997 for much of the data:
https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

The only segment that is growing is graphic novels and, according to comichron: "Sales of kids graphic novels in the book channel, which includes chain bookstores, mass merchants, major online retailers, and Scholastic Book Fairs were once again driving the format." These kid's graphic novels are things like Raina Telgemeier, Babysitters Club, Sunny, etc. They are not superhero comics. Traditional superhero comics are falling hard and sales of these kid's books are in no way helping Marvel or comic shops.
I wondered if there was a shift. I'd be interested in seeing a breakdown. But the links I've provided show that while sales of graphic novels are way up, traditional comic book formats unit sales haven't been dropping. Has there been a shift in that market, as well? I haven't seen anything like a comic book rack in traditional book stores, and I don't know enough about scholastic book fairs to know how many sales they can drive.

Anecdotally, the last time I stopped at a comic book shop I saw a young girl and her mother come in. The girl had never been there before, but had clearly begged her mother to bring her. But she was looking for manga and left disappointed because that's not the store's focus. Then a second group of girls showed up, with similar interests. Given that was literally half their foot traffic during that period, if that's at all representative, they're making a business mistake by not catering to them.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 12, 2021, 05:35:05 PM
Just look at Marvel as a good example. The Marvel print Comics division is shit. Perpetual declining sales numbers, annually laid off staff, with no upswing in sight.

I keep hearing this. I guess it made some geek news circles and nobody every questioned it and just takes it as gospel.

So let's start with comics in general:

"The comic book industry saw record growth in 2019, averaging $1 billion in the combined graphic novel and single-issue sales. The comic book industry experienced record growth in 2019, with combined sales of graphic novels and single issues in the United States and Canada equalling a total of $1.21 billion -- an 11% increase from 2018. The massive shift to graphic novels as the preferred format for comics continued in 2019, bringing sales in the book channel above the comic store channel in North America for the first time in the history of the medium. The biggest driving force behind sales were graphic novels, which tend to be sold in bookstores and comic book shops. Graphic novel sales accounted for around $765 million, while single issues totaled close to $355 million. Digital comics accounted for about $90 million, while sales made in bookstores totaled were closer to $570 million. Finally, approximately $525 million in sales came from local comic shops and $25 million in sales came via "other methods," including crowdfunding sites."

"Marvel dominated the market share for periodicals with a 44.72%-30.74% lead over DC in unit share and a 40.2% to 29.29% lead in dollar share. That roughly echoes 2018’s market share numbers, with a slight uptick in Marvel’s favor."

(https://specials-images.forbesimg.com/imageserve/5e18bc9ca854780006e842bd/960x0.jpg?fit=scale)

Now obviously Covid has messed with a lot of this for 2020. But, the comic book industry isn't like people seem to think it is.

Most of those sales are legacy sales.  A few years ago 100000 copies sold was a big triumph (which would have been sad back in the 1990s), now 40000 copies sold of a new comic would be an epic success. The supposed "super popular" SJW characters like Captain Marvel and Miss Marvel have routinely sold in the 10000 and 8000 range respectively.  The new SJW GI Joe was lucky to sell 2000.

No one is buying the new comics. Note that even those figures are inflated because marvel ships extra unpaid copies and lists them as "shipped", which most people think of as 'sold'.

The vast majority of the money Marvel and DC are making now are from, as you point out, OLD Comics in graphic novel format now. Watchmen (the original, not any of the garbage sequels) probably makes DC more money THIS YEAR than any comic they are currently paying people to make.

How long can that industry exist in this current form that way?

Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 12, 2021, 09:50:19 PM
I mean aside of drama queens wasn't Werewolf practically in 88% of campaigns played as heroic werewolves vs bad corporation poisoning crops of normie people?

Never seen the drama queens in Werewolf. Vampire, on the other hand... ::)

Anyway, you're partially correct. W:tA was pretty much like the old Captain Planet cartoon, but instead of kids with magical rings fighting bad guys who wanted to pollute the planet you had werewolves fighting a big bad corporation who wanted to pollute the planet.

Pollution wasn't their goal, however, but means to an end: turning the planet into a literal and spiritual cesspool.

I saw potential there, but removed all the tree-hugging and "punk" elements that turned the setting into a self-caricature.

I added elements of myth and folklore, planar traveling (the Umbra, with all its different Realms, was full of potential), urban fantasy, and political intrigue. I added many different villains, from secret societies (like the Enlightened Society of the Weeping Moon from "Werewolf: Old West") and corrupted werewolves and humans, to old evil spirits (heavily inspired by the Great Beasts from John Byrne's Alpha Flight) and other supernatural creatures. 

I treated the werewolves as the mythical guardians of Earth, not as eco-terrorists fighting Pentex, but literally as protectors of both physical and spiritual worlds who fought many different menaces (and, believe it or not, this was a few years before "Werewolf: the Forsaken" was published).

That’s how the Manitou in The Everlasting worked. Manitou were humans who were empowered by nature totems, which could be animals, plants, or even minerals. Although they did deal with humanity’s despoiling of the natural world, invasions by the setting’s equivalent of Lovecraftian aliens was considered a more pressing issue.

I suspect The Everlasting influenced nWoD/CoD because some of the jargon is identical (e.g. blood potency, numen).

Somebody once told me that nWoD/CoD was a creative disaster not because it tried to do something new but because it tried too hard to distance itself from its predecessor. They pointed to Mage as the most extreme example: it changed from a broader philosophical question to weird Blavatsky stuff.

I agree that Blavatsky might have been too extreme to use as the basis for an IP about DIY magic, but I don’t think “consensus reality” is all that great either. It plays right into science denial and postmodernist critical theory. E.g. flat earth belief, anti-vaccine sentiment, “woman is a social construct.” I don’t want to see those promoted as truth even in a fictional context.

But I digress
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Conanist on February 12, 2021, 10:24:12 PM
Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.

Are you referring to manga? The western "graphic novels" I'm aware of are 99% reprinted monthly stuff. Marvel and DC did produce original graphic novels back in the 80's but you don't see those on the shelves these days.

Up until a few years ago I was a lifelong comic geek, starting in the 70's. But, you drive to the comic shop and don't see anything worth buying one too many times, and you stop going.  That's how you lose a customer for life. I've been using the Comichron site for quite some time to see the industry trends. It's a great site! You can go down quite a rabbit hole with this, if you care to.

Overall, I have to agree with Pundit here. The woke books just don't sell (Saga being the ONE exception, which is written by one of the best, and pubished by Image).

While it does look like the Marvel stuff is making a comeback, and with the consideration that other publishers ate into Marvel's market share during the "peak woke" period, you should look at what happened then. Notice the slowdown in 2016 and the dip in 2017.

https://www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales.html

Drilling down a little deeper take a look at this

https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2017/2017-02.html

Marvel would generally have at least half of the top 20 spots, with Spider Man, Wolverine, X-men and (Avengers in the new milennium) being perennial best sellers. Seeing only Spider Man and Star Wars selling "well" must have freaked them out.

Looking at the last month before COVID 19, Marvel is back where it had usually been using the original characters. Captain Marvel doesn't crack the top 50 and Ms Marvel is clearly in the "dud" category.

https://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2020/2020-02.html

A few years back I read that 6000 sales was the break even point for a Marvel comic. I can't imagine that number has gone down.



Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 13, 2021, 12:10:44 AM
I agree that Blavatsky might have been too extreme to use as the basis for an IP about DIY magic, but I don’t think “consensus reality” is all that great either. It plays right into science denial and postmodernist critical theory. E.g. flat earth belief, anti-vaccine sentiment, “woman is a social construct.” I don’t want to see those promoted as truth even in a fictional context.

But I digress
The digression is more interesting than the actual topic though and is at least game related.

The thing to remember about “consensual reality” is it’s pretty much jargon in the same way that “disk drive” is in this era of solid-state flash drives... or the fact that the save icon looks like an old 3.5” floppy disk; it’s a term used even though it’s not actually all that accurate because it’s familiar and still somewhat covers the part related to magic.

Because, since pretty much late 2e and continuing through Revised and V20, the ACTUAL cosmology would be better described as an objective universe with will-based reality warping as an overlay.

That’s because late 2e on introduced the idea of “cosmological constants”; gravity, linear time, a round planet that orbits the sun, basic physics and chemistry; all of that stuff (among others) in Ascension has been established to exist independently of any will.

They also clarified “effect-based determinism.” i.e. the result of your magic is limited by the spheres used to produce it... you can’t use Correspondence to coincidentally get quickly across town by having a Taxi show up (that would be results-based determism... Correspondence allows quick travel from place to place so a coincidental use is that a Taxi just happens to be there and gets all green lights the whole way).

Rather, to just happen to have a Taxi waiting on the corner you’d need matter (to create a taxi), life and mind (to create a meat puppet taxi driver), prime (to create those from nothing), forces (to control the traffic lights) and correspondance (to affect anything beyond your line of sight) and a generous helping of knowledge in engineering (for the taxi) and biology (for the meat puppet driver).

In other words, Correspondence alone doesn’t cause reality to subjectively produce a taxi and driver. You have to deliberately warp reality using specific knowledge of many spheres of magic coupled with principles of physics, chemistry and biology.

Another example is that if you want to survive being shot by the bullet coincidentally hitting a whiskey flask in your pocket, then you better either already have a whiskey flask in your pocket (and either entropy or forces to guide the bullet to the flask) OR have matter magic to create a whiskey flask in your pocket.

M20 also clarified “hypothetical average observer” for coincidental/vulgar magic which further defines a less subjective and more objective reality. If you walk into a dark alley, no average person watching would think anything of it. Even if they were following you and couldn’t find you when they entered the alley they wouldn’t think “magic” they’d think you slipped out via a route you didn’t see.

Similarly, if you walked out of a dark alley on the other side of town, no one is going to think “magic” unless they knew for a fact you were 5 miles away 10 seconds ago (though if they did know that’s now vulgar with a witness).

Basically, all of these combined establish a non-consensual reality that mages are able to warp using their belief (bolstered by the tools and practices they believe work) to the specific limits of their avatar and will/arete... and which gets pushback from both the degree it violates objective laws (vulgar without witnesses) and even more severely from the unbelief of Sleeper (vulgar with witnesses).

Reality warpers with security blankets (their paradigm, practices and props) is really the only sort of system that can allow “everyone’s magical practices work” in any sort of coherent fashion. It’s also the version that best interacts with the broader World of Darkness and it’s need for certain objective truths for their settings to function.

The alternative is basically the largely rejected “one true way” approach that Awakening used.

So if it’s majority objective, why do they call it “consensus reality”? Because it’s an easy shorthand for explaining the fundamentals of the “reality warpers” abilities and limitations, but it’s about as accurate as claiming E=mc^2 is the whole of mass/energy equations.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 13, 2021, 01:35:58 AM
Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.

Are you referring to manga? The western "graphic novels" I'm aware of are 99% reprinted monthly stuff. Marvel and DC did produce original graphic novels back in the 80's but you don't see those on the shelves these days.

Here's the top selling graphic novels of 2020/ (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 13, 2021, 03:01:31 AM
Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.

Are you referring to manga? The western "graphic novels" I'm aware of are 99% reprinted monthly stuff. Marvel and DC did produce original graphic novels back in the 80's but you don't see those on the shelves these days.

Here's the top selling graphic novels of 2020/ (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/)


So NOT ONE is a traditional superhero comic. It's a mix of Manga and the books sold to library and pushed on parents through the 'scholastic press' scam. The latter mostly being SJW propaganda, none of which would sell under a system that wasn't explicitly set up to trick families into buying them as "educational".
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Eirikrautha on February 13, 2021, 08:30:38 AM
Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.

Are you referring to manga? The western "graphic novels" I'm aware of are 99% reprinted monthly stuff. Marvel and DC did produce original graphic novels back in the 80's but you don't see those on the shelves these days.

Here's the top selling graphic novels of 2020/ (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/)


So NOT ONE is a traditional superhero comic. It's a mix of Manga and the books sold to library and pushed on parents through the 'scholastic press' scam. The latter mostly being SJW propaganda, none of which would sell under a system that wasn't explicitly set up to trick families into buying them as "educational".

I love how the entire argument started from a simple statement that Marvel comics are floundering, while the IP is making all the money.  The comics defenders come out of the woodwork to assert that "ackshully, comics are doing just fine..."  Then, the very stats and links they provide establish that Japanese and alternative comics might be doing well, but Marvel comics don't appear to be the driving force, even on the very list they linked!  So why argue the point in the first place?!?  It's like they hear "Marvel" and think "Oh no, someone is attacking my beloved hobby!"  Well, there's a difference between the weeb crap that's popular with kids today and the traditional superhero comic that Marvel is famous for.  It's like getting in an argument with a religious zealot.  Even evidence against their position is somehow warped as support for it in their mind...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 13, 2021, 09:34:13 AM
I love how the entire argument started from a simple statement that Marvel comics are floundering, while the IP is making all the money.  The comics defenders come out of the woodwork to assert that "ackshully, comics are doing just fine..."  Then, the very stats and links they provide establish that Japanese and alternative comics might be doing well, but Marvel comics don't appear to be the driving force, even on the very list they linked!  So why argue the point in the first place?!?  It's like they hear "Marvel" and think "Oh no, someone is attacking my beloved hobby!"  Well, there's a difference between the weeb crap that's popular with kids today and the traditional superhero comic that Marvel is famous for.  It's like getting in an argument with a religious zealot.  Even evidence against their position is somehow warped as support for it in their mind...
A lot of the discussion (like mine) has been about the comics industry as a whole, with no mention of Marvel. And calling someone like me a comics defender is ridiculous, since I don't like modern comics. There are a handful of people, including you and Pundit, who seem desperate to turn this into some kind of partisan thing, and are jumping to all kinds of false conclusions.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Dimitrios on February 13, 2021, 09:48:20 AM
It does seem like traditional super hero comics sold in the traditional format (24 or 32 pages, softcover, appearing monthly) are struggling. Of course manga is huge, but it's a distinct genre and mostly sold in bookstores.

There were 3 local comic shops when I moved to my current city 7 years ago, and they all closed during the last 3 years (before covid). I have no idea whether that says anything about the state of the industry as a whole.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 13, 2021, 10:24:26 AM
It does seem like traditional super hero comics sold in the traditional format (24 or 32 pages, softcover, appearing monthly) are struggling. Of course manga is huge, but it's a distinct genre and mostly sold in bookstores.
Graphic novels have definitely been growing based on the Diamond numbers, but based on the New York Times list, they seem to be dominated by stuff like Cat Kid or the Babysitter's Club, and secondarily manga. I'm curious about the traditional comic book format. According to the Diamond lists, unit sales seem fairly stable. But is that because traditional super hero comics sales are stable, or are they in a decline and being replaced by alternatives in the same format? And if they are being replaced by something like New Kid or My Hero Academia, where are those issues being sold? Because I haven't seen comic books racks in general book stores, and comic book stores still seem very heavily focused on super heroes. Someone mentioned scholastic fairs, but I don't know anything about them.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Eirikrautha on February 13, 2021, 11:17:59 AM
I love how the entire argument started from a simple statement that Marvel comics are floundering, while the IP is making all the money.  The comics defenders come out of the woodwork to assert that "ackshully, comics are doing just fine..."  Then, the very stats and links they provide establish that Japanese and alternative comics might be doing well, but Marvel comics don't appear to be the driving force, even on the very list they linked!  So why argue the point in the first place?!?  It's like they hear "Marvel" and think "Oh no, someone is attacking my beloved hobby!"  Well, there's a difference between the weeb crap that's popular with kids today and the traditional superhero comic that Marvel is famous for.  It's like getting in an argument with a religious zealot.  Even evidence against their position is somehow warped as support for it in their mind...
A lot of the discussion (like mine) has been about the comics industry as a whole, with no mention of Marvel. And calling someone like me a comics defender is ridiculous, since I don't like modern comics. There are a handful of people, including you and Pundit, who seem desperate to turn this into some kind of partisan thing, and are jumping to all kinds of false conclusions.
The hit dog is the one that barks.

