The Gaming Den

Blasted wrote: Is the cost of decent art that high? Could you get away with a single cover piece and then a small series of lesser pieces in the book?
I'm sure half an hour on deviantart could tell me the cost, but I'm not sure I care.

In case you do care, the general price for good art is $1-2K for full-color pieces, up to $5K for something nice enough for a cover. Pen or pencil drawings are around $50-$200 each.

Basically, too expensive for anyone who is just an enthusiast.

There is a reason why "concept artist" is an internal job at big AAA video game companies and not a freelance gig, and that reason is cost-savings.

On prince points for entry products:

Agreed with 5e being the deep end of that regression.

However, in the German market, you can currently buy a softcover version of the Player's Handbook for
- Shadowrun 5
- Earthdawn 4
- Call of Cthulu 4

with some of them in full colour and clocking in at 400 pages or more.

And they cost 10 Euros, which is about 12 dollars.

The publishers did a mass print run to cut down on unit cost. And the trick how to get it down to 10 Euros is to reduce paper size. Has been favourably reviewed so far (smaller print is still legible etc.), and it's a return of sorts to the idea of starting a new edition with a major loss leader.

Let's see where things go from here.

PS I haven't bought any of the these products, since I'm not interested in those editions, so I can't contribute with personal experience on them.

Blasted wrote:
Something that's become very apparent is that the boardgame community (such as BGG et. al.) don't put up with crap rules.

I guess you and I have very different definitions of "crap rules" then.

But as far as I know: Monopoly is still at the top of those charts. Hasbro can't even decide which version of challenge is the actual one in Scrabble. You only get to see discards instantaneously in Dominion. And you still have to make strategic decisions without knowing anybody's score in Ticket to Ride. At least the euro-snobs at BGG have finally grown the sense to disdain Munchkin, although it "the community" still buys enough that Munchkin continues to be a sales leader for Steve Jackson Games.

Blasted wrote:Most games don't have a well written or well imagined setting. Taking a look at the roll20 Q3 report...

Remember the basis of this thread?

FrankTrollman wrote:The products we have out right now are shoddy, bloated, unfinished, and poorly marketed. If Ford Motors decided to stop advertising and make rickety Model Ts with a skeleton crew, we wouldn't be surprised if their sales tanked.

Sad as it is, we are in a dark age of role playing because the industry is producing garbage that people don't want to buy.

Why are you talking about failing products as though that's relevant to revitalizing the dying industry? How is bringing up Star Wars and Warhammer relevant to a new entrant to the market when those IPs are already licensed to other companies right now? Do you really think using a licensed IP is free, financially or creatively? Have you done any cursory due diligence on the logistics and drawbacks of using licensed IPs?

RE: TTRPG game complexity, way to move goalposts from games of the TTRPG heyday to Bear World. Bravo. Bear World has failed to revitalize the industry and was never part of its previous success; don't hold games like it up as though they're relevant to the discussion. Try comparing D&D 3.X with Descent instead and see how well your assertion holds up.

RE: Adventures: Try doing some due diligence on how the TTRPG ecosystem works. If you don't understand the importance of GMs and catering to them, you have no chance of contributing to anything that will revitalize the TTRPG market.

Josh_Kablack wrote: But as far as I know: Monopoly is still at the top of those charts. Hasbro can't even decide which version of challenge is the actual one in Scrabble. You only get to see discards instantaneously in Dominion. And you still have to make strategic decisions without knowing anybody's score in Ticket to Ride. At least the euro-snobs at BGG have finally grown the sense to disdain Munchkin, although it "the community" still buys enough that Munchkin continues to be a sales leader for Steve Jackson Games.

There are a ton of board games that have awful rulebooks or just awful rules in general, and they cover for the lack of mechanical precision with a focus of theme, miniatures, or both. The rules for Betrayal at the House on the Hill are fraught with ambiguity and imprecise descriptions, but the point of the game is a thematic experience.

I would argue that imperfect information like not knowing exactly what other players' scores are in Ticket to Ride is intentional and thus not an issue of a poor ruleset. If it described certain tickets that were publicly visible, but others that weren't, and those tickets weren't distinguishable by any means other than guessing by flavor, that would be a bad ruleset.

Things like not being able to look through your Dominion discard pile are more unfortunate choices in rules than they are bad, necessarily. It's a similar issue in Small World, where everyone's coins are hidden information, but you start with a certain amount and it's public whenever you gain an amount of coins, so if you really care you can count. It's not poorly written or defined rules, they're just annoying to work with because it only makes sense from a meta perspective (it speeds up gameplay so people aren't constantly counting cards/points every turn).

