Pitch Your D&D Killers

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I think Scholastic could put out a game as part of a tie-in to a mid grade series and potentially do well as they have a captive audience with book fairs in schools. They could get the kids hooked before they are exposed much to other games. The trick is it would have to be good and very simple - playable by 8-10 year olds with no prior rpg experience, yet cool enough that it's not dumped after a year for being a kid game. But not too simple, like some of the early TSR board games.
 
Shinonigami actually came out in some form huh? That Kickstarter was an epic clusterfuck. Not surprising, considering the folks involved, but I am surprised anything was ever released in English. That's a step past Far West I suppose
 
Shinonigami actually came out in some form huh? That Kickstarter was an epic clusterfuck. Not surprising, considering the folks involved, but I am surprised anything was ever release in English. That's a step past Far West I suppose
PDF of the base book came out a good while back and physical of the base book shipped last year

Deluxe included the expansion book into the base book as one book. The expansion book has been in translation/editing for... the last forever.

Granted, I still think there is stuff from Ryuutama they were supposed to translate that never got done either.

I really wish there was more groups that would actually work on Japanese RPG translations, because most of them suffer from being not that great (the official Kamigakari translation was an unholy mess of business), and while the work Kotodama puts out IS good, you'll never know how long it will be before it is ever done.

LionWing (who primarily does translations for Japanese Board Games) did the Picaresque Roman one and it has been REALLY fast and well done. I'm hoping they do more.

(I work for a Japanese company that does international video game publishing, I can't say I've not ever floated the idea of seeing what we could do in the Tabletop RPG realm with translations since we have connections to Kadokawa which is one of the largest book publishers in Japan... but I'll admit it would be an experimental project for us and I'm not sure how seriously we should ever consider it).
 
So... How is Shinonigami? I'm considering grabbing the pdf.
 
Repeat after me. I [insert name] am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG pdf for [xx] days. I will take this one day at a time.
I mean, I don't think it's so bad as long as you're at least READING them.

I'm just not sure what's worse: downloading them and not reading them, or buying them and not downloading them. Because one of those is wasting space on your PC/Google Drive/Whatever.

That's always my argument against people who say that RPG books are underpriced for the value they provide: That's only true if you actually get value from the book.
 
Repeat after me. I [insert name] am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG pdf for [xx] days. I will take this one day at a time.

I only buy PDFs these days, and I handle this by setting a hard monthly budget for myself of what I can buy. Whatever I don't use rolls over so I have a larger budget the next month (it also goes towards things like Kickstarters, though I rarely do those, as well as Humble Bundles and Bundles of Holding).
 
I only buy PDFs these days, and I handle this by setting a hard monthly budget for myself of what I can buy. Whatever I don't use rolls over so I have a larger budget the next month (it also goes towards things like Kickstarters, though I rarely do those, as well as Humble Bundles and Bundles of Holding).
I was doing mainly pdf for a while but have gone back to buying physical books, often with the pdf as well, because I much prefer them.
 
That's always my argument against people who say that RPG books are underpriced for the value they provide: That's only true if you actually get value from the book.

And it's also just not how pricing works in general. If I told my company's customers something like that about our products ("Well, you should REALLY be paying X for this..."), it wouldn't go over too well.
 
I was doing mainly pdf for a while but have gone back to buying physical books, often with the pdf as well, because I much prefer them.
I’m buying a lot more physical now, too. Finding myself reading PDFs less and less.
 
Isn't the point of the OSR is that there's no one in charge who gets to set a standard?
I am sure there are those who would like the power to set the standard for the OSR but the fact they can't is a consequence of the fact that open content was used to ignite the OSR. And the procedure that was used to leverage that open content is straightforward enough for anybody with the interest to use within the time they have for a hobby.
 
And it's also just not how pricing works in general. If I told my company's customers something like that about our products ("Well, you should REALLY be paying X for this..."), it wouldn't go over too well.
Although I have heard from some designers that they're also undervalued compared to what people will pay for them. That possibly only works with a novel product though. I'm not sure that the price for your average "high fantasy in my own campaign world" RPG could be raised much more.
 
Yup but it can't kill D&D that way.
Sure it can by having a publisher break out and rapidly expand its distribution reach and creative output due to its popularity.

Mmmm where I have seen that before?

Ah yes, Paizo.

Basically, an individual or a group with a solid reputation for putting out quality work on a regular basis with the ability to handle things like print runs and normal distribution. This needs to be coupled with the imagination and smarts to seize an opportunity when it presents itself.