Someone in this thread made a comment about Marvel comics vs the IP.  Then you and others jump in with assertions about comics and graphic novels in general, which had nothing to do with the original statement or argument.  Nobody here thinks that manga is the same thing as Marvel, so what is your point, if not to defend comics in general, which apparently not even you care about?  It certainly has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, that Hasbro might be trying to grow the D&D IP without concern for the RPG.  The only person who seems to have an ideological axe to grind is you, trying to defend against arguments irrelevant to the topic at hand...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 13, 2021, 07:05:17 PM
I agree that Blavatsky might have been too extreme to use as the basis for an IP about DIY magic, but I don’t think “consensus reality” is all that great either. It plays right into science denial and postmodernist critical theory. E.g. flat earth belief, anti-vaccine sentiment, “woman is a social construct.” I don’t want to see those promoted as truth even in a fictional context.

But I digress
The digression is more interesting than the actual topic though and is at least game related.

The thing to remember about “consensual reality” is it’s pretty much jargon in the same way that “disk drive” is in this era of solid-state flash drives... or the fact that the save icon looks like an old 3.5” floppy disk; it’s a term used even though it’s not actually all that accurate because it’s familiar and still somewhat covers the part related to magic.

Because, since pretty much late 2e and continuing through Revised and V20, the ACTUAL cosmology would be better described as an objective universe with will-based reality warping as an overlay.

That’s because late 2e on introduced the idea of “cosmological constants”; gravity, linear time, a round planet that orbits the sun, basic physics and chemistry; all of that stuff (among others) in Ascension has been established to exist independently of any will.

They also clarified “effect-based determinism.” i.e. the result of your magic is limited by the spheres used to produce it... you can’t use Correspondence to coincidentally get quickly across town by having a Taxi show up (that would be results-based determism... Correspondence allows quick travel from place to place so a coincidental use is that a Taxi just happens to be there and gets all green lights the whole way).

Rather, to just happen to have a Taxi waiting on the corner you’d need matter (to create a taxi), life and mind (to create a meat puppet taxi driver), prime (to create those from nothing), forces (to control the traffic lights) and correspondance (to affect anything beyond your line of sight) and a generous helping of knowledge in engineering (for the taxi) and biology (for the meat puppet driver).

In other words, Correspondence alone doesn’t cause reality to subjectively produce a taxi and driver. You have to deliberately warp reality using specific knowledge of many spheres of magic coupled with principles of physics, chemistry and biology.

Another example is that if you want to survive being shot by the bullet coincidentally hitting a whiskey flask in your pocket, then you better either already have a whiskey flask in your pocket (and either entropy or forces to guide the bullet to the flask) OR have matter magic to create a whiskey flask in your pocket.

M20 also clarified “hypothetical average observer” for coincidental/vulgar magic which further defines a less subjective and more objective reality. If you walk into a dark alley, no average person watching would think anything of it. Even if they were following you and couldn’t find you when they entered the alley they wouldn’t think “magic” they’d think you slipped out via a route you didn’t see.

Similarly, if you walked out of a dark alley on the other side of town, no one is going to think “magic” unless they knew for a fact you were 5 miles away 10 seconds ago (though if they did know that’s now vulgar with a witness).

Basically, all of these combined establish a non-consensual reality that mages are able to warp using their belief (bolstered by the tools and practices they believe work) to the specific limits of their avatar and will/arete... and which gets pushback from both the degree it violates objective laws (vulgar without witnesses) and even more severely from the unbelief of Sleeper (vulgar with witnesses).

Reality warpers with security blankets (their paradigm, practices and props) is really the only sort of system that can allow “everyone’s magical practices work” in any sort of coherent fashion. It’s also the version that best interacts with the broader World of Darkness and it’s need for certain objective truths for their settings to function.

The alternative is basically the largely rejected “one true way” approach that Awakening used.

So if it’s majority objective, why do they call it “consensus reality”? Because it’s an easy shorthand for explaining the fundamentals of the “reality warpers” abilities and limitations, but it’s about as accurate as claiming E=mc^2 is the whole of mass/energy equations.
All your eye-searing examples do is just remind me why I dislike Ascension in the first place.

If I was writing a magic setting then I would let magic just work, offering a banal platitude about the Anthropic Principle at most (https://mobunited.livejournal.com/52042.html), and then let various in-universe organizations come up with magical theories. I suspect that might even fit better thematically with a DIY magic system rather than the purple paradigm, but YMMV.

This is why I found myself attracted to Opening the Dark (https://archive.org/details/OpeningTheDarkSRD/page/n117/mode/2up)'s magic rules. In addition to being a distillation of Ars Magica's syntactic magic and its innumerable derivatives, it puts the players and GM firmly in control rather than pretending the RAW can account for all eventualities.

Reality warpers with security blankets (their paradigm, practices and props) is really the only sort of system that can allow “everyone’s magical practices work” in any sort of coherent fashion.
Well darn, why didn't you say that in the first place?

The alternative is basically the largely rejected “one true way” approach that Awakening used.
I think that's an uncharitable description of Awakening. Especially when you're cherrypicking the entire publication history of Ascension to bolster arguments about it, but seemingly not affording the same luxury to Awakening. Tho I'm not enough of a shill to try defending it further.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 13, 2021, 09:17:34 PM
I love how the entire argument started from a simple statement that Marvel comics are floundering, while the IP is making all the money.  The comics defenders come out of the woodwork to assert that "ackshully, comics are doing just fine..."  Then, the very stats and links they provide establish that Japanese and alternative comics might be doing well, but Marvel comics don't appear to be the driving force, even on the very list they linked!  So why argue the point in the first place?!?  It's like they hear "Marvel" and think "Oh no, someone is attacking my beloved hobby!"  Well, there's a difference between the weeb crap that's popular with kids today and the traditional superhero comic that Marvel is famous for.  It's like getting in an argument with a religious zealot.  Even evidence against their position is somehow warped as support for it in their mind...
A lot of the discussion (like mine) has been about the comics industry as a whole, with no mention of Marvel. And calling someone like me a comics defender is ridiculous, since I don't like modern comics. There are a handful of people, including you and Pundit, who seem desperate to turn this into some kind of partisan thing, and are jumping to all kinds of false conclusions.
The hit dog is the one that barks.

Someone in this thread made a comment about Marvel comics vs the IP.  Then you and others jump in with assertions about comics and graphic novels in general, which had nothing to do with the original statement or argument.  Nobody here thinks that manga is the same thing as Marvel, so what is your point, if not to defend comics in general, which apparently not even you care about?  It certainly has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, that Hasbro might be trying to grow the D&D IP without concern for the RPG.  The only person who seems to have an ideological axe to grind is you, trying to defend against arguments irrelevant to the topic at hand...
Bullshit. When you make broad, general statements about a group of people in the thread with certain characteristics, and don't reply to a specific post or identify who you're talking about, then you're attacking anyone who meets any of the criteria. That's passive aggressive bullshit and I called you out for it.

And I replied to a specific post. I'm not responsible for every other thing every other poster has said in the thread. That's insane. And I hope you realize the whole discussion on comics has absolutely nothing to do with the thread's main topic.

I posted because I was curious what the comics industry was like, looked up some data, and shared it. Zero ideology, because I don't have any real investment in the modern comics industry. You're the one who posted as an emotional ideologue -- which should be obvious even to you.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 13, 2021, 09:48:32 PM
Most graphic novels are new and not reprints of monthly published prior comics. The market shifted. It's not Watchman. It's not old comics in a new format. For the most part, it's brand new stuff.

Are you referring to manga? The western "graphic novels" I'm aware of are 99% reprinted monthly stuff. Marvel and DC did produce original graphic novels back in the 80's but you don't see those on the shelves these days.

Here's the top selling graphic novels of 2020/ (https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/graphic-books-and-manga/)


So NOT ONE is a traditional superhero comic. It's a mix of Manga and the books sold to library and pushed on parents through the 'scholastic press' scam. The latter mostly being SJW propaganda, none of which would sell under a system that wasn't explicitly set up to trick families into buying them as "educational".

It's so nice your grandchildren taught you how to post to the interwebs, old man.

Oh for fucks sake, how on earth could you be this out of touch? Scholastic's graphic novel sales are not a scam and there hasn't been in person school in a year. The change-over to Scholastic's massive REAL hits with Raina Telgemeier which spawned literally hundreds of others appealing to middle school age kids which are selling massively and have become a dominant trend with middle schoolers for give years now. Marvel and DC picked up on the trend and followed as well. It's not SJW anything - it's just they all figured out (finally) that the original comics sold TO KIDS and so now they're SELLING COMICS THAT APPEAL TO KIDS AGAIN.

There's also a boom in spanish-language comics by the way. Which, if you were not a senile old man you'd know given you live in one of those nations where that trend has spread to.

Jesus, it's like talking to my parents when I come here sometimes (and I am in my early 50s). You seriously thought the comic book market was still dominated by superheroes? Superheroes still do OK, but the market changed a while ago. And not from some nefarious political agenda, but because markets sometimes change and this one did. And it's not aimed at old people as much as it was.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Eirikrautha on February 13, 2021, 10:06:33 PM
I love how the entire argument started from a simple statement that Marvel comics are floundering, while the IP is making all the money.  The comics defenders come out of the woodwork to assert that "ackshully, comics are doing just fine..."  Then, the very stats and links they provide establish that Japanese and alternative comics might be doing well, but Marvel comics don't appear to be the driving force, even on the very list they linked!  So why argue the point in the first place?!?  It's like they hear "Marvel" and think "Oh no, someone is attacking my beloved hobby!"  Well, there's a difference between the weeb crap that's popular with kids today and the traditional superhero comic that Marvel is famous for.  It's like getting in an argument with a religious zealot.  Even evidence against their position is somehow warped as support for it in their mind...
A lot of the discussion (like mine) has been about the comics industry as a whole, with no mention of Marvel. And calling someone like me a comics defender is ridiculous, since I don't like modern comics. There are a handful of people, including you and Pundit, who seem desperate to turn this into some kind of partisan thing, and are jumping to all kinds of false conclusions.
The hit dog is the one that barks.

Someone in this thread made a comment about Marvel comics vs the IP.  Then you and others jump in with assertions about comics and graphic novels in general, which had nothing to do with the original statement or argument.  Nobody here thinks that manga is the same thing as Marvel, so what is your point, if not to defend comics in general, which apparently not even you care about?  It certainly has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, that Hasbro might be trying to grow the D&D IP without concern for the RPG.  The only person who seems to have an ideological axe to grind is you, trying to defend against arguments irrelevant to the topic at hand...
Bullshit. When you make broad, general statements about a group of people in the thread with certain characteristics, and don't reply to a specific post or identify who you're talking about, then you're attacking anyone who meets any of the criteria. That's passive aggressive bullshit and I called you out for it.

And I replied to a specific post. I'm not responsible for every other thing every other poster has said in the thread. That's insane. And I hope you realize the whole discussion on comics has absolutely nothing to do with the thread's main topic.

I posted because I was curious what the comics industry was like, looked up some data, and shared it. Zero ideology, because I don't have any real investment in the modern comics industry. You're the one who posted as an emotional ideologue -- which should be obvious even to you.
The only bullshit here is what you are peddling.  The discussion was about whether or not Hasbro was motivated to sell D&D (you know, in the thread title?), and the Disney/Marvel IP was used as an example.  Several people chimed in to dispute that Marvel was doing poorly.  No one was arguing that all comics were failing, because that's irrelevant; they were talking about Marvel comics.  But you and Mistwell then start babbling about manga and kid's graphic novels.  So do you have any opinion on the actual topic of discussion?  How about Marvel?  Are their superhero comics profitable, or is the IP carrying the brand (as wa s stated by several people, including Pundit, above)?  How about those statistics...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 13, 2021, 10:21:24 PM
The only bullshit here is what you are peddling.  The discussion was about whether or not Hasbro was motivated to sell D&D (you know, in the thread title?), and the Disney/Marvel IP was used as an example.  Several people chimed in to dispute that Marvel was doing poorly.  No one was arguing that all comics were failing, because that's irrelevant; they were talking about Marvel comics.  But you and Mistwell then start babbling about manga and kid's graphic novels.  So do you have any opinion on the actual topic of discussion?  How about Marvel?  Are their superhero comics profitable, or is the IP carrying the brand (as wa s stated by several people, including Pundit, above)?  How about those statistics...
Projection, they name is Eirikrautha. I replied to a post, not to everything everyone else said in the thread. That's insane. It's tangential to the thread topic, but then so is the entire discussion of comics. Claiming otherwise is absurd. And I literally asked, several post ago, if anyone had any information on how much of the market was super hero comics.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 14, 2021, 03:52:27 AM


If I was writing a magic setting then I would let magic just work, offering a banal platitude about the Anthropic Principle at most (https://mobunited.livejournal.com/52042.html), and then let various in-universe organizations come up with magical theories. I suspect that might even fit better thematically with a DIY magic system rather than the purple paradigm, but YMMV.

There's lots of different ritual trappings used in magick throughout time and culture, but there's only one philosophia perennia.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Dimitrios on February 14, 2021, 10:40:39 AM
To bring the comics tangent back to the topic of rpgs, I don't think the point is about the overall state of the comics industry or what the Kids These Days are reading (that's pretty obviously more manga than super heroes).

I think the point was that Marvel's attempt to revive their flagging super hero lines by woke-ifying them failed miserably, and that has implications for the future of D&D in the event that 5e's sales start to decline.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Abraxus on February 14, 2021, 11:07:37 AM
to revive their flagging super hero lines by woke-ifying them failed miserably, and that has implications for the future of D&D in the event that 5e's sales start to decline.

Get Woke Go Broke is pretty much the standard Marvel seemed and still seems to be striving for, and quintupling down on even more lately. The sales were hurting yet mostly due to DC and Marvel over saturating the market with comic events that had ties in to every single comic which made it impossible for many to even try and collect when Crisis on Infinitely Multiple Earths touches every character.

The huge slump in sales began when they lost their minds and sanity and started targeting the Woke audience that make a large amount of noise to get the changes they want, once the change is implemented run off to something else to ruin. I could see the rot from awhile back when Kitty is talking with the Hulk and one of her lines was "You know whose fault is Bruce men...specifically white men who ruin everything." When the writer actually turns a character into their own Woke mouthpiece myself and other comic fans were not at all interested. That's when the major decline in sales began. Shocking really when both Marvel and DC and especially the Woke writers give not one but two big middle fingers to the regular comic fans .

Not to mention absolute garbage like this on comic covers is not going to increase sales: https://images.app.goo.gl/EM2kxU1m6KUsY92y8 . Notice the year on the cover way back in 2016. So the rot started way back when.



 
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 18, 2021, 11:53:08 PM
Did I mention that Hasbro will never, ever, sell off D&D?

I think I did.


Just look at Marvel as a good example. The Marvel print Comics division is shit. Perpetual declining sales numbers, annually laid off staff, with no upswing in sight.

I keep hearing this. I guess it made some geek news circles and nobody every questioned it and just takes it as gospel.

So let's start with comics in general:
...


No let's not. No one was talking about “comics in general.”* No one.

Holy Crap dude. I was actually agreeing with your larger point, which made up the majority of my post! And then you climb back on this molehill to die on?

What part of me mentioning Marvel or DC Comics leads you to believe that I’m talking about anything else but Marvel and DC Superhero Comics? Worth noting that I explicitly used the phrasing "Marvel print Comics division" in my post that you directly quoted!

No one else but you seems to have a problem getting this.

You didn't "keep hearing this". This argument already happened. You did question it. Got told.

Busted this bit of deflection in this thread:
https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/will-the-current-woke-environment-hasten-or-delay-a-wotc-commitment-to-6th-ed/msg1161368/#msg1161368

A reference for those who don’t want to read the other thread all the way:


The Below was current as of late 2017:

Marvel filed for bankruptcy in 1996.

In 2007 Marvel took in 45% unit market share. Marvel was on a roll, Iron Man came out the next year, which brought in $585 Million at the box office.

In 2009 it was bought for $4 Billion by Disney. An incredible turn around. Unfortunately, by then Marvel had become entirely converged.

What’s more, the security of being owned by Disney allowed the Marvel executives to let their Social justice Freak Flag Fly. It would be hard to find a SJW cause that Marvel has not Relentlessly pushed. Everything from LGBTQ, Body-positive Obesity, feminism, and pushing comics that tried race/gender flipping a good chunk of their iconic characters.

When Marvel got pushback after introducing  Spider-Man replacement Miles Morales in 2011, Marvel Marvel’s editor in chief Axel Alonzo responded “Simple fact is Marvel Comics reflect the world in all its shapes, sizes and colors. We believe there’s an audience of people out there who are thirsty for a character like Miles Morales.” Original Spider-Man creator Stan Lee voiced his support saying “Doing our bit to try to make our nation, and the world, color blind is definitely the right thing.”

