Cheap Labor is Too Expensive

[DeadlyReed]

How about the Returners FF RPG?

[TavishArtair]

The Returners Final Fantasy RPG is miserable tripe. I would recommend BESM before it, and BESM is a bad system that my entire gaming group quit ever attempting to play again.

[Vnonymous]

Returners is absolutely terrible.

It is a confusing mess of imbalance, bad design, not letting you play iconic characters and general all around shittiness.

And if you're going to make a FFRPG, I think that you're best off basing it on the Crystal Chronicles series.

[Username17]

I've always wondered...

Considering how absurdly profitable it can be to make tabletop games (even though the actual ceiling for these games are low) I've always wondered why some multimillionaire type with a wad of Benjamins to burn doesn't try to finance a system from scratch. I mean, sure, if you're Hasbro you wouldn't even wipe your ass with Wizards of the Coast but if you were some guy who had about 2 million dollars to burn why wouldn't you hire a group of top-shelf artists, contact some ultra-nerds, and even do some focus group research to see what your audience would like in an RPG and then produce that? The risk is low and the payoff is pretty large. You could even do something swanky like produce leatherbound books that actually look like tomes and fill up every page with ridiculously detailed artwork.

It's really not ridiculously profitable by any means. If you don't have name recognition, it's actually hard as hell to sell a new game.

Getting your group to learn a whole new system is hard. Not so much because learning the system is hard, but because everyone probably already has a favorite system and you have to go through the trouble of convincing them why they should switch.

There is a difference between margins and total profits. The margins on printing and selling books appear to be pretty damn good. The volumes are really quite small. As a way to turn money into more money, it's pretty decent. But as a way to turn lots of money into more money it is pretty damn limited.

-Username17

[Gelare]

Of course, to turn a money into more money, you need to make sure the game you're making is one that people will actually buy once it's printed. How do you make sure of that?

[Lago PARANOIA]

How do you make sure of that?

Okay, like with my Kickass Marketing Campaign threads, I'm just going to go into the generic aspects. I do have more specific suggestions, but these are universal.

But the tl;dr answer to your question: You can either get a license that everyone wants or you can make your book insanely attractive either through its artwork or because of its written content.

As Koba astutely pointed out, people don't want to slog through 200+ pages of an RPG book before they get to play. So a bunch of effort needs to go into actually making the rules fun to read--or at least not boring. Seriously, the people who come up with the rules do not have to be the same people as those who write them. Technical writers exist for a reason and a good one is more than worth their salt.

Artwork is also a concern that often gets overlooked. The 2nd and 3rd Edition rulesbook looked REALLY good for its time, but frankly they're just not up to snuff nowadays. Rulesbooks in the future should look like artbooks. The 4E core books (not so much the sourcebooks) were a step in the right direction. If I was going to do it over again I would have doubled the artwork and minimized the white space. Characters cutouts on whitespace need to go for good; everything should be on a background. I don't know why 4E went with plain text on white, it just doesn't look as good as 3E's slightly parchmented looks.

I don't even have to say that everything should be in color. I know color pictures are expensive (even though they're getting less so nowadays) but this shouldn't even be in question. No RPG company should even think about going to the presses with B&W books these days.

Advertising and endorsements help a whole bunch, too. Like I've said many times before, the Penny Arcade advertisement was pure gold. Unfortunately, the economy of tabletop RPGs are quite small so the idea of plopping down millions of dollars for an advertising blitz on, say, Gamefaqs is right out. Probably the best you're going to do as far as that goes is release the next Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter Nights.


As far as licensing goes, you can either go with the hottest new franchise on the block or an oldie-but-goldie like Star Wars or Final Fantasy. The problem with the former is that some franchises have a shelf life that can be killed by things not even your fault. The Avatar fandom was huge in its heyday, but it's only a footnote now because it only ran for three seasons and that fucking movie is probably going to kill it as dead as Disco. If you're licensing a flash-in-the-pan franchise, you should focus on making one kickass book and tie it to some other system (d20) so that people will have somewhere to go after the bottom for the license falls out. If you're going for a long-runner, like, say, Star Trek or Marvel Comics you don't have to be so hasty with production.

What you don't want to do is select a franchise that is based on an industry that hurts tabletop gaming. Releasing that World of Warcraft RPG would have failed miserably if it wasn't released during 3.5E D&D's peak. Unless you're positive that you have the most awesome RPG in the world you should not do that; why would someone play a World of Warcraft wannabe when they could play the real thing for less money?

This necessarily means that you should shy away from doing RPGs that are still ongoing. Releasing a tabletop game that's based on Final Fantasy 6 or Tactics is a good idea; releasing a tabletop game that's based on Final Fantasy XI is a bad one. Releasing a tabletop game that's based on Disney canon could be a good idea, releasing one that's based on Kingdom Hearts (even if you could get the licenses) is a bad one.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Seriously, no more character cutouts on white space. Mouseguard has inferior artwork to 4E but the artwork layout in that game LOOKS better because they use backgrounds more often.

[FatR]

Artwork is also a concern that often gets overlooked. The 2nd and 3rd Edition rulesbook looked REALLY good for its time, but frankly they're just not up to snuff nowadays. Rulesbooks in the future should look like artbooks. The 4E core books (not so much the sourcebooks) were a step in the right direction. If I was going to do it over again I would have doubled the artwork and minimized the white space. Characters cutouts on whitespace need to go for good; everything should be on a background. I don't know why 4E went with plain text on white, it just doesn't look as good as 3E's slightly parchmented looks.

I think 4E art is kinda "meh". Yes, the quality of the pictures is higher and there is less abject art failure, but all cool art concepts are borrowed from 3E and all new concepts are not cool.

Otherwise, very true. I knew, that lack of good art was one of the main reasons I never bought into any third-party DnD product. Similarly, art was a big unselling point for nWoD and Mutants and Masterminds for me, which proves that you not only need to pick an artistic direction (something in which many RPG fail), you also need to choose direction that doesn't suck ass.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm increasingly becoming of the opinion that RPG with sufficient cheddar should permanently hire a technical writer on-staff.

While on these forums we are fucked blessed to have people (Koumei, FrankTrollman, K, Josh, etc.) who can write up good mechanics and write good prose, the skillsets don't tend to overlap too much. Granted, writing good mechanics is harder than writing good prose as I can think of several writers good at the latter but bad at the former, but not the other way around.

But what this means is that the people responsible for coming up with rules should remain focused on coming up with rules. When they get their draft going (which will consist of completed mechanics but unfinalized prose) they give their script to a technical writer who makes it all engaging.


My other thing is... what's the marginal cost on getting good writers on your staff? Considering how not-lucrative RPG writing is from a monetary standpoint, you'd think that the people who would do these things for a living (no offense) would either be the bottom of the barrel for these skills compared to the general market or doing it as a labor of love.

But if you increase the amount of money that you're willing to pay writers, would you be able to increase the quality of talent knocking at your doorstep? For example, take Dragon and Dungeon magazine content. Right now it's sort of used as a feeder for RPG writing, where people who show talent get promoted for writing for big books. So if you increased the internal competition while also increasing the payout, wouldn't you eventually start attracting better writers?