Paizo gained this through how it handled Dragon Magazine and its 3.5 Adventure Paths. The opportunity came when Wizard's stumbled on their marketing coupled with making the D&D 4e completely unrelated to prior editions.

The key is not to focus on the fact a D&D variant, Pathfinder, supplanted a D&D branded RPG. Why Paizo was even able to handle the logistics of this in the first place. Also, keep in mind that Paizo brought significant innovation to the table the fact they were a pioneer of the Adventure Path format. Which I feel was just as important as the fact Pathfinder was 3.5e follow-up.

The same with a D&D killer. Whoever put this forth would have long ago laid the foundation to handle a popular product. They would have been innovative in something related to RPGs. And finally be able to handle the logistics of producing and selling a popular RPG product.
 
Although I have heard from some designers that they're also undervalued compared to what people will pay for them. That possibly only works with a novel product though. I'm not sure that the price for your average "high fantasy in my own campaign world" RPG could be raised much more.
I dunno. The entire tabletop hobby is largely fueled by people making poor financial decisions. A little FOMO here and there and we're off to the races.
 
Repeat after me. I [insert name] am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG pdf for [xx] days. I will take this one day at a time.
I Chuck Dee am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG PDF for... wait a minute ... what is that?

I Chuck Dee am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG PDF for 0 days. I will take this one day at a ... wait a minute, that looks...

I Chuck Dee am a pdf addict. I have not bought an RPG PDF for 0 days. I give up.
 
And it's also just not how pricing works in general. If I told my company's customers something like that about our products ("Well, you should REALLY be paying X for this..."), it wouldn't go over too well.
That's the whole business model at my company. And it's been working for 30+ years. They price based on the company rather than the product. Sounds backwards, but it works.
 
I mean, I don't think it's so bad as long as you're at least READING them.

That's always my argument against people who say that RPG books are underpriced for the value they provide: That's only true if you actually get value from the book.

This is one of the key reasons that I really like Warlock and Warpstar pdfs, they are very phone reading friendly. Where as pdfs that are designed for A4/Letter printing with small typefaces are a pain to read on a phone and I like to browse through pdfs that I have bought as and when I get the chance.
 
The key is not to focus on the fact a D&D variant, Pathfinder, supplanted a D&D branded RPG. Why Paizo was even able to handle the logistics of this in the first place. Also, keep in mind that Paizo brought significant innovation to the table the fact they were a pioneer of the Adventure Path format. Which I feel was just as important as the fact Pathfinder was 3.5e follow-up.

WotC basically handed it to Paizo when they farmed out Dragon Magazine and then killed the deal to put stuff on-line for fourth.[/QUOTE]
 
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OK here goes, I'm not sure it could ever be a D&D killer but it would be unique and appropriately aimed for people new to RPGs.

Modern urban fantasy, the players are half fae with a wide range of backgrounds, werewolf, vampire, fairy, elf, ghost, goblin, etc. They are the defenders of humanity against more hardcore fae.

The game would have three levels of play. Any of which are optional.
First level keep it simple, characters are young adults, investigating and blocking incursions of fae and stamping out their local strongholds. Play is mainly into he real world with some going into the link worlds between Earth and the fae realms. These games are aimed more at beginner, teenage players and so need options to keep the crunch simple at first and have a bit of zero to hero growth feel as complexity adds.
Groups are encouraged to place adventures in locations that are local to themselves with guidance on how to turn local stories. history, places, news into adventures as well as a range of published adventures that can be placed in many locations without issue.

Second level the characters are more involved with the local fae world(s) and have more power this moves the game into a more political power politics game and allows more variation in the world that the PC group is exploring. It is becoming more of a superhero fantasy game.

The third level is totally gonzo out there fantasy space epic as the players can travel across the many planes of existence and get involved with the powers of of the universe.

So where is the kicker?
The basic stuff can all be pencil, dice and paper, but for more joined up play with other groups an app or web site is used.

The system is geolocating events and adventures in real places. GMs can hook up adventures, encounters, etc to real world sites so that their players and other players can encounter them through a geolocating phone app or website that allows you to walk the world.
Random encounters can be seeded by the system so players when out and about can play a pokemon go esq game.
The aim would be to create local communities of RPG players using their local environment to create and share stories, part RPG, part treasure hunt, part computer game. How you would balance any of this, I have no idea, but some form of encounters balancing to the player group in the area or online at that spot or a duck out method for encounters that are too powerful.

A GM's outer worlds are found through finding the appropriate gate point which is also geolocated and a particular outer world such as the publishers, can be accessed from many points in the world. Once there, the outer world encounters geolocate to the real world as well, so you can differentiate play levels in the same area. You walk into the local pub and suddenly your phone is showing you a cave system to explore.
So Scion with Geo-caches?
 