But whether doing their bit to impose color blindness on the world is right or not, their belief in the size of that audience was evidently misguided.

Six years later, Axel Alonso was out of a job, the most recent issue of Spider-Man featuring Peter Parker had sold close to a million units, while the Miles Morales version has seen one series after another shut down after 12 issues or so. After one year, Brian Michael Bendis’ new comic chronicling the further adventures of Miles Morales had lost almost two-thirds of its readership.

As a result of its convergence, despite an almost ten-year string of successful movies that constantly advertised its famous characters to the public, Marvel as of 2017 was still the #1 seller but at a 39% unit market share. It was a comic industry in decline. Single issue sales declined 10.40% and graphic novel sales declined 9.38%, for a total drop of 10.09% over 2016. In fact July 2017 Sold 25% fewer comics than July 2016.

How did Marvel stay #1 in a declining market?

Because their closest competitor, DC comics had decided early on that they, under no circumstances whatsoever, would allow DC comics to become less woke than Marvel…

fast forward to 2020:

As we have seen in the time of the Corona-Chan, when people have more time than ever to stay home and read:

Print book sales actually rose 8% in 2020:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/85256-print-unit-sales-rose-8-2-in-2020.html

Yet...

You have Marvel doing things like this late last year:
Disney Axes Two Top Marvel Employees In Latest Round Of Job Cuts:
https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/11/09/disney-axes-two-top-marvel-employees-marvel-in-latest-round-of-job-cuts/

And hear things like this being bandied about DC comics:
DC COMICS WILL CLOSE DOWN IN JUNE SAYS RUMOR
https://cosmicbook.news/dc-comics-closing-down-june



This is really not that hard.

FYI for future reference and all that: If someone comments on Marvel or DC comics; they mean Marvel or DC comics. You know, the ones with all the famous superhero's in them. They are not talking about "comics in general".

Marvel and DC Comics = Marvel and DC comics.    Work on that.  I have every confidence you'll get it.


Back to the point.

In past history Magic was better earner for WOTC, but D&D has always had more overall potential as an exploitable IP.

5e D&D as a game is doing absolute gangbusters right now. It's silly. They've been selling hardbacks by the boatload just retreading old AD&D material! Almost a license to print money with no end in sight.

But going woke does funny things. Dr. WHO once rode high, but recently has been plagued by rumors of outright cancellation. Some think that might be due to the fact that when they started turning out woke garbage they alienated a lot of their fanbase who then stopped watching. But those people are probably just misogynist racists, and the real fans will come rushing back next season now that all the toxic elements of the fanbase have been purged and can no longer gatekeep.

Which is why NOW is a good time for Hasbro to try and put over D&D as a Brand so that it can bring in big $$$ without RPG sales. They got a movie, they are working on a tv series. And if those hit you bet they will pound out the novelization books, toys and YA novels to follow!

If Hasbro succeeds in what they are doing, then they could likely give a toss how woke the RPG line gets.

But, if they don't, and they let WOTC dial up the woke...

That being said. D&D has made such huge gains the past few years that they probably could literally alienate half of their audience, and still be the #1 selling RPG by a pretty big margin.

Between WOTC and Baizuo the cost of real competition for the top RPG spot - even if they do pull Chinballs Dr.Who moves, is higher than ever.

Even with 4e level errors it will prove very difficult for D&D as a game to not be the #1 RPG. We need to remember that if WOTC has been even a little bit more johnny on the spot with their 4e SRD, Baizuo would have stayed a D&D 4e 3pp...

With no one out there to pull their card over the 4e nonsense, D&D as a Brand might be in a very different place today.



*IMHO - If illustrated kids books now count as comics, then the time has come when we must all recognize the One True King of comic books: Dr. Seuss

All Hail.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Pat on February 19, 2021, 05:05:36 AM
*IMHO - If illustrated kids books now count as comics, then the time has come when we must all recognize the One True King of comic books: Dr. Seuss
The definitions can be tricky and the border can be fuzzy, but there's a widespread agreement that Archie, Tijuana Bibles, and Maus are comics and Doctor Seuss and Roald Dahl's books are not. Manga and the kid's comics on the comic books lists all seem to fall into the first category.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RandyB on February 19, 2021, 08:16:06 AM

*IMHO - If illustrated kids books now count as comics, then the time has come when we must all recognize the One True King of comic books: Dr. Seuss

All Hail.

All hail Dr. Seuss! :)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Abraxus on February 19, 2021, 08:19:19 AM
No one else but you seems to have a problem getting this.

You didn't "keep hearing this". This argument already happened. You did question it. Got told.

You have to understand about Mistwell being one of the resident SJWs it's all about his carefully constructed personal narratives on a subject.

In this case he will never ever admit even under penalty of torture that SJW writers and woke authors and story lines have hurt comic sales immensely.

As it goes against the narrative and anything against the narrative does exist and is to be summarily ignored.

Which is why he is ignoring declining sales when it comes to Marvel and DC and bringing up every other kinds of comics as smokescreen to ignore having to actually debate the lack of sales. It's a pattern of continually moving goalposts and he will of course adamantly deny doing so.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 19, 2021, 08:44:00 AM
Huh. I thought non-woke people liked Miles Morales. Although that could’ve just been the movie stripping out all the bad writing.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mishihari on February 19, 2021, 10:03:15 AM
I liked Miles Morales a lot in the movies and the console game, and I'm about as non-woke as it gets.  And this is after expecting to hate him because most woke media is objectively terrible and pushes evil and/or stupid agendas.  He's a likable character, it's a good story, and the stories aren't really woke otherwise.  I haven't read the books though, so I can't speak to that.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Slambo on February 20, 2021, 09:32:06 AM
I liked Miles Morales a lot in the movies and the console game, and I'm about as non-woke as it gets.  And this is after expecting to hate him because most woke media is objectively terrible and pushes evil and/or stupid agendas.  He's a likable character, it's a good story, and the stories aren't really woke otherwise.  I haven't read the books though, so I can't speak to that.

In the books hes basicallynwritten to be as bland and inoffensive as possible. And like all teen heroes he's a super genius who for some rrason never uses gadgets for crime fighting (iirc it was either him or Ms. Marvel that had like an anti-gravity fish tank that suspended water in mid aid...yet none of them things using similar tech to actually fly would be helpful)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Abraxus on February 20, 2021, 10:15:40 AM
I was not a fan of Miles Morales though enjoyed the animated movie with the character.

Even then it's not the character that made me stop reading DC and Marvel for the most part. It was the shitty SJW storylines and art. Heaven forbid any female character look remotely sexual let alone female lets draw them as looking as male as possible. I could get past that yet when every evil is due to straight white men in the setting (apprently only white men can commit evil in Marvel) fuck that saving my money.

Instead of trying to stop the Titanic from leaking with both comic companies they instead find new ways to make it sink faster.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 22, 2021, 07:14:37 PM
The definitions can be tricky and the border can be fuzzy, but there's a widespread agreement that Archie, Tijuana Bibles, and Maus are comics and Doctor Seuss and Roald Dahl's books are not. Manga and the kid's comics on the comic books lists all seem to fall into the first category.


Thank you for explaining the panelist elitism that is gatekeeping Dr. Suess from his rightful place in history.



All hail Dr. Seuss! :)

Hail Seuss!

Peace be upon him.


Huh. I thought non-woke people liked Miles Morales. Although that could’ve just been the movie stripping out all the bad writing.
I liked Miles Morales a lot in the movies and the console game, and I'm about as non-woke as it gets.  And this is after expecting to hate him because most woke media is objectively terrible and pushes evil and/or stupid agendas.  He's a likable character, it's a good story, and the stories aren't really woke otherwise.  I haven't read the books though, so I can't speak to that.

Mike Morales rejection in the comics has a lot to do with the fact that by Marvel’s own admission he was explicitly pushed as part of their woke agenda. And although in the hands of different writers for the movie and video game, the reason you keep seeing him pop-up as “SpiderMan” when everyone would be perfectly happy with Peter Parker, is because he is pushed.

Ever wonder why in the latest Avengers video game the starting character you play is Muslim Captain Marvel Kamala Khan? A character that was not in a single Marvel universe film? Because Marvel said so. How do I know this? Because I know someone who works at Crystal Dynamics and did a lot of the character animation for the game. And I asked him how one of the most cancelled and renewed over and over again Comic characters became their pick to star in the new Avengers game. What he was told: “Marvel gives the writing team the characters they have to use with the license.”

You really think Kamala Khan wound up as the lead character in a game trying to cash in on the Marvel Movies success by accident? Do you really think Miles Morales was chosen over Peter Parker by the video game developers for the latest Spider Man game? 

However benign they might try and make it seem, it is all pushed for ideological reasons.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Greywolf76 on February 22, 2021, 07:21:55 PM
I have nothing against Miles Morales as long as he is not the resident Spider Man. Kid Arachnid? With completely different super-powers? No problem with that.

But there's only one Spider Man, and his name is Peter Parker.

Even then it's not the character that made me stop reading DC and Marvel for the most part. It was the shitty SJW storylines and art. Heaven forbid any female character look remotely sexual let alone female lets draw them as looking as male as possible. I could get past that yet when every evil is due to straight white men in the setting (apprently only white men can commit evil in Marvel) fuck that saving my money.

Instead of trying to stop the Titanic from leaking with both comic companies they instead find new ways to make it sink faster.

Exactly. I stopped reading mainstream comics around 2011/2012 for this very reason. The only Marvel and DC comics I've bought in the last ten years or so are paperbacks of pre-2010 story arcs.

The only comics I read now are independent stuff (like Soulfinder, Red Rooster, The Futurists, Bass Reeves, Peregrine, AI Wars, Flying Sparks).
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on February 22, 2021, 08:27:24 PM
The now shell company White Wolf is more likely to get sold.

Aside from the tabletop scene being riddled with scandals ranging from writers being pedophiles to inciting an international incident, Paradox has been whoring out the IP Games Workshop-style to produce games. These are mediocre low-budget mobile shovelware or "visual novels" on Steam. If the reviews and SteamSpy estimates are any indication, they're not exactly what you would call amazing critical or commercial successes. Immortal Realms: Vampire Wars was apparently way more popular despite a mixed reception.

The first big budget title to release so far was Werewolf: Earthblood, which had mixed reception at best according to Metacritic. Vampire: Bloodlines 2 has been subject to a bunch of interference that will likely cause it to suffer similar failure, in addition to just failing to live up to its predecessor.

Question is... who would be both willing and able to buy White Wolf?

I can describe two huge reasons not to touch this IP with a ten-foot pole.

Firstly: It has never had a successful video game release, to the point where the superstitious might claim it is cursed. Vampire: Bloodlines was a flop on release and is only remembered as a cult classic (and that was due solely to Troika's writing rather than any inherent strength of the IP), and Paradox was apparently unwilling and/or unable to remaster the game. Its continued livelihood seems to riding entirely on the success of Vampire: Bloodlines 2. (Before anybody chimes in, no company that isn't already a tabletop company is going to buy it just to sell tabletop games and I don't see many tabletop companies being both willing and able to buy the IP when they could just invent their own.)

Secondly: The IP's value in general is questionable at best. It's firmly stuck in this weird 90s proto-SJW zeitgeist that probably won't appeal to normies or modern SJWs either. Every individual aspect is either awesome, stupid, or insane with nothing in between and nothing in the way of any cohesive aesthetic: time traveling vampires, eco-terrorist werewolves, militantly luddite wizards, reincarnating fairies who are allergic to concrete, etc. It's not remotely creative (VtM's clans are mostly direct rip-offs of popular and obscure works of vampire fiction, such as Necroscope and 3×3 Eyes, as well as non-vampire fiction like Conan the Barbarian) and while mildly diverse in concepts it has no monopoly on the many tropes of the urban fantasy genre. The existing fanbase is extremely toxic, cultish, twenty years ago sent so many death threats to writer Jess Henig that made him afraid to open his inbox for years, other negative descriptors... I'm not sure why any sane company would want to court these loonies.

IMO, if what you want is a profitable vampire-themed CRPG et al, then you're probably better off either inventing your own or licensing a vampire IP that isn't seemingly cursed. Like Bloodlust: Shadowhunter or Red Embrace.

What do you think?

If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Renegade_Productions on February 22, 2021, 09:27:24 PM
2020 WAS RECORD YEAR FOR 'MAGIC,' 'D&D'

https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/47547/2020-was-record-year-magic-d-d

I know ICV2 ran an article about them selling WotC before, but it seems like a great time for Hasbro to find an excuse to divest themselves of these troublesome Millennials, and avoid worrying about staying on top of a volatile market. Not to mention the impending end to 'geek culture' being cool, at which time they run the risk of losing half their fanbase. It may not be true in the very short term, but it just feels like there's nowhere to go but down for most of the TTRPG industry, especially for those who don't focus on veteran/alpha gamer types who are less likely to quit on a whim.

Unfortunately, the converged parts of the company are not causing enough hemorrhaging of players and support to justify Hasbro cutting them loose. Yet.

Unless they make a massive PR mistake like White Wolf made in 5th Edition Vampire (and I'm not at all surprised by the implication that some of that company's writing staff were pedos), WOTC and D&D will stay under the Hasbro umbrella for a while yet.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BronzeDragon on February 22, 2021, 09:47:29 PM
If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.

Some things are better left dead.

Strange Aeons and all that jazz...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on February 22, 2021, 10:01:04 PM
If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.

Some things are better left dead.

Strange Aeons and all that jazz...

Possibly, but if I do get the means to acquire the New WoD/Chronicles of Darkness license or IP, I will do it come Hell or high water.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 23, 2021, 03:36:19 PM
If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.

Some things are better left dead.

Strange Aeons and all that jazz...

Possibly, but if I do get the means to acquire the New WoD/Chronicles of Darkness license or IP, I will do it come Hell or high water.

Incoming rant alert. Feel free to ignore if you don't like that sort of thing.

I don't understand why Paradox is even interested in the Classic/Old World of Darkness. It hit its peak in the 90s and has declined ever since. None of the video games have been commercial hits. Bloodlines 1 flopped on release and is only remembered because of Troika's writing rather than any strength of the IP. Earthblood was a flop. The IP isn't financially viable at this point.

World of Darkness is firmly stuck in the 90s counterculture movement and doesn't have any viability anymore, because what was counterculture then is pro-culture now. If the game was created from scratch today, then it probably wouldn't resemble what we got in this timeline. It would probably resemble what Chronicles of Darkness could have been if the writers weren't fixated on going out of their way to be different from their predecessors.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse in particular is so outdated. Most governments take climate change seriously. Zero-emissions by 2050 is standard planning now. Reparations for slavery are standard rhetoric now. The World Economic Forum openly discusses their plans to take over the world and institute a communist utopia. Transwomen are coddled on social media. The ACLU states that biological sex is a social construct. Words are considered violence. Blah blah blah. We are living in, or at least on a rapid path to, the world that the writers of Werewolf wanted to see thirty years ago.

New WoD/Chronicles reached its peak with Lost and Vigil. None of the others are interesting to me because they either go out of their way to avoid being too similar to their c/oWoD predecessors (e.g. Requiem not having vampire supremacists, Forsaken not touching real politics, Awakening not having personalized magical traditions, Lost only ever being human-born rather than fairies who adopted humanity), are overshadowed by parochial metaplot (e.g. the strix, father wolf, atlantis, god-machine, irem), and/or aren't anywhere near as creative as Lost and Vigil were. Oh, and the rules are basically garbage in any iteration due to a complete lack of universal rules for superpowers, 2e trying to ape the worst parts of FATE without understanding game design at all, etc.

Pretty much the only reason anybody cares about these games is because of their lore. Which doesn't interest me and I find it parochial anyway. The entire reason I liked the concepts of Lost and Vigil was because they didn't have lore, they had options. A changeling could be a genie, a mermaid, a selkie, a gnome, a goblin, an ogre, a troll, whatever and the rules for doing so were vastly simpler than the arbitrary nightmare of its preceding game. A hunter could be an amateur ghost hunter, an employee of a corporation that harvests monsters for pharmaceuticals, a member of a secret government taskforce, a half-human spawn of the literal Devil, a big game hunter who considers monsters the next logical step, etc.