You can argue that they're inelegant solutions, but I don't think they're necessarily bad or poorly written.

RE: Adventures: Try doing some due diligence on how the TTRPG ecosystem works. If you don't understand the importance of GMs and catering to them, you have no chance of contributing to anything that will revitalize the TTRPG market.

What would you say are good examples of RPG's (new or old) that marketed to the GM well?

Windjammer wrote:- Call of Cthulu 4

Seriously? The latest edition is seventh. 4th edition literally came out in the 1980s.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

Windjammer wrote:- Call of Cthulu 4

Seriously? The latest edition is seventh. 4th edition literally came out in the 1980s.

-Username17

german editions were numbered differently, because there were quite a few different publishers. the current one started over in 1999 with their 1st edition, which was original 5.5(?). german 3rd was the original 6th.

apparently they stopped doing that with the new version, so german editions jumped from 3rd to 7th with nothing in between.

that might explain windjammer's "confusion".

Yes indeed. Thanks to shlominus for clearing this up.

The next big (?) releases in rpg land are:
-A new edition of Rolemaster

-The Dark Eye, not a peep about this from the publisher Ulisses since august and although the finished product is a clear improvement* on the Beta, it still is a very standard fantasy rpg. Worse it is still DSA and it is very bloated. The basic book is a massive 414 pages and covers less territory than the D&D 5 phb, which is 320 pages.

-An English edition of Aquelarre... Maybe it will be big with Latino's, in the same way vampire was big with Goths?



*That is to say, I see a lot of improvement, the gearheads on this site might asses it differently.

Goths is a scene you choose.

Wulfbanes wrote:Goths is a scene you choose.

That was a deliberate bad comparison, going for comedic effect.

I actually do think that board game fans are generally a bit less tolerant of contradictory rules than role players. Board games tend to be treated as puzzles or competitions whereas roleplaying is closer to play acting and DIY creative hobbies. With board games there isn't much you can change before people stop calling your game chess. That's a way different situation than with RPGs, a hobby in which you'll see people sincerely defending books that are 95% crap on the grounds that they were still able to find a scrap of inspiration that they were able to Frankenstein into their homebrew.

Daniel wrote: -An English edition of Aquelarre... Maybe it will be big with Latino'

Something big with Latinos would be a Saint Seiya or Dragon Ball tRPG.

Wulfbanes wrote:Goths is a scene you choose. :nonono:

<somebody has to>
"I did not choose the Goth-Life, the Goth-Life chose me!"
</somebody had to>

OgreBattle wrote:Something big with Latinos would be a Saint Seiya or Dragon Ball tRPG.

Back in the day, I wrote a SS book for a system written by Ewen Cluney that was based on WW's Street Fighter game. Granted, it's around 20 years old and probably nothing to be proud of.

My second meatspace table tried the DB-Z game written by Bird Studio, which was a steaming pile of crap and one of the many proofs that pop music and videogames aren't the only areas where the Japanese got permanently stuck in the 80s.

MGuy wrote:Why HASN'T anyone tried to do a cartoon tie in? That kind of exposure really, really would help the industry. Vin Diesal being talked to about playing in some kind of D_D movie helps a bit but nothing captures the young people like cartoons. I believe that's why starwars has like what, 3 maybe, 4 animated SW series under their belt now? I know the thing that even got me to TRY the game was an episode of Dexter's Lab and because I got into it a number of my friends did and a number of their friends did.

You know, I told someone this week I play D&D and she told me she did know the D&D cartoon, but did not know that D&D is a game. In fact, nobody here seems to know what ttrpgs are (even though quite a few know the D&D cartoon).

Windjammer wrote:On prince points for entry products:

Agreed with 5e being the deep end of that regression.

However, in the German market, you can currently buy a softcover version of the Player's Handbook for
- Shadowrun 5
- Earthdawn 4
- Call of Cthulu 4

with some of them in full colour and clocking in at 400 pages or more.

And they cost 10 Euros, which is about 12 dollars.

The publishers did a mass print run to cut down on unit cost. And the trick how to get it down to 10 Euros is to reduce paper size. Has been favourably reviewed so far (smaller print is still legible etc.), and it's a return of sorts to the idea of starting a new edition with a major loss leader.

Let's see where things go from here.