So Scion with Geo-caches?

More Changeling the lost mixed with other WoD (including Scion), but not grim dark and not using storyteller and having the flex to turn more pure fantasy or space opera dependent on the group's wants.

I would like to experience wandering around an old castle in real life with a group of friends and at the same time having a partially geocached adventure revealed to us that uses elements of the history of the place. It may require some on the spot GMing or be more software controlled, but it would be heading into the direction of an augmented reality LARP that uses the same system as the table top game.
 
Big missed opportunity was in early 80s, GDW should have released a fantasy game compatible with Traveller. But those guys were already putting out a product every 22 days, so they wouldn’t have had time…
 
Was Dark Conspiracy modern/urban fantasy? I never owned or played it, but from what I could tell it looked kind of that way?
 
Was Dark Conspiracy modern/urban fantasy? I never owned or played it, but from what I could tell it looked kind of that way?
Kind of. It was built off of Twilight 2000 and used the same rules. It was more of a Lovecraft meets post WW3 type of thing from what I remember.
 
Was Dark Conspiracy modern/urban fantasy? I never owned or played it, but from what I could tell it looked kind of that way?
Image a 1980's cold war environment where the cold war is against a mixture of world of darkness and Lovecraftian style enemies. There were splashes of x files and future tech as well.

The system as noted was based on Twilight 2000 which wasn't a great start point to my mind. A rebuild that kept the same ascetic but changed to a more modern rules set would be nice.
 
Image a 1980's cold war environment where the cold war is against a mixture of world of darkness and Lovecraftian style enemies. There were splashes of x files and future tech as well.

The system as noted was based on Twilight 2000 which wasn't a great start point to my mind. A rebuild that kept the same ascetic but changed to a more modern rules set would be nice.
Twilight had a really good character creation system that took on terms of a career to build up skills and attributes. So you could be a highly skilled 50 year old past your prime and have effectively a good spread of skills but then age modifiers on attributes. Or you could stack it so you were young, fit, and a specialist. In the process though, you told your story...

I take 2 terms as a cop, and then a 4 year jail stint and another term as a criminal. That right there gives you a hell of a starting point for a backstory and the stats to back it.
I loved that concept and it seemed to work well in practice too.

Forgive me if I get stuff wrong on the system or setting though. It's been nearly 30 years since I played it.
 
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Was Dark Conspiracy modern/urban fantasy? I never owned or played it, but from what I could tell it looked kind of that way?
The system was clunky though the lifepath character generation was great fun. I really dug the background, and even picked up the Michael Stackpole novelisation.

Would definitely be interested in a reboot with a smoother system.

Whether it would kill D&D? Probably not, but the fact that CoC overtook D&D in Japan is interesting. Murder mystery parties are a thing in the mainstream, and CoC does hit some of those buttons.
 
Dark Conspiracy is set in the near but unspecified future. It's not the full five minutes that gets you to Max Headroom so more like 3 minutes into the future. The rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer and the ecology is crumbling if not well on its way to collapsing. America has become a third world nation. Her cities are filled with crime and poverty, everywhere is Detroit in the nineties. There are toxic and radioactive ecological wastelands called demonground. The cars have gotten bigger because the rich like to show off but most people have to walk.

It's really a setting I've used for a lot of near future games. Abandoned shopping malls and so forth.

But the problem is there are lots of weird things out there. Theres the demonically possessed aliens who are running the government. There are Morlocks dragging mallrats down into their tunnels to feed. Dark elf artists and media stars are luring victims into their play rooms where they torture and dismember them. There are trolls under bridges and illusion casting mosquito people telling gangs of disaffected youth that they're vampires.

The basic premise is that the creatures of myth and legend are things that people glimpsed out of the corner of their eye or had brief encounters with and everything you know about vampires is wrong.
 
I love the idea of all of those big-budget, high-concept, lore-heavy, original IP games from the “peak rpg” period of the late 80s-early 90s: stuff like Rifts and Torg and the World of Darkness and Space 1889 and Underground and Shadowrun and SLA Industries and Castle Falkenstein and Nephilim and so on - even TSR got in on the action with Spelljammer and Ravenloft and Dark Sun and Planescape. It’s really cool to me that for a few years rpg publishers were making heavy investments into developing and producing this kind of stuff and thought they would pay off.