With Vampire in either iteration, you're playing an Anne Rice knockoff with some superpowers loosely inspired by random works of fiction that may or may not have been about vampires. Unlike Lost or Vigil, you're never given the option to make up whatever concept suits your fancy using a simple set of universal rules. You can't just play a vamphyri with psychic powers and metamorphic flesh, you have to play a shameesay high school clique with all this weird baggage involving sabbaths, babytalk jargon arbitrary pulled from assorted Slavic languages, butchered Slavic folklore, soul eaters and shit.

I don't give a flying fuck about all that bullshit that Mark Asterisk Häagen-Dazs and friends pulled out of their asses thirty years ago. I just want to play a game about some vampires that eat people, have kewl powerz I guess if I don't prefer a straight superhero game, and maybe mope about their lost humanity or whatever the fuck makes them wake up in the evening.

I don't care about however the fuck many clans/bloodlines/high school cliques there are as of the latest editions. Unless you're an anal-retentive autist, then you can shorten the list to just 3 and not lose anything of value. That's how Red Embrace: Hollywood did it and I found the game way less irritating for that genius design choice... not that anybody plays that romance game for its vampire houses.

But whatever, YMMV.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mordred Pendragon on February 23, 2021, 03:54:51 PM
If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.

Some things are better left dead.

Strange Aeons and all that jazz...

Possibly, but if I do get the means to acquire the New WoD/Chronicles of Darkness license or IP, I will do it come Hell or high water.

Incoming rant alert. Feel free to ignore if you don't like that sort of thing.

I don't understand why Paradox is even interested in the Classic/Old World of Darkness. It hit its peak in the 90s and has declined ever since. None of the video games have been commercial hits. Bloodlines 1 flopped on release and is only remembered because of Troika's writing rather than any strength of the IP. Earthblood was a flop. The IP isn't financially viable at this point.

World of Darkness is firmly stuck in the 90s counterculture movement and doesn't have any viability anymore, because what was counterculture then is pro-culture now. If the game was created from scratch today, then it probably wouldn't resemble what we got in this timeline. It would probably resemble what Chronicles of Darkness could have been if the writers weren't fixated on going out of their way to be different from their predecessors.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse in particular is so outdated. Most governments take climate change seriously. Zero-emissions by 2050 is standard planning now. Reparations for slavery are standard rhetoric now. The World Economic Forum openly discusses their plans to take over the world and institute a communist utopia. Transwomen are coddled on social media. The ACLU states that biological sex is a social construct. Words are considered violence. Blah blah blah. We are living in, or at least on a rapid path to, the world that the writers of Werewolf wanted to see thirty years ago.

New WoD/Chronicles reached its peak with Lost and Vigil. None of the others are interesting to me because they either go out of their way to avoid being too similar to their c/oWoD predecessors (e.g. Requiem not having vampire supremacists, Forsaken not touching real politics, Awakening not having personalized magical traditions, Lost only ever being human-born rather than fairies who adopted humanity), are overshadowed by parochial metaplot (e.g. the strix, father wolf, atlantis, god-machine, irem), and/or aren't anywhere near as creative as Lost and Vigil were. Oh, and the rules are basically garbage in any iteration due to a complete lack of universal rules for superpowers, 2e trying to ape the worst parts of FATE without understanding game design at all, etc.

Pretty much the only reason anybody cares about these games is because of their lore. Which doesn't interest me and I find it parochial anyway. The entire reason I liked the concepts of Lost and Vigil was because they didn't have lore, they had options. A changeling could be a genie, a mermaid, a selkie, a gnome, a goblin, an ogre, a troll, whatever and the rules for doing so were vastly simpler than the arbitrary nightmare of its preceding game. A hunter could be an amateur ghost hunter, an employee of a corporation that harvests monsters for pharmaceuticals, a member of a secret government taskforce, a half-human spawn of the literal Devil, a big game hunter who considers monsters the next logical step, etc.

With Vampire in either iteration, you're playing an Anne Rice knockoff with some superpowers loosely inspired by random works of fiction that may or may not have been about vampires. Unlike Lost or Vigil, you're never given the option to make up whatever concept suits your fancy using a simple set of universal rules. You can't just play a vamphyri with psychic powers and metamorphic flesh, you have to play a shameesay high school clique with all this weird baggage involving sabbaths, babytalk jargon arbitrary pulled from assorted Slavic languages, butchered Slavic folklore, soul eaters and shit.

I don't give a flying fuck about all that bullshit that Mark Asterisk Häagen-Dazs and friends pulled out of their asses thirty years ago. I just want to play a game about some vampires that eat people, have kewl powerz I guess if I don't prefer a straight superhero game, and maybe mope about their lost humanity or whatever the fuck makes them wake up in the evening.

I don't care about however the fuck many clans/bloodlines/high school cliques there are as of the latest editions. Unless you're an anal-retentive autist, then you can shorten the list to just 3 and not lose anything of value. That's how Red Embrace: Hollywood did it and I found the game way less irritating for that genius design choice... not that anybody plays that romance game for its vampire houses.

But whatever, YMMV.

If I do buy the rights to New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness and reboot everything, I'll be sure to give you a shout-out in the Acknowledgements of the main corebook.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 23, 2021, 04:06:24 PM
If I had the money, I'd probably buy White Wolf and do what I could to fix it.

Hell, I'm pretty sure you could probably buy New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness for a very low price if you found a way to get in contact with the right people. Paradox outright stated they have zero interest in Requiem or any of the CofD IP's outside of collecting the licensing fee checks from Onyx Path.

Some things are better left dead.

Strange Aeons and all that jazz...

Possibly, but if I do get the means to acquire the New WoD/Chronicles of Darkness license or IP, I will do it come Hell or high water.

Incoming rant alert. Feel free to ignore if you don't like that sort of thing.

I don't understand why Paradox is even interested in the Classic/Old World of Darkness. It hit its peak in the 90s and has declined ever since. None of the video games have been commercial hits. Bloodlines 1 flopped on release and is only remembered because of Troika's writing rather than any strength of the IP. Earthblood was a flop. The IP isn't financially viable at this point.

World of Darkness is firmly stuck in the 90s counterculture movement and doesn't have any viability anymore, because what was counterculture then is pro-culture now. If the game was created from scratch today, then it probably wouldn't resemble what we got in this timeline. It would probably resemble what Chronicles of Darkness could have been if the writers weren't fixated on going out of their way to be different from their predecessors.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse in particular is so outdated. Most governments take climate change seriously. Zero-emissions by 2050 is standard planning now. Reparations for slavery are standard rhetoric now. The World Economic Forum openly discusses their plans to take over the world and institute a communist utopia. Transwomen are coddled on social media. The ACLU states that biological sex is a social construct. Words are considered violence. Blah blah blah. We are living in, or at least on a rapid path to, the world that the writers of Werewolf wanted to see thirty years ago.

New WoD/Chronicles reached its peak with Lost and Vigil. None of the others are interesting to me because they either go out of their way to avoid being too similar to their c/oWoD predecessors (e.g. Requiem not having vampire supremacists, Forsaken not touching real politics, Awakening not having personalized magical traditions, Lost only ever being human-born rather than fairies who adopted humanity), are overshadowed by parochial metaplot (e.g. the strix, father wolf, atlantis, god-machine, irem), and/or aren't anywhere near as creative as Lost and Vigil were. Oh, and the rules are basically garbage in any iteration due to a complete lack of universal rules for superpowers, 2e trying to ape the worst parts of FATE without understanding game design at all, etc.

Pretty much the only reason anybody cares about these games is because of their lore. Which doesn't interest me and I find it parochial anyway. The entire reason I liked the concepts of Lost and Vigil was because they didn't have lore, they had options. A changeling could be a genie, a mermaid, a selkie, a gnome, a goblin, an ogre, a troll, whatever and the rules for doing so were vastly simpler than the arbitrary nightmare of its preceding game. A hunter could be an amateur ghost hunter, an employee of a corporation that harvests monsters for pharmaceuticals, a member of a secret government taskforce, a half-human spawn of the literal Devil, a big game hunter who considers monsters the next logical step, etc.

With Vampire in either iteration, you're playing an Anne Rice knockoff with some superpowers loosely inspired by random works of fiction that may or may not have been about vampires. Unlike Lost or Vigil, you're never given the option to make up whatever concept suits your fancy using a simple set of universal rules. You can't just play a vamphyri with psychic powers and metamorphic flesh, you have to play a shameesay high school clique with all this weird baggage involving sabbaths, babytalk jargon arbitrary pulled from assorted Slavic languages, butchered Slavic folklore, soul eaters and shit.

I don't give a flying fuck about all that bullshit that Mark Asterisk Häagen-Dazs and friends pulled out of their asses thirty years ago. I just want to play a game about some vampires that eat people, have kewl powerz I guess if I don't prefer a straight superhero game, and maybe mope about their lost humanity or whatever the fuck makes them wake up in the evening.

I don't care about however the fuck many clans/bloodlines/high school cliques there are as of the latest editions. Unless you're an anal-retentive autist, then you can shorten the list to just 3 and not lose anything of value. That's how Red Embrace: Hollywood did it and I found the game way less irritating for that genius design choice... not that anybody plays that romance game for its vampire houses.

But whatever, YMMV.

If I do buy the rights to New World of Darkness/Chronicles of Darkness and reboot everything, I'll be sure to give you a shout-out in the Acknowledgements of the main corebook.

I have a thread on hacking the ST system in design and development forum. If you're interested, then I'd be happy to see you share your ideas for rebooting everything.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 23, 2021, 06:28:33 PM
Incoming rant alert. Feel free to ignore if you don't like that sort of thing.
...
But whatever, YMMV.
We get it. You hate the WoD and must share why every time its name is mentioned as if you're a Lovecraftian god being drawn to its true name being spoken aloud.

Personally, I like the fact that its 90's counter-culture basically makes the protagonists practically Right-Wing by today's standards.

Global corporations are evil and in bed with utterly corrupt governments who who foster endless wars to profit from and want to turn us all into slaves? Mainstream conservative.

Religion should be tolerated not stamped out by Godless atheists who unknowingly do the bidding of demons? The most popular line of the whole WoD is based on the notion that Judeo-Christian is RIGHT? Mainstream conservative.

Monsters try to exploit and keep people poor and vulnerable so they're easier to victimize? Mainstream conservative.

Over on the Onyx Path boards, their primary mod openly laments that playing the oWoD straight makes people who believe in the Deep State and Right-wingers the people who are right in the setting.

The biggest reason oWoD is a failure these days is NOT that it's stuck in the 90's... its that the current PTB keep insisting on adapting it into woke garbage in the same vein as the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy.

The easiest fix for the oWoD if someone not an SJW got ahold of the property would be to just embrace that... the villains are the Elders in working behind the scenes to keep the masses vulnerable to their predations; the godless socialist Technocracy who want to snuff out every spark of individuality in the name of a China-like managed economic system where everyone is a cog in the machine; where the Wyrm has taken over the environmental movement and now wields bad science (like windmills and solar panels are better for the environment than nuclear power) like a club to enrich themselves while selling rubes the idea that their paying through the nose for "green tech" is making the planet a better place... all the while replacing authentic Gaia worship with a false environmentalism that is really just subservience to the State.

The up and coming generation are the most conservative in decades precisely because the best way to rebel against their parents and the establishment is to be a conservative.

So, welcome to the revolution where you start out as a newly turned vampire the Elders intended to use as a slave until you broke free and are now trying to chart your own path with your friends... you're a young Mage who's just awakened to the possibilities of changing the world, but fought every step of the way by a soulless Technocracy that wants you to bend the knee to their fascist whims... you're a newly turned werewolf who has to fight to reclaim true spiritualism from the false environmental virtue signalers who are exploiting man's desire to do the right thing to enrich themselves... you're a Changeling who struggles to create stories of true wonder and beauty while the banal woke activists of Hollywood seek to drain the wonder from everything and leave only ugliness in its wake.

Sure, tweak a few things here and there (definitely drop the Punk... but Gothic is timeless); maybe shift focus from "the end is nigh" to "you're the lights in a dark world"; but the core of a solid modern counter-culture game (because today Conservative Christian IS the counter-culture) is already in place.

Hell, frame it as "you're the weak who must band together against the strong" probably makes the unusual bedfellows of cross-splat player groups even more viable. Yeah, the young vampire isn't likely to find any allies among the corrupt elders who just want to use them... but that young mage whose dreams have just been crushed by the Technocrats might be able to help you and you him; banding together for mutual survival in a corrupt and fallen world.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 24, 2021, 05:44:51 PM
Yes. I agree.
In fact I was planning on making own itteration of WOD (mix of oWOD and nWOD) based on more feudal principles, precisely because as right-winger I'm tired by all conspiracy freaks in our community, claiming there are some BIG THEM RUNNING THE WORLD, which aside of my personal dibelief I also consider kinda boring setting-wise.
So for me scattering and multipling supernatural communities both "good" and "evil" is fine - I'm generally hard into later retcon of Technocracy as much less powerful organisation as it seems - still very powerful but nowhere close to running the world (and definitely some good clash between their sects), Vampires divided into multiple political groups - both taken from Masquerade and Requiem, and so multiple cross-species groups.

World of Chaos that many would like to control, but it's just to big to be grasped by any single player.

That I suppose is neither really left- or right-wing counter-culture, but then what can I say - I'm feudalist ;)

Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 24, 2021, 05:57:39 PM
Yes. I agree.
In fact I was planning on making own itteration of WOD (mix of oWOD and nWOD) based on more feudal principles, precisely because as right-winger I'm tired by all conspiracy freaks in our community, claiming there are some BIG THEM RUNNING THE WORLD, which aside of my personal dibelief I also consider kinda boring setting-wise.
So for me scattering and multipling supernatural communities both "good" and "evil" is fine - I'm generally hard into later retcon of Technocracy as much less powerful organisation as it seems - still very powerful but nowhere close to running the world (and definitely some good clash between their sects), Vampires divided into multiple political groups - both taken from Masquerade and Requiem, and so multiple cross-species groups.

World of Chaos that many would like to control, but it's just to big to be grasped by any single player.

That I suppose is neither really left- or right-wing counter-culture, but then what can I say - I'm feudalist ;)

Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Renegade_Productions on February 24, 2021, 06:15:05 PM
Yes. I agree.
In fact I was planning on making own itteration of WOD (mix of oWOD and nWOD) based on more feudal principles, precisely because as right-winger I'm tired by all conspiracy freaks in our community, claiming there are some BIG THEM RUNNING THE WORLD, which aside of my personal dibelief I also consider kinda boring setting-wise.
So for me scattering and multipling supernatural communities both "good" and "evil" is fine - I'm generally hard into later retcon of Technocracy as much less powerful organisation as it seems - still very powerful but nowhere close to running the world (and definitely some good clash between their sects), Vampires divided into multiple political groups - both taken from Masquerade and Requiem, and so multiple cross-species groups.

World of Chaos that many would like to control, but it's just to big to be grasped by any single player.

That I suppose is neither really left- or right-wing counter-culture, but then what can I say - I'm feudalist ;)

Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.

I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 24, 2021, 06:32:53 PM
Quote
Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.

No. I suck at original creativity - and I love making my own puzzle from estabilished setting and franchises remodelling them as it suits me.
My creative vision is WOD trimmed and reshaped according to my vision :3

Quote
I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.

Nah. It wouldn't be honest. I don't want new urban fantasy setting - I want WoD with my fixes.
If I tried to override it I'd get some pathetic parody of intelectual property like Daniel D. Fox - Zweihander (I mean rules are different enough) but pantheon of gods and Chaos powers is just pathethic.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 24, 2021, 06:46:05 PM
Yes. I agree.
In fact I was planning on making own itteration of WOD (mix of oWOD and nWOD) based on more feudal principles, precisely because as right-winger I'm tired by all conspiracy freaks in our community, claiming there are some BIG THEM RUNNING THE WORLD, which aside of my personal dibelief I also consider kinda boring setting-wise.
So for me scattering and multipling supernatural communities both "good" and "evil" is fine - I'm generally hard into later retcon of Technocracy as much less powerful organisation as it seems - still very powerful but nowhere close to running the world (and definitely some good clash between their sects), Vampires divided into multiple political groups - both taken from Masquerade and Requiem, and so multiple cross-species groups.

World of Chaos that many would like to control, but it's just to big to be grasped by any single player.