This prompted me to take a look at local online web-shops. (Amazon or something is a no-go here, since it requires you to pay with a credit-card)

Most popular shadowrun product here is the 5e German softcover (12 euro) (Keep in mind, most people only got 3 years of German in high school and never use it otherwise)
The English version is a hardcover: 69 Euro

A Shadowrun and a new Battletech Cartoon . .
Or hell, outsource it and make it anime <.<
THAT would be a sweet thing!

I was under the impression that the SR video games already generate a lot of interest among people new to TTRPGs. I don't have robust, hard numbers on that, but when you spend some time hanging out on r/shadowrun, you see posts from people just getting into SR due to the video games all the time, and most of them are completely new to tabletop gaming. I guess that would be a good thing if they wouldn't all end up buying SR5.

SR's problem right now isn't lack of publicity; Shadowrun Returns probably solved that in the easiest way possible.
No, the problem is that people who get curious about this game get hit over the head with an edition that's geared completely towards grognards and does jack shit to explain the lore to someone new to the line.
SR4 already suffered from developers not getting that their metaplot exposition was indecipherable to people unfamiliar with the IP, because everybody writing the damn thing had been playing SR for more than a decade.
Now they do not even pretend to give a single fuck and leave out the entire history section in favor of pages upon pages of crappy fanfiction - in an edition that was launched with heavy emphasis on cross-platform promotion to draw in newcomers. And it reflects in the posts of people getting into the game just now. The number one concern among them isn't how to get a grip on the mess that is SR5 mechanics (although bringing back priority chargen to appease the retro crowd sure as hell doesn't help), it's that people who get into this game because they think the setting is fun and atmospheric and an ideal place for murderhobo fantasies are totally left in the dark about what the hell is actually going on in that setting.

To make matters worse, the usual advice to them is to go and buy the 6th World Almanach.

One thing that would help the rpg industry imensely, I think, is making games quicker to assemble and run.

In your average rpg you spend 4 hours reading a 300 pages book, then create a character in 1 hour and a half, and then play a story arc in 2 or 3 sessions of 4 hours each. Nowadays your average teenager will have given up in a tenth of that time.

RPGs must be simpler, lighter and faster. They must be "pick-and-play" enabled. And its not a difficult thing to do, really, as some games already managed to pull this out in a way or another (see Gamma World 4e, Apoc/Dungeon World, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, etc). Its just a matter of the Powers that Be focusing their business to such a model instead of trying to please the bearded grognards.

The point is having "pick-and-play" games that also reward long term gaming if players so want. So forget the kind of laser-focused designed like Dogs in the Vineyard. I think Gamma World 4e was the perfect model, as it presented a lush product in a package full of cool bits and extras, that was simple and fast to start playing but also accomodated long-term and future expansions easily.

Also, some games out there already propose 1 story arc per session (Shinobigami, Blades in the Dark, Marvel Heroic). I think this is also a good move, as it more or less paralells what we see in movies, tv shows and manga/comics, where each episode kind of starts and completes a given issue, thus delivering a faster satisfaction ratio. For this to work, the game must be designed with a more agressive (and meaningful) scene-framing in mind, instead of your traditional slow-paced flow where people roleplaying even taking a crap in the bathroom, or the GM lets the group investigating a dead-end clue for an hour just to "cleverly" surprise everybody at the end and appease its own ego. Its a shift in paradigm, really.

Rasumichin wrote:And it reflects in the posts of people getting into the game [SR5] just now. The number one concern among them isn't how to get a grip on the mess that is SR5 mechanics (although bringing back priority chargen to appease the retro crowd sure as hell doesn't help), it's that people who get into this game because they think the setting is fun and atmospheric and an ideal place for murderhobo fantasies are totally left in the dark about what the hell is actually going on in that setting.

To make matters worse, the usual advice to them is to go and buy the 6th World Almanach.

silva wrote:One thing that would help the rpg industry imensely, I think, is making games quicker to assemble and run.

In your average rpg you spend 4 hours reading a 300 pages book, then create a character in 1 hour and a half, and then play a story arc in 2 or 3 sessions of 4 hours each.

Both good points. The German publisher of Pegasus has a special deal where they sell you 5 core rulebooks (softcover), 1 DM Screen, and (in PDF) a starting scenario for 50 Euros total (under 60 dollars). For relatively mainstream English speaking RPGs, that gets you at most one core rulebook (using the above mentioned metric of 'I don't use a Creditcard so Amazon, Ebay, and Abebooks are dead to me').