Alas, what nobody seemed to notice (or at least care about) is that when your game-world has so much detailed unique lore and an elaborate metaplot that it doesn’t really work as a traditional rpg (as in the GM making up their own adventures and running their own campaign) - the GMs became dependent on the publishers to shape the campaign and dole out secrets and if you wanted to stay consistent with the developing story (which you weren’t privy to the shape or ultimate resolution of) your own creativity could only be at a very local and trivial scale (and even there you always ran the risk of getting contradicted by a later official source). This was exacerbated because official product didn’t come out at the pace of play and the official adventures tended to be bad - very railroady with lots of big boxed-text read-aloud sections and mandatory scenes that all too often had the PCs witnessing NPCs do all the important stuff. It’s like all the designers were so wrapped up in their worlds and stories that they forgot how rpgs work and what made them appealing in the first place. It’s no wonder that most of these games were commercial disappointments and no coincidence the few that did catch on and endure (WoD, Shadowrun, Rifts to an extent) were the ones whose IP was close enough to pre-existing cliches to be familiar enough to home players and GMs that they could comfortably riff on them rather than having to wait for the publishers to tell them what to do next.

Looking back now it seems pretty obvious that almost all of these concepts would’ve worked better as video games or novels or movies than rpgs, and I suppose that’s what at least some of them were hoping for - that the rpg would serve as proof of concept for bigger-dollar projects in other media. In retrospect it all seems so terribly misguided and a real disservice to the whole idea of rpgs, and yet at the same time so many of those concepts - the worlds and stories - were really good!
 
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Spelljammer and Al-Qadim didn't have particularly rail-roady adventures and Ravenloft and Planescape produced so much content there are some good adventures to find there as well. Some of the Ravenloft and Planescape adventures front load the railroad at the start of the adventure and have such good concepts I think they are worth hacking for play, Hour of the Knife comes to mind, and others like Castle Forlorn are more open, almost mini-sandboxes.
 
There have been maybe 3 chances for another game company to eat DnD's lunch, and in each case no one stepped forward with a good enough product and good enough production values and strategy to stick the landing:
1) the late 70's, when the concept of rpg's was out of the bag and well understood by a big community, but DnD itself was a pretty sketchy set and hard to interpret set of pamphlets. A bunch of companies took a run at them, but the best games (e.g., Runequest) were either too idiosyncratic and specific in their vision to fill the central role of generic fantasy game, or (e.g., TFT) good generic games but not produced in a way that could stand up to the tremendous jump in production quality and market saturation that came with the release of 1E ADnD

This.

D&D was not only the first RPG - Which was HUGE.

But it also very much benefitted early on from the fact that it had no legitimate competitors besides brand mismanagement until WotC came out with 4e.


2) The mid 90's, when 2E had finally dissolved ignominiously into a shambling mound of splat books and several very good games could have stepped in. This was a real opening and lasted for several years before 3E's launch, but the overall market felt poor, particularly given the rise of video games and trading card games, and I think no one really had the urge and finances to go big with a wide-appeal product. This was a period of peak creativity for GURPS, but that was just never going to take over because the game is too complex and 'flat' in its power progression to serve as a general engine for fantasy settings.

That was a big reason why Vampire/WoD was able to do so well.

Also:
Vampire I think was largely beneficial to the wider RPG market in a way that D&D isn't necessarily. It seemed that a sizeable number of its players were also willing to try other games as well.
White Wolf succeded because VtM was able to operate on two-levels. First as roleplaying intensive experience of playing characters in a vampiric society with own history and culture. Just familiar and exotic enough to be approachable. Second as monsters with superpowers duking it out with other monsters which little of the moral qualm of people versus people situations. And third VtM was good enough as a system.

A #2 RPG that is not a D&D clone is better for the Hobby.

The RPG hobby as a whole was more dynamic when D&D was not quite the domineering force that it is today.

Sadly WW went on to make a series of stupid mistakes with their edition changes that they never recovered from.


3) The mid 2000's, when 3E had dissolved into a shambling mound of splat books and then 4E immediate shit the bed. This was another window when another game company could have jumped in. Piazo nearly did it with Pathfinder, but I consider that a false choice, as Pathfinder is just DnD with a couple of serial numbers filed off. That's more like a hostile takeover of an existing system than a genuinely new game that wins on its own strengths. I don't really understand why no one stepped forward decisively while we waited for 5E, but they didn't. Part of the answer might be the tremendous fragmentation of the hobby into thousands of different systems.

In PF defense any RPG that supplants D&D will be so close in play concepts that the system differences will be largely irrelevant.

What made Pathfinders fall to 5e inevitable is that it doubled down on all the elements that made 3.x D&D an unwieldly mess past the first few levels.

PF correctly bet that the 3.x rule set had a few more years of life left in it, but they were ultimately an employee's house rules that leaned into the type of game that was making 3.x a bloated mess.