That I suppose is neither really left- or right-wing counter-culture, but then what can I say - I'm feudalist ;)

Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.

I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.
It also provides a fresh start to (re)develop ideas with the benefit of hindsight, the easy research provided by the internet, etc.

I find a lot of WoDisms to be pretty arbitrary.

For example, before Changeling: The Dreaming was released, somebody invented their own "Faerie: The Game Eternal (http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/WW/changelingfront.html)." While it draws on the same folkloric roots, the execution was completely different. Rather than being killed by the stability of human society, these faeries rely on it to avoid deteriorating into beings of pure chaos.

Before Geist was released, somebody wrote their own nWraith (https://www.cattail.nu/wraithproject/archives/wraiththearising.html) that recycled concepts from cWoD but re-contextualized for the more local state of affairs presented in CoD1e. It is something of an exact opposite of its predecessor, as the the main political conflict introduced is a gang war between two competing factions of ghosts for haunted real estate because ghosts can harness these places as a fuel and materials source. Meanwhile, a third faction (there are several others) preaches resolving one's unfinished business, which would ultimately render said real estate useless.

And others wrote "Angel: The Rapture (http://167.99.155.149/archive/angeldemon/ad1.html)" and "Daemon (http://167.99.155.149/archive/daemon/daemonpre.html)" years before Demon: The Fallen. Or literal Anne Rice vampires (http://vampirerpg.free.fr/Rules/Anne-Rice.html): while similar to WoD vamps, there are key differences.

There's also plenty of heartbreakers like The Everlasting and WitchCraft.

There's tons of conceptual space to explore without wholesale copying WoD. Take inspiration, sure, but don't feel constrained by the choices of White Wolf in the 90s and 00s.

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Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.

No. I suck at original creativity - and I love making my own puzzle from estabilished setting and franchises remodelling them as it suits me.
My creative vision is WOD trimmed and reshaped according to my vision :3

Quote
I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.

Nah. It wouldn't be honest. I don't want new urban fantasy setting - I want WoD with my fixes.
A lot of original settings started as fanfiction.

While I entertained similar ideas many years ago, I ultimately found WoD/CoD too parochial and constraining. It also helps that I familiarized myself with fiction and games outside of the WoD/CoD bubble, which is how I realized it was so parochial in the first place.

For example, ghosts should be able to fly and teleport because this is a common property demonstrated in fiction featuring ghosts. They're spirits: they shouldn't be limited by distance and gravity the way that our bodies are. This would also explain why they can walk through walls but don't fall thru the floor. Guess what they aren't normally capable of in WoD?

Another example: why should vampire PCs all drink blood? Why can't we play energy vampires like in What We Do in the Shadows tv show? Or a succubus like in Lost Girl?

Also, WW games have always been shitty from a game design perspective, so that's another thing keeping me away. Again, I didn't realize how horrible it was until I familiarized myself with other games and game design principles in general.

You might not have a problem with that, but I find it suffocating. As I said, parochial.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 24, 2021, 06:51:44 PM
Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.
Not even a little.

A) Already did a top to bottom rewrite of the mechanics for what often call "White Book Mage" (due to my giving copies to my players using white binders) available here; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing)

B) I'm up to my neck in getting my fantasy setting finished so I can get it out the door.

C) I don't care enough about researching urban fantasy tropes to reinvent the wheel.

D) If I'm not using White Book Mage, the various 20th Anniversary Editions are good enough for my personal gaming purposes.

If you care enough to reinvent the wheel for a kitchen sink urban fantasy and convince people to play it... more power to you. As it stands, being able to put up "Looking for players for V20 or M20 campaign" on our local gaming meetup groups and not have to spend hours just explaining the setting and can just get right to char gen and playing is well worth any trivial issues I have with the setting.

I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.
I fixed the wokeness of the oWoD in about a minute by just playing everything straight in the 2020s. The Brujah are still anti-establishment rebels stupidly working to support an elitist secret society... so they control Antifa now. The Ventrue still control big business so they're all over Crony Capitalism and predatory hedge funds that destroy small up and comers and put people out of work just to further enrich themselves. The Toreadors are still wannabe artistes obsessed with their visions of beauty so they mostly put out modern woke crap and films they call art. The Nos and the Gangrel are still social pariahs who mostly stick to the sewers or the woods. The Malks are still insane so you just play them as if they took Leftism seriously and you're gold.

In case you missed the memo... vampires are the villains and should be played the same way you would an evil-alignment D&D game. There's a reason I only play mortal hunters or dhampirs in VtM.

The Technocracy are still the bad guys because they think socialism/fascism is the best path forward for the world so any free thinkers pretty much have to end up at least tangentially associated with the Traditions. My last PC was a Roman Catholic Euthanatos whose mysticism manifested charisms gifted from God (deep dive into Euthanatos lore is that most of their magic works by union with god forms... Catholic mysticism is based on seeking spiritual union with God and sometimes results in the ability to work miracles) and had St. Michael in his role as the Angel of Death as their patron saint. House Ex Miscellanea is a great catch all for anything even remotely Hermetic in origin.

I've never liked Werewolf enough to even to read its core book entirely through... I don't use anything from it enough to need to fix any wokeness in it.

Basically, why waste my limited heartbeats on this earth on something that's never going to be commercially viable when I don't have to. If you want your Non-WoD urban fantasy game, do your own work for it. If you want my work... I linked to it above.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Renegade_Productions on February 24, 2021, 07:03:13 PM
Quote
Have you considered writing an original IP fulfilling your creative vision rather than copying WoD? It doesn't hold a monopoly on urban fantasy. And if you do an original IP, then you can sell RPG books for profit too.

No. I suck at original creativity - and I love making my own puzzle from estabilished setting and franchises remodelling them as it suits me.
My creative vision is WOD trimmed and reshaped according to my vision :3

Quote
I second that. Might as well make your own thing if you liked World of Darkness so much but hate the wokeness and other nonsense it became infested with over the years.

Nah. It wouldn't be honest. I don't want new urban fantasy setting - I want WoD with my fixes.
If I tried to override it I'd get some pathetic parody of intelectual property like Daniel D. Fox - Zweihander (I mean rules are different enough) but pantheon of gods and Chaos powers is just pathethic.

Zweihander is only like that because the creator used the retro-clone idea on Warhammer Fantasy and added SJW trappings like gender into it. Not a smart move when 4th Edition Warhammer Fantasy is still around and fair to play.

You don't strike me as someone who would do that, but if you don't think creativity is your thing, it wasn't really mine either until, as BoxCrayonTales pointed out, I tried my hand at fanfiction. Moved away from it pretty quickly because the IP is heavily copyrighted but I found a new niche afterwards that I liked and stuck with it.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 24, 2021, 07:42:21 PM

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A) Already did a top to bottom rewrite of the mechanics for what often call "White Book Mage" (due to my giving copies to my players using white binders) available here; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing

Interesting though I have to admit - I dislike sphere redesign


Quote
It also provides a fresh start to (re)develop ideas with the benefit of hindsight, the easy research provided by the internet, etc.

I find a lot of WoDisms to be pretty arbitrary.

For example, before Changeling: The Dreaming was released, somebody invented their own "Faerie: The Game Eternal." While it draws on the same folkloric roots, the execution was completely different. Rather than being killed by the stability of human society, these faeries rely on it to avoid deteriorating into beings of pure chaos.

I'm generally quite willing to go with The Lost angle, not The Dreaming. Ancient mysterious terrors from Dream/Nightmare Dimension that ocassionaly kidnaps people.
Dreaming angle ultimately leaves me quite cold.
In terms of oWoD - nWoD - I rather prefer my Vampire and Mage more on o-side, and Changeling and Ghost on n-side.
Werewolves sort of leaves me cold on both sides, but if I had to choose I'll go with nWoD because zoophilia is just icky.

Quote
And others wrote "Angel: The Rapture" and "Daemon" years before Demon: The Fallen. Or literal Anne Rice vampires: while similar to WoD vamps, there are key differences.

There's also plenty of heartbreakers like The Everlasting and WitchCraft.

There's tons of conceptual space to explore without wholesale copying WoD. Take inspiration, sure, but don't feel constrained by the choices of White Wolf in the 90s and 00s.

From 3pp hacks of WoD my favourite is definitely Genius: The Transgression.

Quote
Another example: why should vampire PCs all drink blood? Why can't we play energy vampires like in What We Do in the Shadows tv show? Or a succubus like in Lost Girl?

I'm all for energy vampires but as different being that is not really vampire in common sense. Sort of like Vampire Courts in Butcher books which are loose coalition of separate species of supernaturals - with psychic vampires being human+, and classic vampires being almost Lovecraftian spiritual energy mimicking psyche of freshly dead and converted corpses.
But that's sort of another problem - I like to have extra species, but also to have multi-clanned classic vamps with singular historical source of their existence.


Quote
Also, WW games have always been shitty from a game design perspective, so that's another thing keeping me away. Again, I didn't realize how horrible it was until I familiarized myself with other games and game design principles in general.

You might not have a problem with that, but I find it suffocating. As I said, parochial.

I won't disagree.
Gameplay was never much interesting for me. Setting was - or rather aspects of it.

Quote
If you care enough to reinvent the wheel for a kitchen sink urban fantasy and convince people to play it... more power to you. As it stands, being able to put up "Looking for players for V20 or M20 campaign" on our local gaming meetup groups and not have to spend hours just explaining the setting and can just get right to char gen and playing is well worth any trivial issues I have with the setting.

Yep. Besides why assume we don't know various tropes and just prefer overall outline of WoD?

Quote
In case you missed the memo... vampires are the villains and should be played the same way you would an evil-alignment D&D game. There's a reason I only play mortal hunters or dhampirs in VtM.

Should they? I mean vampirism is definitely icky and unholy in origin, but still you can carefuly keep your Humanity high and fight a good fight, I mean considering how many evil kindred are around, those vampires who does not want to surrender to vampirism are probably one of best weapon against them.
It's not like Buffy where it's corpse with caulliflower demon inside ;)

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The Technocracy are still the bad guys because they think socialism/fascism is the best path forward for the world so any free thinkers pretty much have to end up at least tangentially associated with the Traditions

I have a hard time as European Catholic to align with free-thinker occultists over fascists :P
But then I play Technocracy as divided and not even close to omnipotent, because honestly this 90-ties vibe about how big bad powers will make world boring is really stupid.
Any wannabe big power knows rules of panem et circes.

Quote
Zweihander is only like that because the creator used the retro-clone idea on Warhammer Fantasy and added SJW trappings like gender into it. Not a smart move when 4th Edition Warhammer Fantasy is still around and fair to play.

Well Zweihander is bit older than 4e IIRC.
TBH he also added aspects that makes world even more grimdark and violent than original, so it's not just SJwism.


Quote
You don't strike me as someone who would do that, but if you don't think creativity is your thing, it wasn't really mine either until, as BoxCrayonTales pointed out, I tried my hand at fanfiction. Moved away from it pretty quickly because the IP is heavily copyrighted but I found a new niche afterwards that I liked and stuck with it.

So far I have no ambition of being RPG designer
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 24, 2021, 08:40:28 PM

Quote
A) Already did a top to bottom rewrite of the mechanics for what often call "White Book Mage" (due to my giving copies to my players using white binders) available here; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing

Interesting though I have to admit - I dislike sphere redesign
I think Mage: The Awakening's arcana are an improvement. Though I still find both very lacking. I prefer something like the Dark Ages: Mage magic system where every magical tradition has its own set of magic skills.

If I was designing a game, then I'd let all splats have access to the magic system and then make some additional special rules just for the snowflake wizards to justify them being a distinct splat.

Quote
Quote
It also provides a fresh start to (re)develop ideas with the benefit of hindsight, the easy research provided by the internet, etc.

I find a lot of WoDisms to be pretty arbitrary.

For example, before Changeling: The Dreaming was released, somebody invented their own "Faerie: The Game Eternal." While it draws on the same folkloric roots, the execution was completely different. Rather than being killed by the stability of human society, these faeries rely on it to avoid deteriorating into beings of pure chaos.

I'm generally quite willing to go with The Lost angle, not The Dreaming. Ancient mysterious terrors from Dream/Nightmare Dimension that ocassionaly kidnaps people.
Dreaming angle ultimately leaves me quite cold.

I like Lost over Dreaming, too. Nonetheless, I recognize that some people don't like the whole "you were abused by fairies" angle. So I'd offer an olive branch by allowing "exile fey" as a PC option: they're fairies who decided to live in the human world and adopt human ways.

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In terms of oWoD - nWoD - I rather prefer my Vampire and Mage more on o-side, and Changeling and Ghost on n-side.
Werewolves sort of leaves me cold on both sides, but if I had to choose I'll go with nWoD because zoophilia is just icky.

This is why I prefer to invent my own setting rather than try and parse which iteration of the IP I find less offensive.

The whole zoophilia thing is just unnecessary and could have been replaced by humans having sex with wolf gods rather than literal wolves. Woman has sex with wolf god, she becomes pregnant with wolfblood. Man has sex with wolf goddess, she becomes pregnant with wereblood wolf.

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And others wrote "Angel: The Rapture" and "Daemon" years before Demon: The Fallen. Or literal Anne Rice vampires: while similar to WoD vamps, there are key differences.

There's also plenty of heartbreakers like The Everlasting and WitchCraft.

There's tons of conceptual space to explore without wholesale copying WoD. Take inspiration, sure, but don't feel constrained by the choices of White Wolf in the 90s and 00s.

From 3pp hacks of WoD my favourite is definitely Genius: The Transgression.
I saw the author advertising it all over tvtropes years ago, but I never saw the appeal. You can hack Mage to do the same thing, as WW eventually did in Mage Chronicler's Guide.

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Another example: why should vampire PCs all drink blood? Why can't we play energy vampires like in What We Do in the Shadows tv show? Or a succubus like in Lost Girl?

I'm all for energy vampires but as different being that is not really vampire in common sense. Sort of like Vampire Courts in Butcher books which are loose coalition of separate species of supernaturals - with psychic vampires being human+, and classic vampires being almost Lovecraftian spiritual energy mimicking psyche of freshly dead and converted corpses.
But that's sort of another problem - I like to have extra species, but also to have multi-clanned classic vamps with singular historical source of their existence.
I don't see the problem here. You can have a bazillion strains and sub-strains of vampires. What's stopping you?

The Everlasting offers an interesting variation. Progenitor vampires (the ones that found bloodlines) come into existence when a person commits really big atrocities, rather than all tracing back to a single progenitor in the middle east 10,000 years ago or whatever. Although they don't seem to share the same source (or maybe they do? it's unclear), they do follow the same rough Ricean-inspired template except that their strengths and weaknesses are slightly more diverse than WoD (though not as diverse as they could be). For example, they all drink human blood (youth-stealers and flesh-eaters are different splats for some reason) but some bloodlines lack fangs. Perhaps the most extreme divergence is that some bloodlines aren't harmed by sunlight.

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If you care enough to reinvent the wheel for a kitchen sink urban fantasy and convince people to play it... more power to you. As it stands, being able to put up "Looking for players for V20 or M20 campaign" on our local gaming meetup groups and not have to spend hours just explaining the setting and can just get right to char gen and playing is well worth any trivial issues I have with the setting.

Yep. Besides why assume we don't know various tropes and just prefer overall outline of WoD?
My issues with the setting and the rules are non-trivial. I'm not going to play a game I don't like because someone is trying to sell me something. WoD is a dying brand anyway, so there's never been a better time to invent your own setting.

It's not like anybody else has tried... outside of the urban fantasy fiction market, which is vastly larger than the tabletop market.

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In case you missed the memo... vampires are the villains and should be played the same way you would an evil-alignment D&D game. There's a reason I only play mortal hunters or dhampirs in VtM.

Should they? I mean vampirism is definitely icky and unholy in origin, but still you can carefuly keep your Humanity high and fight a good fight, I mean considering how many evil kindred are around, those vampires who does not want to surrender to vampirism are probably one of best weapon against them.
It's not like Buffy where it's corpse with caulliflower demon inside ;)
I never understood how you can maintain high humanity at the same time you accumulate a laundry list of superpowers. Wouldn't using the powers offered by vampirism make you more susceptible to its darkside? Why not play a superhero game and make a PC with vampire powers?