Yet the reaction to Pegasus' 'entry deal for RPG groups' is still mixed, because now instead of monetary investment, people discuss the 'buy in' in terms of their spare time to get into this game. By contrast, if I shell out 40 to 50 Euros for a themed boardgame, I could be playing within the hour, and the boardgame expansion market (I looked into Descent 2's this morning) ensures that complexity and product durability are still secured - they just kick in after initial purchase.

brized wrote:Making a decent RPG isn't about the cost of the materials you're printing it on, it's the cost of hiring writers and designers good enough to write a compelling setting to integrate with a playable system and then spend the time playtesting it to make it good.

Counterpoint:

The edition wars: How they were won. 50% revanchism, 50% T&A. 200% a Machiavellian business plan.

Yeah, I should have replied earlier to OgreBattle...right now the only system I'm aware of that does a decent job of catering and marketing to MCs is Pathfinder.

From their adventure paths page:

212 products

They release two full campaigns a year with decent variety and quality. Enough of Rise of the Rune Lords is OGL such that MCs can get started for free and see if the price of the other stuff is worth the savings in time and effort. For any MC or prospective MC, this lowers the barrier of entry and time cost to run a game. More MCs = more players.

RE: titties, yeah, Pathfinder's art direction and quality was the best in the industry when it came out and still is. That and their overall superior marketing are definitely factors in their success. Any new contender looking to revitalize the industry needs equal or greater marketing and art quality, and that still has little to do with the costs of your printing materials compared to board games.

And even with great art and marketing, you need a system that delivers on the promises they make. Thanks to the OGL Paizo was able to modify 3.5 instead of writing their own system. 3.X had a ton of resources put into designing and play testing it, so even though Paizo's changes weren't great, they still had a relatively good system...Good enough for most 3.X players, but too bloated to attract younger audiences to the same degree D&D did for earlier generations. We'll see what happens when they make their own. I'm expecting less success.

Daniel wrote:-The Dark Eye, not a peep about this from the publisher Ulisses since august and although the finished product is a clear improvement* on the Beta, it still is a very standard fantasy rpg. Worse it is still DSA and it is very bloated. The basic book is a massive 414 pages and covers less territory than the D&D 5 phb, which is 320 pages.

Having recently played Dark Eye: Demonomicon, that video game at least made it feel it differentiated itself somewhat as a Dark Fantasy RPG. If you've played that, is none of that really representative of the Dark Eye RPG's at all?

Aryxbez wrote:

Daniel wrote:-The Dark Eye, not a peep about this from the publisher Ulisses since august and although the finished product is a clear improvement* on the Beta, it still is a very standard fantasy rpg. Worse it is still DSA and it is very bloated. The basic book is a massive 414 pages and covers less territory than the D&D 5 phb, which is 320 pages.

Having recently played Dark Eye: Demonomicon, that video game at least made it feel it differentiated itself somewhat as a Dark Fantasy RPG. If you've played that, is none of that really representative of the Dark Eye RPG's at all?

All or most of that is a part of the setting, and it's also actually the part of the setting that received the most attention in the metaplot after it was dropped on the setting's not-Transylvania, not-Mongolia, not-Vietnam and not-Turkey (yes, these places are somehow adjacent to each other in Aventuria).

It's just that the Shadowlands have become vastly unpopular among large parts of the player base because sudden appearance of demon worshipper fiefdoms runs counter to the romantic quaintness that a lot of players traditionally associate with the setting of Aventuria.
Also, a part of the very vocal basket weaver fraction is pissed that their not-Transylvanian dirt farmer PC is now a refugee running from a necromancer army. TDE4 had, without any exaggeration, about 50 kinds of dirt farmer and basket weaver templates that you could actually play. And there's people who actually do that and who want to have adventures like find the baron's missing dog and attend the local dirt farmer's guild potato festival. That focus on low-level play and excruciating description of local cheese and beer varieties obviously doesn't jive well with adventure paths revolving around apocalyptic cut scenes full of undead hordes and mutated sea serpents, particularly not when the undead hordes prevent export of the special kind of raw milk cheese from Warunk on top of chaining the Queen Mother to their torture cathedral (both of these things get about equal space devoted to them in the Warunk section of the Shadowlands sourcebooks).
The rape cults in not-Turkey also didn't help to make the Shadowlands go over well, so they axed these and made them Hellfire Club-style conspiracies instead of not-Slaanesh janissary matriarchs with rapedog demon death squads.

So yes, this dark fantasy stuff is an integral part of TDE lore, but it's a relatively recent addition and they're in the process of toning it down and running an anti-demon reconquista.