Thus when 4e started flailing D&D was able to shift into a different design space that gave fans a bit of relief from the kind of rules bloat that had become endemic across the board.

That and the fact that WotC was now backed by MTG money and Hasbro; and so they could afford to just drop a whole game line and switch to developing an all new edition.

It is worth noting though that while PF did outsell 4e - It only really outsold it by a little bit.

That is why in my opinion WotC made the call to shift to 5e so quick when the writing was on the wall: D&D doesn't outsell or get outsold by "a little bit".

D&D is the dominant RPG IP because it outsells its nearest competitor by multiple orders of magnitude; controlling the RPG market.

That was beginning to slip under 4e. So we got the quick shift to 5e.


Now, of course, it is too late - 5E is a good enough game, on its own terms, and is wildly popular. So, it will be a good 5-10 years until another opening occurs.

Exactly. Because:

The only D&D killer will be WOTC's lazy incompetence or contempt for their fanbase, and they've been doing okay with 5e so far by all accounts. I doubt we'll see D&D's star fade any time soon.

The only thing that can unseat D&D is if WotC is incompetent enough, long enough, for a competitor to build a big enough player network effect for their competing game that the average D&D player will make the minimum effort necessary to take a look at your RPG, and maybe switch...


The real problem contenders have is that "First Mover" status in RPG land is so huge that people still love their established RPG IP, and are completely incurious about looking for anything else. Being a technically better rules set is not enough to overcome the first mover advantage.

Most gamers do not go out of their way for anything; they talk about what they talk about because it got shoved into their face by virtue of being the mainstream RPG thing, and anything that isn't shoved in their face might as well not exist.

Most gamers don't like to 'work' for their entertainment; they like to just sit down and play. The game that gives them the best odds of being able to do that is the one with the dominant network effect. Once they find a game that allows them to just sit down and play, that satisfaction is met. End. Of. Search.

Because most gamers don't like to 'work' for their entertainment; they aren't curious, so they don't seek things out. Which means that if you don't toil to thrust what you have to offer into their faces, then they will not even consider the possibility that an alternative even exists.

You can see this effect in many threads on many forums of gamers and GM's refusing to look beyond D&D/5e/d20 based games because they do not have the time, or want: "to learn new rules"...

It goes without saying that many people here, myself included, are exceptions to the general rule, and are outliers in the overall hobby.

The economics of the RPG hobby have also changed since the 90's. Making it significantly harder financially to breakout and unseat an established RPG IP with a fully supported game line. And that is assuming the game design side of your operation is solid.

The real issue would-be contenders have is that people like to play "supported" game lines. It is not enough to have a competent core game. You will need to release 3-4 adventures/supplements a year on top of that.

Vampire: The Masquerade released 12 supplements in its first two years of introduction. Outside of Pazio who in RPG land is replicating that today? (Although 5e has shown that one does not need hit the splat treadmill that hard - hence my 3-4 supplements per year.)

RPG's are all about their player network effect. They need to constantly bring in casual players to filter through to the hobbyist GM's that will keep the gaming network going. The supplement treadmill serves to constantly keep the game visible, and keep current and potential new players engaged by new offerings.

It is all about continually engaging people's interest. And for various reasons if a game line isn't actively supported, the majority of gamers just aren't interested.

Even D&D has to edition treadmill every 10-15 years to reinvigorate its ranks...

So what has been a tall order in the early 80's, 90's, and 4e era is even harder now because D&D has captured so much market share in the 5e boom.
 
Vampire: The Masquerade released 12 supplements in its first two years of introduction. Outside of Pazio who in RPG land is replicating that today? (Although 5e has shown that one does not need hit the splat treadmill that hard - hence my 3-4 supplements per year.)
Greg Saunders and Warlock are the main ones I can think of. Also Cubicle 7 and WFRP 4e. Both of those have released those many supplements in a year(!) so it's viable for some publishers at least.
 
The RPG hobby as a whole was more dynamic when D&D was not quite the domineering force that it is today.
You are kidding me right? The fact we are in a golden age for all RPGs whether it is D&D. The fact that D&D benefited the most doesn't mean there are literally tones of products released for a system other than D&D. Not just crap but stuff that is pretty good. For the last five years every RPG has been up in terms of what is available. With the VTT finally be accepted by the general hobby, you are no longer tied to your local community to game with folks who enjoy a specific system. And even if you don't like VTTs it is easier now then it has ever been before to connect with folks in order to meet.

I agree that more diversity is good, but let's not paint the current situation as some dark age for alternatives.
 
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