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The Technocracy are still the bad guys because they think socialism/fascism is the best path forward for the world so any free thinkers pretty much have to end up at least tangentially associated with the Traditions

I have a hard time as European Catholic to align with free-thinker occultists over fascists :P
But then I play Technocracy as divided and not even close to omnipotent, because honestly this 90-ties vibe about how big bad powers will make world boring is really stupid.
Any wannabe big power knows rules of panem et circes.
I never got the appeal of the Technocracy. I vastly preferred Nephilim's secret societies in concept: normal human beings who know the supernatural exists and hunt down wizards to drain magic for their own gain. Not all secret societies were like that, but those were the ones most relevant as antagonists. (It was basically "Illuminati: The Conspiracy (http://167.99.155.149/other/mundane.html#i)" if you're familiar with that old homebrew.)

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You don't strike me as someone who would do that, but if you don't think creativity is your thing, it wasn't really mine either until, as BoxCrayonTales pointed out, I tried my hand at fanfiction. Moved away from it pretty quickly because the IP is heavily copyrighted but I found a new niche afterwards that I liked and stuck with it.

So far I have no ambition of being RPG designer
You don't need to be. There's plenty of existing rules systems that you can make homebrew for, or even go for a systemless setting. You might be fine using a modified WoD/CoD setting/rules now, but that might change in the future. Particularly if you keep making changes and can't silence your niggling doubts about the game's fit for you.

If a mod thinks this is too tangential for the original purpose of the thread, then let us know.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Chris24601 on February 24, 2021, 08:45:18 PM

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A) Already did a top to bottom rewrite of the mechanics for what often call "White Book Mage" (due to my giving copies to my players using white binders) available here; https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8uzbbLvQJOLRWtSaVU4M3A5M0E/view?usp=sharing

Interesting though I have to admit - I dislike sphere redesign
Space is literally just name changes because I hate writing Correspondence when Space does just as well 90% of the time.

The rest came down to actual player utility over the course of the decade and a half my Mage campaign has been running... Prime was too un-distinct, basically the Mage equivalent of a feat tax to fuel certain effects of other spheres. Meanwhile, Entropy wasn't doing what a lot of players thought it would; its possibly the most useless sphere for actually being a necromancer (and all the actual tricks also opened up all manner of other tricks that basically made "magic related to the dead" just a small niche of their abilities... ex. animating a corpse was matter 3, prime 2... which also gives you the ability to spawn any sort of matter you wish from nothingness).

So Prime got merged into each of the spheres (with a few extra bits merged specifically into Spirit) and Entropy got renamed Fate (for pretty much the same reason I renamed Correspondence) and Death got added in to both make direct necromancy a thing and keep the number of spheres at nine.

A related reason for the change was also that I needed easy ways to represent other supernaturals, many of whom have much stronger ties to death, using the same mechanics as sphere magic because they've always shown up as NPCs in my Mage campaigns, but I wasn't about to rewrite all of the abilities of those games just for some NPCs.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 25, 2021, 04:43:13 AM
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Space is literally just name changes because I hate writing Correspondence when Space does just as well 90% of the time.

Respect your syllables!!!

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The rest came down to actual player utility over the course of the decade and a half my Mage campaign has been running... Prime was too un-distinct, basically the Mage equivalent of a feat tax to fuel certain effects of other spheres. Meanwhile, Entropy wasn't doing what a lot of players thought it would; its possibly the most useless sphere for actually being a necromancer (and all the actual tricks also opened up all manner of other tricks that basically made "magic related to the dead" just a small niche of their abilities... ex. animating a corpse was matter 3, prime 2... which also gives you the ability to spawn any sort of matter you wish from nothingness).

So Prime got merged into each of the spheres (with a few extra bits merged specifically into Spirit) and Entropy got renamed Fate (for pretty much the same reason I renamed Correspondence) and Death got added in to both make direct necromancy a thing and keep the number of spheres at nine.


I understand it from perspective of game balance though I have to admit as with druids/warlocks/priest I prefer metaphisical distinction here rather than easy gameplay.
(Entropy as Fate is a good thing though - fits Nine Traditions much better). So in a way lack of Death, and speciality of fantasy necromancers is good thing for me - as honestly they never was a thing in real life till modern fantasy - I mean necromancer per se was a more educated version of Shaman that could talk with spirits, zombie was result of proto-NWO mind-fucking, other beings were unnatural cursed abominations not your regular sphere - more qlippothic in origin than anything.
So while Prime is sort of weird and not cool to use, I for Prime and anti-Death. (Not to mention lack of Death as one of vital elements of reality has nice monotheisitc taste to it ;) ).

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A related reason for the change was also that I needed easy ways to represent other supernaturals, many of whom have much stronger ties to death, using the same mechanics as sphere magic because they've always shown up as NPCs in my Mage campaigns, but I wasn't about to rewrite all of the abilities of those games just for some NPCs.

Ah, ok - I must say I'd just keep sups abilties to be distinctly different than those of mages.
I generally treat most of other races - especially vampires and werewolves in my vision as result of ancient very complex magic, so they are very... emergent to the Spheres per se, and cannot be reduced to Sphere effects as mages knows them.

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I think Mage: The Awakening's arcana are an improvement. Though I still find both very lacking. I prefer something like the Dark Ages: Mage magic system where every magical tradition has its own set of magic skills.

I think description and clearness of Awakening is better. Metaphysical design, and 5 kinds of mages, not so much.
And universalism of magic is also definitely good thing - why would I want separate magic systems for all Traditions.

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I like Lost over Dreaming, too. Nonetheless, I recognize that some people don't like the whole "you were abused by fairies" angle. So I'd offer an olive branch by allowing "exile fey" as a PC option: they're fairies who decided to live in the human world and adopt human ways.

Not bad. I'd go different way - not all Changelings are kidnapped victims. Some are more like refugees taken by more benevolent fae or something. As much as you can say about benevolence/malevolence among them. Anyway energies of Faerie Domain shall change anyone who wanders there. I think I prefer that over giving Faeries actual possibility to bred true with humans.


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This is why I prefer to invent my own setting rather than try and parse which iteration of the IP I find less offensive.

The whole zoophilia thing is just unnecessary and could have been replaced by humans having sex with wolf gods rather than literal wolves. Woman has sex with wolf god, she becomes pregnant with wolfblood. Man has sex with wolf goddess, she becomes pregnant with wereblood wolf.

As I said I prefer to rewrite things I don't like rather than whole setting.

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I saw the author advertising it all over tvtropes years ago, but I never saw the appeal. You can hack Mage to do the same thing, as WW eventually did in Mage Chronicler's Guide.

In a way it is Son of Aether: The Game, but I like setting and its overall weirdness.


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I don't see the problem here. You can have a bazillion strains and sub-strains of vampires. What's stopping you?


Well I like 13 clanes :P

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My issues with the setting and the rules are non-trivial. I'm not going to play a game I don't like because someone is trying to sell me something. WoD is a dying brand anyway, so there's never been a better time to invent your own setting.

Sure. Go for it. As I said I'm not setting creator.
I'm setting fixer, or setting Dr. Frankenstein if you prefer.

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I never understood how you can maintain high humanity at the same time you accumulate a laundry list of superpowers. Wouldn't using the powers offered by vampirism make you more susceptible to its darkside? Why not play a superhero game and make a PC with vampire powers?

Depends what you eat and how you it, in my perspective tbh.
And sure you won't get them as fast and powerful as ruthless murderers but still you'd be more on equal footing than mortal.

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I never got the appeal of the Technocracy. I vastly preferred Nephilim's secret societies in concept: normal human beings who know the supernatural exists and hunt down wizards to drain magic for their own gain. Not all secret societies were like that, but those were the ones most relevant as antagonists. (It was basically "Illuminati: The Conspiracy" if you're familiar with that old homebrew.)

I never really liked concept of draining magic - magic is craft, art, not some energy within :P

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You might be fine using a modified WoD/CoD setting/rules now, but that might change in the future. Particularly if you keep making changes and can't silence your niggling doubts about the game's fit for you.

I'm quite sure when I finish my shenanigans and try to run my hybrid - it's not gonna be even on Storyteller engine, nevertheless still WOD enough for it to be WOD-ish.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 25, 2021, 02:43:31 PM
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I like Lost over Dreaming, too. Nonetheless, I recognize that some people don't like the whole "you were abused by fairies" angle. So I'd offer an olive branch by allowing "exile fey" as a PC option: they're fairies who decided to live in the human world and adopt human ways.

Not bad. I'd go different way - not all Changelings are kidnapped victims. Some are more like refugees taken by more benevolent fae or something. As much as you can say about benevolence/malevolence among them. Anyway energies of Faerie Domain shall change anyone who wanders there. I think I prefer that over giving Faeries actual possibility to bred true with humans.

I remember that being discussed after Lost came out. IIRC the consensus was that if genuinely "benevolent" keepers did exist, then their guests would never want to leave. A fairy offering an escape to a fantasy world where all your wishes come true? What kind of person, in what kind of position, would accept that offer? How many of those who accept will ever want to leave? How long do you think it would take before they forgot they were ever human in the first place?

Remember Disney's Peter Pan? That's a perfect example of a "benevolent" keeper. Neverland tricks children into staying by providing them with endless adventures until they eventually forget they ever lived anywhere else.

In Spielberg's Hook, the situation is reversed. Peter Banning is a changeling who escaped Neverland, Captain Hook is the keeper trying desperately to win him back so they can keeping playing forever.

And now I'm remembering why I always thought Lost was the best game WW ever produced.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 25, 2021, 02:59:59 PM
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I remember that being discussed after Lost came out. IIRC the consensus was that if genuinely "benevolent" keepers did exist, then their guests would never want to leave. A fairy offering an escape to a fantasy world where all your wishes come true? What kind of person, in what kind of position, would accept that offer? How many of those who accept will ever want to leave? How long do you think it would take before they forgot they were ever human in the first place?

It's Faerie. Domain of contracts and obligations. Even benevolent Faeries won't be - cannot be "all your wishes came true" not in a real way.
And as Faerie Domain is Dream Domain - humans even in nice parts can start to recognize it's in some powerful way... FAKE. (And I mean that's of course place where I shank oWoD Changeling - Dreaming is Fake, Mundane is Real, even nice places in Faerie are unreal for genuine life and being. Sure some will stay there forever entrapped by glamours and terrors as drug addicts.

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Remember Disney's Peter Pan? That's a perfect example of a "benevolent" keeper. Neverland tricks children into staying by providing them with endless adventures until they eventually forget they ever lived anywhere else.

In Spielberg's Hook, the situation is reversed. Peter Banning is a changeling who escaped Neverland, Captain Hook is the keeper trying desperately to win him back so they can keeping playing forever.

That's close to my sentiment - Neverland is fake. Even when it's nice-fake and cool-fake.
Like being trapped in real D&D session.

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And now I'm remembering why I always thought Lost was the best game WW ever produced.

Ha! But precisely I think adding nice elements to Lost - in a way I described is still enriching.
That's because I want to see Faerie as some element of overreaching metaphysics, some broken mirror of communal psyche - hey sort of like Chris' Astral Gods now that I think about it - more than simply weird Nightmare Horror.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on February 25, 2021, 03:29:13 PM
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I remember that being discussed after Lost came out. IIRC the consensus was that if genuinely "benevolent" keepers did exist, then their guests would never want to leave. A fairy offering an escape to a fantasy world where all your wishes come true? What kind of person, in what kind of position, would accept that offer? How many of those who accept will ever want to leave? How long do you think it would take before they forgot they were ever human in the first place?

It's Faerie. Domain of contracts and obligations. Even benevolent Faeries won't be - cannot be "all your wishes came true" not in a real way.
And as Faerie Domain is Dream Domain - humans even in nice parts can start to recognize it's in some powerful way... FAKE. (And I mean that's of course place where I shank oWoD Changeling - Dreaming is Fake, Mundane is Real, even nice places in Faerie are unreal for genuine life and being. Sure some will stay there forever entrapped by glamours and terrors as drug addicts.

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Remember Disney's Peter Pan? That's a perfect example of a "benevolent" keeper. Neverland tricks children into staying by providing them with endless adventures until they eventually forget they ever lived anywhere else.

In Spielberg's Hook, the situation is reversed. Peter Banning is a changeling who escaped Neverland, Captain Hook is the keeper trying desperately to win him back so they can keeping playing forever.

That's close to my sentiment - Neverland is fake. Even when it's nice-fake and cool-fake.
Like being trapped in real D&D session.

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And now I'm remembering why I always thought Lost was the best game WW ever produced.

Ha! But precisely I think adding nice elements to Lost - in a way I described is still enriching.
That's because I want to see Faerie as some element of overreaching metaphysics, some broken mirror of communal psyche - hey sort of like Chris' Astral Gods now that I think about it - more than simply weird Nightmare Horror.

I think it's enriching because this, at least the way you put it, plays right into the themes of the game. There's no reason why keepers should limit their hunting behavior to purely kidnapping victims who don't want to come. Deliberately luring dissatisfied people by playing on their desires provides all sorts of new ways to design keepers and changelings backstories, and it makes the keepers that much more a psychological horror. There's always a danger that someone could be ensnared, you go on a rescue mission, and then discover that they don't want to leave.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 25, 2021, 03:50:54 PM
Yes.

Generally as I wanted to have 7 main races linked to 7 deadly sins, I'd like to link Faerie beings to Envy - Faerie beings themselves suffer from unreality - therefore kidnapping human children both to sort of feast on their reality, and for lesser faerie to live as mortal fetches (tbh those fetches should be called changelings if we use whole faerie language properly - but hey if there is one thing WoD is doing really shitty - it's NAMING THINGS. Dear lord, their naming customs are... BAD. From ultra generic terms of nWoD to permanently misused terms of oWoD, always BAD. (Except of Correspondence Sphere - it's cool, suck it Space losers).

And of course for changelings themselves those who escaped there is envy towards real people, they lost their life, and maybe part of their... selves by being tainted by Dream.
This is their struggle now.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 25, 2021, 05:44:49 PM
Big WOTC announcement today:

Hasbro is reorganizing and giving tabletop gaming -- Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering -- a higher priority.

According to the Wall Street Journal, WotC's revenue last year was $816 million (a 24% increase on 2019). Brian Goldner, Hasbro's Chief Executive, says WotC is predicted to double revenue from 2019 to 2023.

Hasbro is dividing into three 'units' -- Consumer Products (toys, classic board games); Entertainment (film, TV, licensing); and Wizards & Digital (WotC plus digital licensing).

Hasbro bought WotC in 1999 for about $325M.

Link:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403?f
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 25, 2021, 08:58:10 PM
Big 'Doctor Who' Announcement November 25, 2013

'Doctor Who': Record-setting ratings:
https://ew.com/article/2013/11/25/doctor-who-ratings-day/

How many U.S. viewers tuned in for “Day of the Doctor”?

Enough to break BBC America’s all-time ratings record. … On Twitter, Doctor Who overall generated a total of 1.8 million tweets, beating every show on cable for the week.

The company claims Doctor Who earned a Guinness World Record for the “largest ever simulcast of a TV drama” following the global release which saw the episode broadcast in 94 countries at the same time. The BBC released over the weekend that the episode was seen by 10.2 million viewers in the UK.


BBC executive 1: "This is amazing. Dr. Who is going from strength to strength!"

BBC executive 2: "What can we do to ensure this dynamic growth?"

BBC executive 1: "I know, lets go Full-Woke! We will add all those marginalized yet vibrant potential fans that are just waiting to watch the show once we have some representation in our cast, and our plotlines have relevant messaging!"

BBC executive 2: "Yes, Brilliant! Diversity will become our strength!”"
 


Fast Forward to 2017: Moffat + Full-Woke =

Big 'Doctor Who' Announcement July 10, 2017

Doctor Who ratings for last series lowest since it returned to TV in 2005
https://www.irishnews.com/magazine/entertainment/2017/07/10/news/doctor-who-ratings-for-last-series-lowest-since-it-returned-to-tv-in-2005-1080816/

Ratings for the latest series of Doctor Who were the lowest since the programme returned to screens in 2005, new figures show.

…almost two million below the average ratings for 2014.

The next Doctor is due to be revealed in the 2017 Christmas episode, which will also be the last to be produced by Steven Moffat, who has been in charge of the show since 2010.

The 2017 series – the last to feature Peter Capaldi in the title role – also saw the lowest audience to date for a single episode...



