Has d20 even been successful?

GRIM · February 28, 2007, 02:02:27 PM

You need to define what the goals were to determine whether it's succesful.

jrients · February 28, 2007, 02:09:01 PM

Quote from: TonyLBWell, I think you're wrong. I see stuff like "d20 Modern" and its official offshoots everywhere. Every gamer I've met knows about the game. Many of them play it.

How many non-gamers do you know who have tried it? I suspect plenty of people who don't self-identify as gamers have tried D&D. I suspect the overwhelming majority of people who self-taught themselves their first RPG started with D&D.

TonyLB · February 28, 2007, 02:31:01 PM

If the measure of success that is being touted is that a game is only successful when it is the first game for a substantial number of gamers (and moreover gamers who were not recruited by friends who were already gamers, but rather spontaneously decided to take up gaming due to the book) then that really makes very few games of any sort "successes." Fewer, obviously, the greater the number of new gamers you need before you count it as "substantial."

Maybe D&D and Vampire are clear-cut successes by that metric ... and, I suspect, not much else. Are you cool with that?

jrients · February 28, 2007, 02:35:29 PM

Quote from: TonyLBMaybe D&D and Vampire are clear-cut successes by that metric ... and, I suspect, not much else. Are you cool with that?

No! The complete opposite, in fact! I want more games to achieve that level of success. But every time we start talking about "well, I know lots of gamers who play that" or "every gamer has heard of that" we've pretty much taken that goal off the table. I hate that. Sometimes it's like the people in this industry can't see past their own nose.

TonyLB · February 28, 2007, 02:37:37 PM

Ah, I wasn't so much asking whether you were okay with the phenomenon. What I was asking was (to put it more explicitly) "Are you okay with defining things in a way that implies that you're defining 99% of RPGs as flat-out 'unsuccessful'?"

jrients · February 28, 2007, 02:46:28 PM

Quote from: TonyLBAh, I wasn't so much asking whether you were okay with the phenomenon. What I was asking was (to put it more explicitly) "Are you okay with defining things in a way that implies that you're defining 99% of RPGs as flat-out 'unsuccessful'?"

I think any one criteria is going to fall short of providing a complete view. New blood in the hobby is very important and pretty much everyone, including Wizards, is doing a half-assed or worse job of it. Another measure people like to talk about is sales. I'm much more keen on whether people seem to be actually playing the games, myself. For example, I know lots of people who own GURPS sourcebooks of various stripes. Nearly every hobbyist locally seems to have at least one or two. But there's only one active GURPS campaign in a vast sea of D&D. Is GURPS successful? From my point of view, where a game is an artifact designed to enable actual play, not so much.

TonyLB · February 28, 2007, 02:52:25 PM

Quote from: jrientsI think any one criteria is going to fall short of providing a complete view.

Okay ... then I say that d20 is wildly successful by all sorts of criteria. You can, of course, say that it's wholly unsuccessful by other sorts of criteria. We can both be right, and everyone can be happy.

Sound good?

jrients · February 28, 2007, 02:55:57 PM

Quote from: TonyLBWe can both be right, and everyone can be happy.

Sound good?

Sure thing. I didn't come to this thread looking for a fight, after all. I would totally agree that there are several perfectly good metrics that would indicate success for D&D, d20 in general, and d20 Modern as well. I played d20 Modern/Future on Sunday and had a helluva good time. That's my personal number one criteria.

Calithena · February 28, 2007, 03:13:03 PM

FWIW, I don't begrudge anyone other definitions of success, and wouldn't tell people who don't want to measure themselves by this yardstick that they should by any means. If you design a cool homebrew or whatever and play it with your friends, or get an RPG company going and get hundreds or thousands of existing gamers to play your fun new game instead, I'm cool by calling that success. It's just not what I'm after here.

Pierce Inverarity · February 28, 2007, 03:13:13 PM

Cali, it might help if you let the cat out of the bag re. what you have in mind as a possible alternative to 3E.

It sounds as though what you're looking for is a fantasy game for adult non-gamers as opposed to teenage gamers, or former teenage gamers. Well, Wizards themselves did try to provide that, but Everway tanked.

James McMurray · February 28, 2007, 03:18:16 PM

Calithena, if you're defining "butts in seats" as successful may I suggest getting catalogs from various conventions and counting the # of tickets bought for each? It won't be a perfect count because some people won't show up, and others will use generics, but it should be close.

I'd also suggest checking both big and small conventions, given the differences in turnouts between the sizes.

jrients · February 28, 2007, 03:23:24 PM

My local con was this month. It's a small con, say 400 attendees on a good year. The RPGA's Living Greyhawk section outweighed every other RPG combined. Back in the 2nd edition era I ran a three round AD&D tournament for a couple of years and we got similar results from that. Heck, I ran a 10 person Basic D&D game this year and the mofo filled. The only other game that consistently fills year end and year out is Call of Cthulhu.

TonyLB · February 28, 2007, 03:58:19 PM

Individual conventions are going to be swayed pretty heavily by the people who have made an effort in past years to really put on some stellar games. Many conventions have a year-to-year continuity that people find reassuring, and so they'll deliberately seek out the "sequel" to a game that everyone was excited about last time.

Which is not to say that the convention-survey idea wouldn't work, simply that I recommend a survey broad enough to smooth out such local variation. The butts-in-seats statistics at some of the conventions I've been working the past few years, for instance, don't look a lot like what I hear discussed as commonplace by other people.

RPGObjects_chuck · February 28, 2007, 04:30:05 PM

Quote from: CalithenaSo really the question is: has D&D 3 been successful?

I'm not sure. I see some people playing it in my community. It's certainly _more_ successful than any other RPG currently out there, where 'success' is defined in terms of butts in seats playing the game per unit time. (That's how I define success, from a hobby point of view. You could also define it from a money point of view or from an art point of view, but I'm not concerned with those in these thread.)

Now: are there more people playing RPGs now because of D&D3 than there were six years ago? I think there arguably are, actually. I don't know how many more, but I have the vague sense that there's some slow growth coming on. So by that measure, it's a success.

D&D 3e is a success by any objective measure you can apply.

It sells the most books and has (BY FAR) the largest player base. It has also brought "lapsed" gamers either back into the hobby, or at least back into the "buying D&D books" part of the hobby.

As far as comparing number of players to the heady days of the early 80's, that's about as fair as wondering why no show on the air now gets ratings like MASH.

There's not three stations anymore, and the options for games have expanded WAY beyond Wargames, TTRPGs or Board Games. We now have way more choices, including console games, MMOs, CCGs and miniatures games, to name just a few.

Settembrini · February 28, 2007, 04:43:40 PM

M*A*S*H was a great show!

Nowadays they produce Grey´s Anatomy. Sad times indeed.