Quote from: David Johansen;647031Now, if you wanted a game to spike in sales and replace D&D and happened to be George RR Martin you probably could do it.  He's a GURPS fan but let's stay system agnostic on this.  I'm not sure what the current liscencing deals are but assuming he's good with the rules, he could stick his name and Game of Thrones on a paperback sized, ten dollar rule book and insist book stores stock it right next to his novels.

There's already a Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Well produced by Green Ronin, and reasonably well received (it won a 2009 Ennie). But it hasn't set the RPG world on fire, let alone drawn in a bunch of new players.

Let's face it - D&D is RPGs to a big part of the game community. And if something does come along to replace it, the game won't be anything at all like D&D. It will be something along the lines of a collaborative urban fantasy fanfic carried out online. No pen and paper tabletop game is going to truly rival D&D until the tabletop hobby decline even further into an amateur cottage industry akin to hex and counter wargames. At that point we'll be talking sales figures of 2,000 versus 1,500 - king of the anthill.

Quote from: Sommerjon;647008Is no one allowed to speculate anymore?

Are we not allowed to take any kind of position with 5e?

Sure, just don't speak for everyone else, and declare it as fact.

I know there's a Song of Fire and Ice rpg already.  I was talking about a specific product model to get a sales spike.  From that spike if properly supported you might get a continuing market to rival D&D.  I'm not sure it would work.  More over, I'm not sure the product model could make money.  It's a lot easier to get sales if you're willing to lose a lot of money.  What I am sure of is that the Game of Thrones fan base is much larger than the entire rpg market.  Of course, if I were GRRM I'd bring out a retroclone in a box with tonnes of miniatures but if GRRM was GRRM we can conclusively say he wouldn't.  

I'm not so sure you couldn't replace D&D with a paper and pencil rpg but I am sure you would have to go outside of the existing rpg market and to do so.  Within the existing market and business model nothing will ever replace D&D.

As someone already mentioned, Numenera is totally what Spinachcat is looking for. I would say that it qualifies having taken advantage of the WotC fallow time.

Didn't it have the biggest tabletop rpg Kickstarter ever last year? $517k. Huge numbers for a game no one had heard of even a few months before. I'm betting it sells decently when it's published this summer due in no small part to all that amazing art.

Quote from: Dimitrios;647027I think a big way in which 4e might hurt WotC is that it may be the last edition that tons of people (like me) went out and bought sight unseen simply because it was the new edition of D&D.

I was an auto-sell for 4e, as I was for every previous edition. This time around I'm not.

If there are lots of folks like me out there, I think that might hurt.

That's a good point. 4e was in my case the very first edition of D&D that I DIDN'T buy "sight unseen" (or indeed at all); but I suspect more people followed your pattern than mine, based on what the pre-order sellout success of 4e was, and then became bitterly disappointed, based on what later sales were like.

And yes, I suspect that means a lot of people will need to carefully look at 5e BEFORE just buying it.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;647280That's a good point. 4e was in my case the very first edition of D&D that I DIDN'T buy "sight unseen" (or indeed at all); but I suspect more people followed your pattern than mine, based on what the pre-order sellout success of 4e was, and then became bitterly disappointed, based on what later sales were like.

And yes, I suspect that means a lot of people will need to carefully look at 5e BEFORE just buying it.

I was one of those "sight unseen" buyers of 4E, largely due to finding a group I was willing to play a regular weekly game with.

This time around for 5E/Next, it won't be "sight unseen" anymore.  (Especially if I don't come across any "acceptable" local gaming groups playing it).

I was a double schmuck for 4E: I picked up Keep on the Borderlands, thought "Huh, this is locked to the grid and focused almost entirely on tactical miniatures skirmish battles - I guess since this is the intro adventure they pitched it like that to ease people into less structured stuff." Then I got the main rulebooks and NOPE, it really was grids all the way down.

Quote from: RPGPundit;647280That's a good point. 4e was in my case the very first edition of D&D that I DIDN'T buy "sight unseen" (or indeed at all);

RPGPundit

4e is the only edition I don't own a single product of.  I fear 5e will remedy that.

Quote from: Haffrung;647037There's already a Song of Ice and Fire RPG. Well produced by Green Ronin, and reasonably well received (it won a 2009 Ennie). But it hasn't set the RPG world on fire, let alone drawn in a bunch of new players.

"A Game of Thrones" was released by Guardians of Order before that, in 2005. So yeah George's incestous, misery porn, boring/dont get anything done books are not gonna bring the kids/players in.

That's why I was very specific about the format, marketing, and content.  A $10 paperback with a short story not appearing anywhere else.  Even then I'm fairly sure a side story novel by GRRM would make more money.  It's just that rpg sales are so low that a failure in another market might be considered a break away hit by rpg standards.

RPGs aren't about "telling stories".

No but selling books is.

Actually I disagree to an extent.  An rpg campaign has a beginning, middle, and end and is composed of a series of events that are mostly narrative in nature even if you do use miniatures.  And rpgs are most certainly ficticious.

What rpgs don't do or at least shouldn't do is conform to the formulaic modern story structure in to more than a passing glance.  A piece of fiction in the English Literature class sense is like a single line passing through a maze from the beginning to the end.  An rpg campaign is like a scribble on top of a maze that frequently goes off the page and makes holes in the paper.

That doesn't mean it's not a story.

Quote from: David Johansen;647610That doesn't mean it's not a story.

By that definition a commentator's transcript of a game of golf is a story. What you do with the information after the game is done is your own business, the game itself has little or nothing to do with telling stories. A record of an RPG campaign is not an RPG game.

Quote from: S'mon;645702What did they do to push 4e to non-gamers? Genuine question, I really have no idea what if any marketing there was to non-gamers?

From what I saw, there were television commercials which aired during adult Swim, SyFy, YouTube and other "geek" markets. I think it premiered on MTV primetime.

They ran print-ads in pretty much every issue of every comic book known to man.

For release, they had standee displays in every big-box bookstore, and probably in other retail as well.

The "basic" game was released into every major retailer i.e. Wal-Mart, Toys R Us.

They did this again with the D&D Essentials Red Box. minus the TV commercials.  

They pushed the crap out of that product.

Quote from: KrakaJak;647638They pushed the crap out of that product.

And if the product wasn't crap, they might have succeeded.