Actually, the WEG d6 Star Wars game brought the franchise back from the dead. Lucas didn't realise how popular Star Wars was until the RPG hit it big and he hired Tim Zahn to do the Thrawn Trilogy.

Quote from: jeff37923;686914Actually, the WEG d6 Star Wars game brought the franchise back from the dead. Lucas didn't realise how popular Star Wars was until the RPG hit it big and he hired Tim Zahn to do the Thrawn Trilogy.

What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

Jason is a bit guilty of talking using his own invented jargon when he goes on about game structures, but having read the (long) series of essays he wrote on the topic I think there's some good observations at the centre of it all.

Quote from: Mistwell;686926What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Watch it, you're starting to sound like Storygame Swine.

It's heresy on this site, but one of the reasons a lot of STGs are so popular is that they come with baked-in, pick-up-and-play scenario structures. These are often tied to specific scenarios, but not always.

I've said it before, but: When D&D had a game structure and character creation that allowed it to be picked up and played as easily as a board game or card game, it was memetically viral and spread rapidly to new players. The further away it (and the rest of the RPG industry) has moved from that game structure, the less memetically viral the game has become and the harder it has become for new players to start playing.

GenCon provides an excellent example of this: A lot of people ask why indie storytelling games have an event like Games on Demand and RPGs don't. It's because the vast majority of games being played in Games on Demand are literally "pick up a copy of the game and run it".

Anecdote from my own gaming table: Tonight I'm running Lady Blackbird. The process for that is literally "read the rulebook and then play". I can get an equivalent experience with OD&D, but only because I've developed an open table for it. Meanwhile, I'm also in the middle of really struggling to figure out how to make an open table structure work for Eclipse Phase because EP, like most RPGs, is so horribly unsuited to anything except dedicated, long-term play.

Quote from: robiswrong;686908Organizationally, I think Encounters was the right idea.  I'm just not sold that a linear series of combats is really the best way to highlight the game.

There are two structural problems that lead to this problem:

First, combat is massively time-consuming in 4E. Run a couple of combat encounters and that's your gaming session. This makes it really, really difficult to design scenarios that aren't just a linear series of combats. (This is a problem I discuss here at greater length.) Even if there's other stuff happening, the amount of time chewed up by combat causes the perception of combat to overwhelm everything else.

Second, every chunk of an Encounters arc needs to end at the same place and in roughly the same way so that if the players come back next week and end up playing with a different group there will still be comprehensible continuity. This can be very limiting in. (But I do think there are a lot of ways to give these chunks more interior flexibility while still guaranteeing consistency on entry and exit points.)

Quote from: TristramEvans;686933I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

That's not the same statement.

While it is true (and widely reported) that the WEG sourcebooks were widely treated as a setting bible for the EU as it developed in the late '80s and early '90s, I've never heard anything to suggest that Bantam decided to pick up the Star Wars novel license because of the RPG's success. Nor have I ever seen anything to suggest that George Lucas was directly involved in the hiring of Timothy Zahn.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686933I have heard that, to the point that eu authors in the 90s were pointed towards the game as a reference source.

Yes, they were pointed towards the game as a reference, that I think is true.  What I had not heard, is that the game caused Lucasfilm to hire Zahn in particular.  Was Zahn previously affiliated with the game and Lucas hired him away from WEG? Was there some indication that the game's success caused the hiring of Zahn to write new books?

Quote from: Mistwell;686926What makes you think it was the game that caused the hiring of Zahn? I'm not saying it didn't happen that way, just not a claim I had heard before.

Don't forget that the Zahn books came out simultaneously with the first Star Wars comics from Dark Horse. There was a big push at the time about both being the first "official" Star Wars material in fifteen years.

Quote from: Mistwell;686937Yes, they were pointed towards the game as a reference, that I think is true.  What I had not heard, is that the game caused Lucasfilm to hire Zahn in particular.  Was Zahn previously affiliated with the game and Lucas hired him away from WEG? Was there some indication that the game's success caused the hiring of Zahn to write new books?

I don't have a reliable source on that, this info comes from interviews I read in the 90s, possib in Wizard

Quote from: Piestrio;686893That's my impression as well. At some point then the fadishness started wearing off in the mid-late 80's the industry, lead by TSR, decided to respond by doubling down on the hardcore fans.

Which kept them afloat but also alienated casual gamers.

Now we're living in that world and I fear that most of us, and especially the folks in charge, have very little to no conception of a 'casual' gamer and what it would take to get them back.

To carry your metaphor a little further we've been eating seed corn for so long we forgot how to plant it.

Yup agree completely. Over the last year I`ve run 13 one hour DnD sessions for my students and I think they've taught me a few things about this. I'll write up a long essay about this soonish.

Quote from: Grymbok;686928Jason is a bit guilty of talking using his own invented jargon when he goes on about game structures, but having read the (long) series of essays he wrote on the topic I think there's some good observations at the centre of it all.

I agree, actually.  The snark wasn't even really directed at him, necessarily.  It was more directed at the idea that any talk about structure is pointless, etc. - which is often made by people that simply assume the structure they're familiar with.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686935It's heresy on this site, but one of the reasons a lot of STGs are so popular is that they come with baked-in, pick-up-and-play scenario structures. These are often tied to specific scenarios, but not always.

... big snip ...