BBC executive 1: “Damn those toxic cis-gendered Dr. Who fans!. “

BBC executive 2: “Damn them? Are we not Woke! Where are all those new vibrant and diverse fans that were supposed to take us to ratings high after ratings high!?”

BBC executive 1: "You fail to understand my good man. You see we are obviously not Woke enough! There is still a white male in the lead role as the Doctor! We have not yet purged ourselves of the toxic gatekeeping elements in the Dr. Who fanbase! We have to engage all the new vibrant fans with Full representation! The Next Doctor must be a Woman! We must have MOAR Diversity!”

BBC executive 2: “Indeed! How could we have been so blind! We clearly do not have enough Diversity to claim it as a strength!  A female Doctor, and Companions of color forever! I see it now my good fellow; a female Doctor combined with our socially relevant messaging that we push in every episode will ensure a meteoric rise in ratings and popularity!”

BBC executive 1: “By Jove! I think that we have finally got it!”
 


Fast Forward to 2020: Chinballs + Female Doctor + MOAR-Woke =

Big 'Doctor Who' Announcement March 9, 2020

Doctor Who suffers lowest ratings since 2005 revival:
https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/tvfilm/doctor-who-series-12-ratings-low-a4382666.html

Doctor Who has slumped to its lowest ratings since the programme was revived in 2005, according to new viewing figures.

This is also the lowest since Doctor Who was relaunched 15 years ago.

...below the previous all-time low..., which was set by an episode in 2017.

This year’s series appears no fewer than six times in a top 10 of the least-watched Doctor Who episodes since 2005.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on February 27, 2021, 11:39:21 AM
WotC was more profitable than the entire of Hasbros toy and game division, by 112 Million.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on February 27, 2021, 09:37:04 PM
WotC was more profitable than the entire of Hasbros toy and game division, by 112 Million.

I know! Amazing right!?

Have you caught on yet that no one is disputing that 5e is selling amazingly well?

But how much of that WOTC profit is D&D, and how much is MAGIC?

Did you know that WOTC did not beat the toy and game division by the number of products sold?

They beat the Hasbro toy and game division due to their higher profit margins on certain products.

I'm not sure what the margins are on Hardcover D&D books vs. little Magic cards... Anyone??

WOTC = D&D + MAGIC.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on February 27, 2021, 10:29:57 PM
The problem with recent Doctor Who isn't that it's woke.  It's that it's shit.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mishihari on February 27, 2021, 10:33:22 PM
The problem with recent Doctor Who isn't that it's woke.  It's that it's shit.

I have noticed a correlation between those two attributes though.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RPGPundit on February 28, 2021, 12:32:03 AM
WotC was more profitable than the entire of Hasbros toy and game division, by 112 Million.

I know! Amazing right!?

Have you caught on yet that no one is disputing that 5e is selling amazingly well?

But how much of that WOTC profit is D&D, and how much is MAGIC?

Did you know that WOTC did not beat the toy and game division by the number of products sold?

They beat the Hasbro toy and game division due to their higher profit margins on certain products.

I'm not sure what the margins are on Hardcover D&D books vs. little Magic cards... Anyone??

WOTC = D&D + MAGIC.

Magic cards have an insane profit margin. D&D books would have probably the standard for books.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on February 28, 2021, 05:21:47 AM
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I have noticed a correlation between those two attributes though.


nuWho was woke from the beginning, it became broken mostly due to screenwriters being additionaly dumbass.
I'd say Moffat was not more woke than Davis, but aside of one-shot mystery episode he is bad storyteller so any woke stuff, and TBH any sci-fi stuff in his era is just like this thorn in your side.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 02, 2021, 07:43:50 PM
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I have noticed a correlation between those two attributes though.


nuWho was woke from the beginning, it became broken mostly due to screenwriters being additionaly dumbass.
I'd say Moffat was not more woke than Davis, but aside of one-shot mystery episode he is bad storyteller so any woke stuff, and TBH any sci-fi stuff in his era is just like this thorn in your side.

There are degree’s of woke…

Fans liked the new Dr. Who. Until they didn’t.

Most fans of a given IP are willing to tolerate a degree of wokeness, if that show/game/etc., otherwise delivers elements they like.

 If they find that they enjoy themselves more than the bits of wokeness irritates them, the wokeness tends to get a pass.

Unfortunately, the proponents of wokeness all too often mistake tolerance for acceptance. (Notice how the woke always seems to get dialed up – not dialed down…)

Generally speaking, I find that those of the woke persuasion seem to have an all or nothing mentality. You are either in, or you are out. You are a good person, or you are evil and deplorable. I have see this all or nothing mentality at work in arguments on other RPG forums where they are talking about restricting playable races: “You already have make believe Dragons, why would Tieflings upset the verisimilitude of your setting? What’s the difference?”

And the same goes for the woke. It is worth noting that they do seem to inherently understand that going full-Woke right away with well established IP is counter to their goals...
But if even a little bit gets a pass, they gradually start to turn up the dial thinking that if everyone was Ok with a little woke, then they obviously would have no problem with a lot of Woke.

Thus went the fate of the new Dr. Who...


The following naturally has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the future of D&D which is owned by WOTC, which is owned by HASBRO.

MR. POTATO HEAD GOING GENDER NEUTRAL
Toy maker Hasbro put out some major damage control after it was revealed earlier today that they would be removing the Mister from Mr. Potato Head.
“The Associated Press reported: “Hasbro, the company that makes the potato-shaped plastic toy, is giving the spud a gender neutral new name: Potato Head. The change will appear on boxes this year.”
https://boundingintocomics.com/2021/02/25/hasbro-puts-out-damage-control-after-mr-potato-head-disaster/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hasbro-puts-out-damage-control-after-mr-potato-head-disaster

Following significant backlash on social media, Hasbro put out a damage control tweet in order to spin the narrative in their favor.

They tweeted, “Hold that Tot – your main spud, MR. POTATO HEAD isn’t going anywhere!”

Hasbro then claimed that they had only changed the brand name and logo for Mr. Potato Head not the actual toy.”

The original press release, https://archive.is/Tefqi it begins by stating, “Hasbro today announced the iconic brand will be reimagined for the modern consumer.”

the original press release, it begins by stating, “Hasbro today announced the iconic brand will be reimagined for the modern consumer.”

It went on to state, “Hasbro is making sure all feel welcome in the Potato Head world by officially dropping the Mr. from the Mr. Potato Head brand name and logo to promote gender equality and inclusion.”
The original press release also states, “The name change will come with a fresh branding look with a whimsical color palette and more inclusive messaging along with new product to appeal to the modern consumer.”

The current press release on their corporate website does not include any of this language. “

#NothingisSacred
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: moonsweeper on March 02, 2021, 09:43:03 PM
Generally speaking, I find that those of the woke persuasion seem to have an all or nothing mentality. You are either in, or you are out. You are a good person, or you are evil and deplorable. I have see this all or nothing mentality at work in arguments on other RPG forums where they are talking about restricting playable races: “You already have make believe Dragons, why would Tieflings upset the verisimilitude of your setting? What’s the difference?”

And the same goes for the woke. It is worth noting that they do seem to inherently understand that going full-Woke right away with well established IP is counter to their goals...
But if even a little bit gets a pass, they gradually start to turn up the dial thinking that if everyone was Ok with a little woke, then they obviously would have no problem with a lot of Woke.

...and the fact that they are 'all or nothing' yet realize their messaging only works in increments tells you how dishonest they are.  If the little brownshirts thought their message was true and not simply a way to project power, they would know that it could stand on its own...

The original press release, https://archive.is/Tefqi it begins by stating, “Hasbro today announced the iconic brand will be reimagined for the modern consumer.”

the original press release, it begins by stating, “Hasbro today announced the iconic brand will be reimagined for the modern consumer.”

It went on to state, “Hasbro is making sure all feel welcome in the Potato Head world by officially dropping the Mr. from the Mr. Potato Head brand name and logo to promote gender equality and inclusion.”
The original press release also states, “The name change will come with a fresh branding look with a whimsical color palette and more inclusive messaging along with new product to appeal to the modern consumer.”

The current press release on their corporate website does not include any of this language. “

#NothingisSacred

My first thought when I saw the press release earlier was...

'I wonder what kind of interchangeable parts are going in that one...'  ;D ;D ;D
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: hedgehobbit on March 02, 2021, 10:36:42 PM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403?f

This article has a strange quote ... "Hasbro hopes the reorganization will allow it to replicate Wizard of the Coast's success in digital games."

So, it appears that WotC big increase in revenue has little to do with face-to-face RPGs like D&D and everything to do with MTG Arena.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 02, 2021, 10:47:56 PM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403?f

This article has a strange quote ... "Hasbro hopes the reorganization will allow it to replicate Wizard of the Coast's success in digital games."

So, it appears that WotC big increase in revenue has little to do with face-to-face RPGs like D&D and everything to do with MTG Arena.

Yes.

MAGIC was always the bigger earner over D&D by orders of magnitude.

Even Magic grew 23% this year...


...

...and the fact that they are 'all or nothing' yet realize their messaging only works in increments tells you how dishonest they are.  If the little brownshirts thought their message was true and not simply a way to project power, they would know that it could stand on its own...
...

Exactly.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on March 02, 2021, 10:49:09 PM
WotC was more profitable than the entire of Hasbros toy and game division, by 112 Million.

I know! Amazing right!?

Have you caught on yet that no one is disputing that 5e is selling amazingly well?

But how much of that WOTC profit is D&D, and how much is MAGIC?

Did you know that WOTC did not beat the toy and game division by the number of products sold?

They beat the Hasbro toy and game division due to their higher profit margins on certain products.

I'm not sure what the margins are on Hardcover D&D books vs. little Magic cards... Anyone??

WOTC = D&D + MAGIC.

We don't know for sure what portion is which, all we know is D&D has gone up massively every year, while Magic is going down, and they just announced more prominence for D&D on multiple fronts. They're moving tons of people over TO D&D right now, and announced they will increase the product rate. Read the fucking room man. 
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Mistwell on March 02, 2021, 10:50:29 PM
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403?f

This article has a strange quote ... "Hasbro hopes the reorganization will allow it to replicate Wizard of the Coast's success in digital games."

So, it appears that WotC big increase in revenue has little to do with face-to-face RPGs like D&D and everything to do with MTG Arena.

Yes.

MAGIC was always the bigger earner over D&D by orders of magnitude.

Even Magic grew 23% this year...


...

...and the fact that they are 'all or nothing' yet realize their messaging only works in increments tells you how dishonest they are.  If the little brownshirts thought their message was true and not simply a way to project power, they would know that it could stand on its own...
...

Exactly.

Have you never heard of D&D Beyond and DMs Guild? Are you just unaware they're selling tons of content through Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds?

It's not Magic. Magic has been on the decline for years and it's growth is minuscule compared to the D&D growth. Why the fuck do you think they pushed forward so hard on the D&D movie? Why do you think they keep mentioning D&D in their stockholders meetings? Why do you think all the press coverage is focused on D&D?

Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 03, 2021, 12:09:39 AM

Have you never heard of D&D Beyond and DMs Guild? Are you just unaware they're selling tons of content through Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds?

Are you unaware that Magic still sells like crack cocaine?

Evidently, yes...

It's not Magic. Magic has been on the decline for years and it's growth is minuscule compared to the D&D growth. Why the fuck do you think they pushed forward so hard on the D&D movie? Why do you think they keep mentioning D&D in their stockholders meetings? Why do you think all the press coverage is focused on D&D?...


MAGIC declining? You actually read the investors call press releases right?
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/hasbro-reorganizes-support-big-growth-dungeons-dragons-magic-gathering/

What part of MAGIC growing 23% over last year is hard to understand?

What part of "Hasbro  also announced that it plans to continue bringing crossover content to Magic: The Gathering." And other Pro-Magic initiatives announced by Hasbro are hard to understand.

What part of me saying MAGIC was the bigger earner, but D&D had the more exploitable IP was hard for you to understand. Which is why a lot of those media initiatives favor D&D. But Magic is getting its own media initiatives as well.

Research that then let us know what you find...

Everyone knows MAGIC was always a bigger earner than D&D.
From 2019:
https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-revenue-operating-profit-and-earnings-share
Entertainment, Licensing and Digital segment net revenues increased 24% to $92.0 million compared to $74.4 million in 2018. Revenue growth was driven by Magic: The Gathering Arena and consumer products licensing revenue. ...
Hasbro’s total gaming category, including all gaming revenue, most notably MAGIC: THE GATHERING and MONOPOLY, which are included in Franchise Brands in the table above, totaled $243.4 million for the first quarter 2019, up 20%, versus $203.5 million for the first quarter 2018. ...

Ohh look, there's Magic bringing in that digital money too...

Do you just throw those links up hoping that I won't actually read them?

5e is selling amazingly well. Stupid silly.

But Magic is still fucking Magic...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Shasarak on March 03, 2021, 12:37:06 AM
But Magic is still fucking Magic...

So it is not just me that remembers WotC buying TSR from essentially their cash on hand?
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BoxCrayonTales on March 03, 2021, 01:29:58 PM
But Magic is still fucking Magic...

So it is not just me that remembers WotC buying TSR from essentially their cash on hand?
To be fair, TSR had been run into the ground by that point thru mismanagement.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: jhkim on March 03, 2021, 04:13:46 PM
It's not Magic. Magic has been on the decline for years and it's growth is minuscule compared to the D&D growth. Why the fuck do you think they pushed forward so hard on the D&D movie? Why do you think they keep mentioning D&D in their stockholders meetings? Why do you think all the press coverage is focused on D&D?...

MAGIC declining? You actually read the investors call press releases right?
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/hasbro-reorganizes-support-big-growth-dungeons-dragons-magic-gathering/

What part of MAGIC growing 23% over last year is hard to understand?

What part of "Hasbro  also announced that it plans to continue bringing crossover content to Magic: The Gathering." And other Pro-Magic initiatives announced by Hasbro are hard to understand.

What part of me saying MAGIC was the bigger earner, but D&D had the more exploitable IP was hard for you to understand. Which is why a lot of those media initiatives favor D&D. But Magic is getting its own media initiatives as well.

I think Jaegar is right here. From what I can see, D&D is growing faster than Magic -- but it is still a much smaller profit earner. From ICv2 numbers (from hobby stores), the general collectible game market was about $600 million in 2018, which was ten times the size of the tabletop RPG market at around $60 million. ENWorld maintains a summary of those.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/top-5-rpgs-compiled-charts-2004-present.662563/

I suspect the key is that Magic players are more active and buy more than D&D players. A D&D player might one or two books that lasts them for years, while there is much more profit from a Magic player, who regularly buys new cards. Below are numbers from 2019 from a source that may count differently, so might not be directly comparable, but it was estimated the Magic brought in $500 worldwide.

Quote
With a reported three million active users on MTG Arena, Hasbro banked $2.45 billion in net revenue last year, much in part to the MTG brand (tabletop and digital). Magic and Monopoly were the only brands to profit while others like Transformers, Play-Doh, Nerf, and My Little Pony didn’t, according to Hasbro’s annual reports. And it’s estimated that MTG has already brought in around $500 million this year.
Source: https://dotesports.com/mtg/news/mtg-continues-to-make-millions-for-hasbro


D&D has had bigger growth in the past few years, but it's still a much smaller profit margin overall. The total number of players seems roughly comparable. Both games have had around 40 million people who have ever played, and maybe 10 to 15 million active players.

Quote
Hasbro said that about 38 million people worldwide have played “at least one round” of Magic, though not all of these players are active now. On the earnings call, the company was hopeful that Arena, which can be played online, no trip to the local card game store required, would encourage lapsed players to return to the game.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurenorsini/2019/07/24/magic-the-gathering-leads-hasbros-second-quarter-earnings/?sh=92c99d62f54f

Quote
According to Wizards of the Coast, the company that has published D&D since the late ‘90s, over 40 Million people are estimated to have played Dungeons & Dragons.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/10/02/dungeons-dragons-creators-and-celebrity-players-explain-its-recent-surge-in-popularity
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TobiasP on March 04, 2021, 02:23:31 AM
Magic is growing much faster than the rest of Hasbro, it brings the entire rest of the company up. As long as Magic is there producing good numbers the Hasbro executives look smart every year. Magic would be more valuable outside of Hasbro than inside of Hasbro, so there could be some investors who push for a sale, but it's unlikely.

