what are the resources/relationships needed to sell an RPG

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Thu Aug 09, 2012 6:34 pm

and then you too, can screw the pooch so hard that you go bankrupt in the space of 3 years, about 10 years later.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Aug 09, 2012 7:11 pm

Schwarzkopf wrote:Have you worked as a freelancer? I think Frank or Bobby could attest to this but the contacts you're making as a freelancer...*sigh*

It's probably easier to make contacts when you're working with a smaller publisher rather than a "major" one; if it's a one man operation, then you have a contact with 100% of the company!

The sequence that I see nowadays goes something like:
[*]Write 3rd party PDF-only material for another small company (distributed through Paizo or DriveThruRPG or both).
[*]Write your own 3rd party PDF-only material.
[*]Get enough feedback from your fans (possibly via Kickstarter) to come out with your own book (possibly print-on-demand).
[*]If your first book is successful, keep churning out new books until people lose interest.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 6:41 am

I like how Rein*Hagen "independently" got the idea for his Vampire game on the drive to the game show that launched the first Ravenloft box set.

"Why aren't they letting you play the Vampire in their story where the Vampire is the protagonist?" Seems a slightly more realistic insight.

Oh, and these days being a prolific and insightful blogger seems to be a good alternative to publishing a wide-ranging fanzine for getting your foot in the door, noting there was a huge number of tiny fanzines out there in the 80's that didn't become White Wolf or Games Workshop, as there will be many bloggers (and bboard critics) work years for nothing.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 7:38 am

tussock wrote:I like how Rein*Hagen "independently" got the idea for his Vampire game on the drive to the game show that launched the first Ravenloft box set.

The story is actually way weirder. He had already been making lame noises about playing wizards and vampires in the modern day, he just happened to be going to Gencon in a carpool with the guys who were making Shadowrun. And that is why Vampire: the Masquerade seems like its mechanics are ripoffs of SR but with d10s instead of d6s. That's literally what it is.

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 8:11 am

So, did he rip off a shitty early edition of Shadowrun, or did he rip Shadowrun off and then decide to also make it shit?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 10, 2012 3:33 pm

Koumei wrote:So, did he rip off a shitty early edition of Shadowrun, or did he rip Shadowrun off and then decide to also make it shit?

A little bit of both. Shadowrun's original mechanics were innovative and exciting when I was 10 years old, but really they were pretty damn terrible. People rolled dice pools in the 4-6 range against target numbers in the 5-12 range, which would have meant that no one ever succeeded at anything, except they were also handing out free successes literally with fashionable clothing, so the whole die-rolling mechanic was mostly a side show. Also they really wanted you to spend XPs to modify die rolls in-game.

But for all that, it was still a better and more coherent system than Vampire was. Mostly because it was actually written to be like that instead of starting life as a "roll a d10 and add modifiers" game that got clumsily converted into a dice pool system at the last moment before publication.

-Username17