Agreed 100%.  As I said above, a lot of times people don't even seem to see the structure they're using.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;686935There are two structural problems that lead to this problem:

Totally agreed and understood.  I still think that the linear nature may do more to turn people off than anything.

Quote from: SineNomine;686692I've been thinking about this a great deal lately, myself, because I think something drastic has happened to RPGs in the same way as it's happened to conventional publishers. Publishers now have the power to build an immortal backlist.

For the first time in the hobby, it is theoretically possible to have a publisher's entire corpus made easily available to a buyer. You can use OBS to buy every Sine Nomine book ever published just as easily as you can use it to buy the most recent release. Watching my sales numbers, I see it often- some new guy downloads Stars Without Number, and then the next day he's back buying half a dozen books. He doesn't need to worry about whether they're on the FLGS shelves or finding them on ebay, he just clicks the button and gets his book from a reliable, well-known POD printer.

RPGs are essentially impulse purchases to the most financially remunerative chunk of the market. $20 to these customers is something they drop on a whim. If they hear about something, if they notice something on the website, and they can get a $9.99 PDF of the book, they'll hit it just out of idle curiosity. When your entire backlist is sitting right there in front of them, you have a much better chance of making that sale.

Now, combine that immortal backlist with the "do it cheap" publishing ethos. One guy or a small handful of collaborators will put together the game, farm out any art or design work they can't perform themselves, and then pitch it with little to no marketing. These games do not even exist as far as most FLGSes are concerned, let alone mass-market outlets. The only place they[ll ever get sold is through the author's website, OBS, and maybe a few secondary online outlets. Gross sales will be tiny compared to even the minor releases of the bigger publishers. But it's not gross sales that defines your profit- it's gross sales less expenses. Not paying health insurance? That's a saving. Settling for small publisher b/w art and production? That's a saving. Doing your own layout and editing? Saving. By the time you pare your overhead down to the bare essentials and make some compromises you'd rather not make, you can get a product out the door at a ridiculously low cost.

I'll take two of my own products as examples here. I published Skyward Steel around January of 2011. I did all the layout myself in InDesign and shelled out about $50 on stock art for the interior. As of today, the net profits on it are $3,817.81 before taxes. For my my recent campaign book, Suns of Gold, I spent the heftier sum of $300 or so for the art. I released it in early June this year and my profit on it so far has been $2,184.55. These numbers are not going to get me to quit my day job, but they're not trivial, either. And they're not my only products. So far this year I've moved $30K gross sales worth of product, and $21K of that was product with an initial release before January 1st of this year. Hell, my backlist paid off my student loans this year.

So I keep building my backlist, doing callbacks with fresh product and trying to keep as much of it alive and useful to new buyers as I can. The only way I run out of buyers is if I manage to saturate the entire game-buying market with my material, with no new influx of curious buyers or first-time readers. And I have precisely zero inventory or fulfillment costs- that warehouse full of unsalable late-era TSR stuff? Never going to happen to people like me. That's an entire huge chunk of the old industry that simply does not apply to me.

I think it's too early to tell if the "live on your backlist" model is going to be long-term viable, but it seems to be pretty hot with a lot of old publishers on OBS right now. And as it stands now, counting only my after-tax net game income, I'm still making more than the federal poverty level, which is a positive triumph by writer/musician/artist standards. What are those numbers going to look like after another three years of publishing, when my backlist is theoretically three times as large?

Hear, hear for hard data!  Thank you for sharing.  As a successful PDF/POD Publisher, it is illuminating to to hear your thoughts and experiences.  One reason I set up the freedndart site was for folks like you (there is much more public domain art out there as well, but no time to cleanup/transfer/and upload atm).

Cheers

Quote from: Teazia;686967Hear, hear for hard data!  Thank you for sharing.  As a successful PDF/POD Publisher, it is illuminating to to hear your thoughts and experiences.  One reason I set up the freedndart site was for folks like you (there is much more public domain art out there as well, but no time to cleanup/transfer/and upload atm).

Cheers

And considering how much of Arcana Rising's art is going to be from your galleries, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your collection is practically tailormade for the 'back to folklore' folks like myself.

Give away the rules. The content is what's valuable, so you sell that instead; it doesn't matter if you outline how to have one man attack or injure another man if they don't also have any weapons (or ratings for unarmed attacks) to employ those rules and give them context.  It doesn't matter if you give away rules for diplomacy if there are no NPCs to interact with; rules for government or trade are nothing without an environment to give them context.  Content has value; rules do not.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;687241Content has value; rules do not.

I mostly agree but rules do have some value, as the sales of settingless systems recently testify. Just not nearly as much as a good compelling setting, which is very difficult to come up with and bring to life.

Different takes on manelfdwarfkender just aren't going to cut it any more, actual imagination and vision must be employed in copious quantities combined with ill defined skills like writing ability and a keen eye for the epic.

Quote from: The Traveller;687248I mostly agree but rules do have some value, as the sales of settingless systems recently testify. Just not nearly as much as a good compelling setting, which is very difficult to come up with and bring to life.

Different takes on manelfdwarfkender just aren't going to cut it any more, actual imagination and vision must be employed in copious quantities combined with ill defined skills like writing ability and a keen eye for the epic.

Crunch and fluff support each other.  Any setting with crunch written to support that setting-specific logic is an intrinsically better gaming product, all other things being equal.