D&D by itself can't possibly be worth enough to sell. If you assume D&D is $40m a year in sales, that's worth about $250-500m, it doesn't seem worth it.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: bryce0lynch on March 04, 2021, 10:42:08 AM
Magic makes enough for Hasbro megacorp to care about it.

The entire point of D&D, though, is the brand. That property has "licensing" written all over it. Video games and twelve movie deal with a couple of Tv shows thrown in with a toy line and comics and wood burning set all leveraged off of it. They don't care about D&D sales. They care about the D&D brand and will build that brand in whatever way they need in order to get those sweet sweet licensing deals. Fuck the books. They will do just enough to keep it going while they cater to the younger audiences in twitch, etc ... all in order to build the brand.

Further, modern megacorp theory is that no brand is worth owning unless it can enhance, and be enhanced by, the other brands. Hence a D&D magic setting, or D&D in magic. Or in Transformers, or boardgames, or whatever. There is at least one person at WOTC whose job it is to leverage other brands at Hasbro and be leveraged by them ... all in order to build profits and brand.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: RandyB on March 04, 2021, 11:35:22 AM
Magic makes enough for Hasbro megacorp to care about it.

The entire point of D&D, though, is the brand. That property has "licensing" written all over it. Video games and twelve movie deal with a couple of Tv shows thrown in with a toy line and comics and wood burning set all leveraged off of it. They don't care about D&D sales. They care about the D&D brand and will build that brand in whatever way they need in order to get those sweet sweet licensing deals. Fuck the books. They will do just enough to keep it going while they cater to the younger audiences in twitch, etc ... all in order to build the brand.

Further, modern megacorp theory is that no brand is worth owning unless it can enhance, and be enhanced by, the other brands. Hence a D&D magic setting, or D&D in magic. Or in Transformers, or boardgames, or whatever. There is at least one person at WOTC whose job it is to leverage other brands at Hasbro and be leveraged by them ... all in order to build profits and brand.

Exhibit A: the recently announced Warhammer 40K Magic cards.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Renegade_Productions on March 04, 2021, 11:53:52 AM
Magic makes enough for Hasbro megacorp to care about it.

The entire point of D&D, though, is the brand. That property has "licensing" written all over it. Video games and twelve movie deal with a couple of Tv shows thrown in with a toy line and comics and wood burning set all leveraged off of it. They don't care about D&D sales. They care about the D&D brand and will build that brand in whatever way they need in order to get those sweet sweet licensing deals. Fuck the books. They will do just enough to keep it going while they cater to the younger audiences in twitch, etc ... all in order to build the brand.

Further, modern megacorp theory is that no brand is worth owning unless it can enhance, and be enhanced by, the other brands. Hence a D&D magic setting, or D&D in magic. Or in Transformers, or boardgames, or whatever. There is at least one person at WOTC whose job it is to leverage other brands at Hasbro and be leveraged by them ... all in order to build profits and brand.

No wonder we're getting stuff like the Cauldron book and such. Any sane game publisher would've asked these folks, 'Why are you devaluing our products?'
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 05, 2021, 08:17:09 PM
…D&D has had bigger growth in the past few years, but it's still a much smaller profit margin overall. The total number of players seems roughly comparable. Both games have had around 40 million people who have ever played, and maybe 10 to 15 million active players. …

Exactly! And It is that D&D growth that has given them the confidence to pursue all the big dollar D&D media projects.

But until those projects bear fruit, Magic is the trading card crack-cocaine gift that just keeps on giving.



I think Jaegar is right here...

What’s funny, is that if you look back at our first exchange – I was actually agreeing with him because I thought he made a very good point!

Especially about how Hasbro is seizing the moment to try and make the D&D IP a permanent franchise independent of the RPG. Literally zero attacks or disagreement from me about anything he wrote in his post that I responded to!

But he had to be double right or something, and chose to rehash an argument from another thread that he lost. I guess he wanted to relive the experience.

And then he tries to Mike-Drop the WOTC press releases showing how profitable they are. Trying to insinuate two things IMHO:

1: D&D is so profitable, it is Woke-Proof.

2: Conflate: WOTC growth = D&D   


#1 Busted with the well-known examples of the DC and Marvel Superhero comics industry and the “new” Dr. Who tv show.

#2 Busted in the last few posts.

Worth noting that even in the case of Dr. Who – it took seven years of pushing the woke from their all-time ratings high to get to the state that they are in right now. Fans are longsuffering when it comes to their favorite IP.

And D&D has grown so much compared to any other RPG, I do not think that it is out of the realm of possibility to suggest that even if they go full woke; they could afford to lose half their audience, and still be the #1 selling RPG…

Of course, in such a case the SJW’s would point to the "still #1" status of D&D as an unequivocal endorsement of the stunning and brave direction they have taken the RPG hobby in!


As for signs of HASBRO letting WOTC go full woke…

I had been chided in previous threads for daring to suggest that HASBRO, a for-profit company might allow woke messaging to interfere with the almighty bottom line.

Mentions of Ms. Monopoly, and the attempts to un-gender Mr. potato head have been brushed off as anomalies.

After all, surely HASBRO would step in and get things under control before WOTC starts to go Full-Woke…


To that line of thinking, I can only offer Exhibit A:
https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1364316059747016706

(https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/157925530_914142529355077_5719261977175883313_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=fr5E0UCjsFwAX9kOh07&_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.xx&oh=73f84fbf1a7b88920340286da3cdd385&oe=60694A96)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Ratman_tf on March 05, 2021, 08:57:55 PM

To that line of thinking, I can only offer Exhibit A:
https://twitter.com/Delafina777/status/1364316059747016706

(https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/157925530_914142529355077_5719261977175883313_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-3&_nc_sid=730e14&_nc_ohc=fr5E0UCjsFwAX9kOh07&_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.xx&oh=73f84fbf1a7b88920340286da3cdd385&oe=60694A96)

She is so fucking toxic. I don't think WOTC will have the sense to dump her like Arena.Net did.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Ratman_tf on March 05, 2021, 09:11:39 PM
Big WOTC announcement today:

Hasbro is reorganizing and giving tabletop gaming -- Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering -- a higher priority.

According to the Wall Street Journal, WotC's revenue last year was $816 million (a 24% increase on 2019). Brian Goldner, Hasbro's Chief Executive, says WotC is predicted to double revenue from 2019 to 2023.

Hasbro is dividing into three 'units' -- Consumer Products (toys, classic board games); Entertainment (film, TV, licensing); and Wizards & Digital (WotC plus digital licensing).

Hasbro bought WotC in 1999 for about $325M.

Link:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403?f

And yet they shitcanned the Transformers CCG.  >:(
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: BronzeDragon on March 06, 2021, 10:47:07 PM
It's not a coincidence that even back in 1994, the ones among us who spoke english referred to Magic as "Magic: The Gathering of Your Money".

I actually feel physical pain at the thought of how many more TSR-era books and boxed sets I might have if I hadn't spent a considerable amount of money on Magic between 94 and 98.

It's made worse by the fact that our money was worth a lot in those days. in 94-95 the US Dollar was worth only between 80 and 95 cents of Real. As a consequence, it was pretty easy to get imported stuff at reasonable prices. Nowadays, the exchange rate is over 5 Reais for 1 USD...the pain...
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: soundchaser on March 07, 2021, 11:15:08 PM
MY ROUGH estimate of 2020 for the breakdown of MtG v. D&D is about $520m/296m. Given projections, the 2023 unit would have revenue of about $1.3B (and I'd guess $900m for MtG and about $400m from D&D)... but much depends on the movie.

There is no way HAS sells WOTC when its performance in as it is. There would have to be serious equity-owner pressure or obvious divestiture valuation that puts WOTC at a higher value outside the HAS corporate model. There's probably a scope of economies premium of around $100m favoring the cross-unit leveraging of brands.

Coming soon to a happy meal near you? Probably magic cards and nice D&D figs. I'd guess within 3 years. (My son just bought 10 happy meals and gathered up his 25th anniversary Pokemon cards... he's setting up his sales, probably about $250 in the collector market, though he does have a rare holo card we're going to keep and frame).
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on March 08, 2021, 09:40:30 AM
Quote
And D&D has grown so much compared to any other RPG, I do not think that it is out of the realm of possibility to suggest that even if they go full woke; they could afford to lose half their audience, and still be the #1 selling RPG…

The difference with Doctor Who or comics you have only CANON.
In RPGs canon is loosely defined toolbox to make own fanfiction so to speak. You can use heavily woke RPGs without caring about this wokeness and ignoring it completely if rest works.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 09, 2021, 05:47:04 PM
Quote
And D&D has grown so much compared to any other RPG, I do not think that it is out of the realm of possibility to suggest that even if they go full woke; they could afford to lose half their audience, and still be the #1 selling RPG…

The difference with Doctor Who or comics you have only CANON.
In RPGs canon is loosely defined toolbox to make own fanfiction so to speak. You can use heavily woke RPGs without caring about this wokeness and ignoring it completely if rest works.

This is a good point worth looking at.

Yes, when you defile canon with the woke; this will upset fandom. Which is why when long standing characters of various IP are wokeified, gender/race flipped etc, the ire quickly gets the long-time fans hackles up.!

There is a reason though why the left always tries to subvert established IP:

If they created their own woke IP and had to promote it – it would go nowhere!

You see this in Marvel and DC comics. They wokeify the main characters because of the built-in audience they have. Every time they have tried to promote an original woke hero, it goes nowhere. Nobody wants it.

Because wokeness is off-putting for normal people! Without a known IP to draw them in, normies avoid the woke like the plague.

We can see similar examples with RPG’s. The True20 system sold better as a tool-kit rpg independent of the game it was made for – Blue Rose. Evidently when it comes to RPG games with woke elements up front: “..ignoring it completely” is not that much of a thing.

And D&D does have its own Lore / Canon. Which was not woke. We see this in beloved older modules and settings like Ravenloft. And we see how WOTC has re-worked setting and lore elements for everyone’s own good when it "updates" ;) them for 5e…

D&D is the market leader, so for now the SJW’s can get away with putting some woke in the product, and still count on BIG sales that they could not if it was any other RPG.

But there are degrees of woke…

Most fans of a given IP are willing to tolerate a degree of wokeness, if that show/game/etc., otherwise delivers elements they like.

If they find that they enjoy themselves more than the bits of wokeness irritate them; the wokeness tends to get a pass.

But there are always limits. Messing with "cannon" just gets the fanbase to those limits faster.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: TJS on March 09, 2021, 06:34:16 PM
The idea that Doctor who has 'canon' is itself somewhat ridiculous.

But many fans do see it that way.

That's because they're complete fucknuckles though.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on March 09, 2021, 06:58:33 PM
Quote
And D&D does have its own Lore / Canon.

D&D had a lot of ad hoc thrown fantasy bullshit. Calling it a lore is a travesty.
It was also mostly - do your own shit toolbook - setting books were not necessary to play a game.

Quote
And we see how WOTC has re-worked setting and lore elements for everyone’s own good when it "updates" ;) them for 5e…

Primo there was never something like D&D setting. There were D&D associated settings. Some of which - like Faerun were quite woke in hippy way from the get go.
Not to mention - secundo - those settings were usually retconned so much between each editions, that it's one big bullshit anyway.

Quote
Most fans of a given IP are willing to tolerate a degree of wokeness, if that show/game/etc., otherwise delivers elements they like.

If they find that they enjoy themselves more than the bits of wokeness irritate them; the wokeness tends to get a pass.

But there are always limits. Messing with "cannon" just get the fanbase to those limits faster.

With a game set in some one firm setting it could be a risk.
In D&D though there is no such thing, and many people play in homebrew settings because D&D is perfectly accustomed to it.


Quote
The idea that Doctor who has 'canon' is itself somewhat ridiculous.

But many fans do see it that way.

That's because they're complete fucknuckles though.

Well it's truth technically - nevertheless it should have canon, and as a tv story it will generate illusion of fandom.
RPG - not so much.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Shasarak on March 09, 2021, 09:01:54 PM
Primo there was never something like D&D setting. There were D&D associated settings. Some of which - like Faerun were quite woke in hippy way from the get go.
Not to mention - secundo - those settings were usually retconned so much between each editions, that it's one big bullshit anyway.

Not many people realise that Faerun existed before DnD claimed it as a game setting.

The reason it seems woke is that was created by a Canadian.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on March 10, 2021, 03:31:29 AM
Quote
Not many people realise that Faerun existed before DnD claimed it as a game setting.

The reason it seems woke is that was created by a Canadian.

One could argue Ed's original vision is wokier than TSR first prints ;)
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: ThatChrisGuy on March 10, 2021, 03:43:50 PM
Primo there was never something like D&D setting. There were D&D associated settings. Some of which - like Faerun were quite woke in hippy way from the get go.
Not to mention - secundo - those settings were usually retconned so much between each editions, that it's one big bullshit anyway.

Not many people realise that Faerun existed before DnD claimed it as a game setting.

The reason it seems woke is that was created by a Canadian.

Excuse me, a Canadian pervert.  Or, technically, a free-love hippie but it's the same thing.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Wicked Woodpecker of West on March 10, 2021, 08:02:02 PM
Isn't Canadian pervert a tautology?
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Shasarak on March 10, 2021, 10:04:02 PM
Isn't Canadian pervert a tautology?

Ninja'd
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 18, 2021, 05:31:50 PM
Double Post.
Title: Re: D&D is selling great, why not sell it now?
Post by: Jaeger on March 18, 2021, 06:03:59 PM
D&D had a lot of ad hoc thrown fantasy bullshit. Calling it a lore is a travesty.
It was also mostly - do your own shit toolbook - setting books were not necessary to play a game.

Yes D&D “Lore” for D&D settings like Forgotten Realms etc, is ass.

I mean you don’t need to go full Tolkien and create your own languages when you world build. But some worldbuilding with internal consistency and verisimilitude should be attempted at some point.

But maybe that’s for a different thread.


Primo there was never something like D&D setting. There were D&D associated settings. Some of which - like Faerun were quite woke in hippy way from the get go. …

D&D always had lore bits from many sources thrown in.

And a setting (Greyhawk) was amongst one of the first supplements released.

Greyhawk was the 3e default setting. Nentir Vale for 4e. 5e has Forgotten Realms as its default setting.

With default settings, some of those setting elements make it into the rule books as in-game lore.


Not to mention - secundo - those settings were usually retconned so much between each editions, that it's one big bullshit anyway. …

The D&D fandom that WOTC is selling to does not seem to care about the retconning BS. They still buy the Forgotten Realm based 5e hardcovers hand over fist.


With a game set in some one firm setting it could be a risk.
In D&D though there is no such thing, and many people play in homebrew settings because D&D is perfectly accustomed to it. …

WOTC does not care about homebrew settings.

They are about creating a shared experience with their house settings so that they can sell supplementary material based on IP they own.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/3e-and-the-feel-of-d-d.667269/

“…Personally, one part of the process I enjoyed was describing the world of D&D in its own terms, rather than referring to real-world history and mythology. When writing roleplaying games, I enjoy helping the player get immersed in the setting, and I always found these references to the real world to be distractions. In the Player’s Handbook, the text and art focused the readers’ imaginations on the D&D experiences, starting with an in-world paragraph to introduce each chapter. “

“But by the time we were working on 3rd Ed, D&D had had such a big impact on fantasy that we basically used D&D as its own source. For example, 2E took monks out of the Player’s Handbook, in part because martial artist monks have no real place in medieval fantasy. We put them back in because monks sure have a place in D&D fantasy. The same goes for gnomes. The 3E gnome is there because the gnome was well-established in D&D lore,…”

“The gods in 2E were generic, such as the god of strength. We pulled in the Greyhawk deities so we could use proper names and specific holy symbols that were part of the D&D heritage. We knew that plenty of Dungeon Masters would create their own worlds and deities, as I did for my home campaign, but the Greyhawk deities made the game feel more connected to its own roots. They also helped us give players a unified starting point, which was part of Ryan Dancey’s plan to bring the D&D audience back to a shared experience.”
 
 “We were fortunate that by 2000 D&D had such a strong legacy that it could stand on its own without reference to Earth history or mythology. One reason that fans were willing to accept sweeping changes to the rules was that 3E felt more like D&D than 2nd Edition had.”

So there is D&D lore.

It may be crap, but it is there.

The majority of D&D's audience does pay attention to the lore and WOTC publishes accordingly.

They have put out a lot of hardback books set in the FR.

I would guess that neither you nor I are part of their target audience.