Quote from: HaffrungI guess the people I play with are weird. Because the players can barely be arsed to read the PHB/Core rules, let alone seek out more homework. Back in our heyday of the 80s, books were for GMs because the GMs were typically the hardcore gamers and the rest of the group was not.

For casual gamers that don't buy books, there has been no change in the way things work. Publishers realized that not all players are casual gamers, and that GMs had to buy the books anyway.

QuoteSo maybe the question is when did RPGs become a hobby strictly for hardcores?

They aren't. There are still people showing up to games who have only read the PHB, or not even that much. But, since they're casual gamers, we don't see them posting online.

Quote from: HaffrungWhy can't you (or your players) come up with rules crunch on your own without buying it?

Because some people do it as their jobs, and the rest of us have jobs to do. It's a matter of time.

QuoteBecause that's what I see a lot of in online discussions these days: people who haven't even played a game, or played only one or two sessions, clamouring for more players options and suggesting elaborations of the rules. I've always assumed that it's a good idea to play a game (any game) a number of times so that you can explore the existing options and understand how it actually works before you change or add anything.

That is definitely a good idea. But since when has the general public restricted themselves to good ideas? It's just more visible now because it's on the internet instead of in a stranger's living room across town.

QuoteI don't doubt it. And yet, I wonder how many of the people who buy those crunchy supplements actually play the games.

From the point of view of the publishers it doesn't matter.

Quote from: flyingmiceI've written adventures. They take longer to write than anything, because everything needs explaining, all the details have to be included, and every location mapped out meticulously. You can't get away with some generic goons, a plot generated on the fly by the GM & players together, and some maps scrawled on the back of a napkin.

They also don't sell. The only adventures I know that sell worth spit are those that cater to AD&D grognards. Most adventures are given away free - on the website or as intro adventures, are fan-written, or are pure loss-leaders. Of the adventures I publish, only one even made what it cost to produce. My other supplements sell like crazy, especially the crunchy ones!

-clash

Clash, to add my own experience, I find adventures easy to write. Mainly due to my approach of hitting plot points, and conflict ideas and Plot twists. I leave the details to the GM. My adventures are more a source-adventure hybrid and it helps a lot.

That said, my experience has been that I can usually sell about 300-500 of an adventure or about 1/2 of the total source books sold. Also, they are very profitable and have a reasonable break even, for me. This has to do with much more than just market trends.

In the end, I truly believe the old model of Room A->Room B->Room C type guided adventures are gone. I think to produce successful adventures you need to have description of locale couched in a story that is fun for the GM or the players to read. Don't get me wrong, I used to buy those adventures and still have a shelf full of them but you know what? I would grab the maps and through out the rest. Maps were enough (and still are) for me to be highly inspired.

Of course, all the above is just me and my experiences.

Bill

Quote from: Old GeezerWhen it imploded.

Paul Chapman, marketing director for Steve Jackson Games, said last year that he estimated the RPG hobby was about a $50 Million per year industry.

When I worked for Dave Arneson, I saw some of the figures for D&D.  In the 1977 - 1983 time period, D&D ALONE was a $50 M per year industry.

Not counting other TSR products.  D&D ALONE.

In 1977 - 1983 dollars.

This hobby has imploded, dude.  Of COURSE there's nobody left but the hardcores.

Agreed.  From what I know, there was a peak of popularity at around 1981, and steady decline through the eighties.  Some cultural products lagged behind this, like Gary Alan Fine's "Shared Fantasy" (1983) and the D&D cartoon series (1983-86).  There was a mild revival with the early 90s driven by the popularity of Vampire, but it never reached the peak of 1980.  The late nineties similarly declined.  There was another mild revival in 2000 with the release of D&D3, followed by another decline.  Still, D&D3 mainly revitalized lapsed players rather than creating new ones, and neither of the two revivals approached the 1980 peak.  

Player option books and splatbooks became more common in the nineties with White Wolf's lines but also D&Ds parallels.   Though looking at the mid-eighties, I note that the D&D cartoon tried hard to promote one of the first player option books, Unearthed Arcana (i.e. Cavalier, Barbarian, Acrobat).

Quote from: HaffrungWhy can't you (or your players) come up with rules crunch on your own without buying it?

But I did, from the very beginning, and many of my players did too. I stated that already. Heck, I'm a game designer and publisher now. Obviously I did.

QuoteBut getting back to the assertion that players have always wanted crunch, were lots of people adding player options and rules crunch to Call of Cthulhu and Traveller on their own? Did they open the core book of Pendragon and instantly find the choices of knightly virtues and skills too limited? I don't know, I'm just wondering.

I don't know about lots of people. I'm talking only for my own group, but I had at least five or six players helping me eviscerate AD&D and recreate it in our own image, and that began for me within minutes of being exposed to the concept of roleplaying, and within months of others being exposed to it.

QuoteBecause that's what I see a lot of in online discussions these days: people who haven't even played a game, or played only one or two sessions, clamouring for more players options and suggesting elaborations of the rules. I've always assumed that it's a good idea to play a game (any game) a number of times so that you can explore the existing options and understand how it actually works before you change or add anything.

If it's something like AD&D, how it works and how it all interacts is simple. It's the game itself that's complicated. It was easy as pie to swap ouot this for that and change this into that because OD&D and AD&D were designed to work with several totally dissimilar sub-rulesets. Jury-rigging your own was easy because the game accepted and encouraged it. This is not the case with 3.X and higher D&D, which is a beautifully designed machine which is fully integrated and extensible and an absolute nightmare to houserule.

QuoteI don't doubt it. And yet, I wonder how many of the people who buy those crunchy supplements actually play the games.

I have no idea, and I have no way of telling that. I do see lots of people downloading multiple copies of the free light version of the rules, which only makes sense if they are giving them out to players. All I know is that people buy my games and my supplements enough so that I can continue making them available.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceBut I did, from the very beginning, and many of my players did too. I stated that already.

Sure. Just wondering why, according to the market:

Adventures = something you can make yourself

Splat books = something you have to buy

Quote from: HinterWeltClash, to add my own experience, I find adventures easy to write. Mainly due to my approach of hitting plot points, and conflict ideas and Plot twists. I leave the details to the GM. My adventures are more a source-adventure hybrid and it helps a lot.

That said, my experience has been that I can usually sell about 300-500 of an adventure or about 1/2 of the total source books sold. Also, they are very profitable and have a reasonable break even, for me. This has to do with much more than just market trends.

In the end, I truly believe the old model of Room A->Room B->Room C type guided adventures are gone. I think to produce successful adventures you need to have description of locale couched in a story that is fun for the GM or the players to read. Don't get me wrong, I used to buy those adventures and still have a shelf full of them but you know what? I would grab the maps and through out the rest. Maps were enough (and still are) for me to be highly inspired.

Of course, all the above is just me and my experiences.

Bill

Hi Bill!

Different experiences are vital to understanding a question fully. I find writing adventures for sale - as opposed to coming up with scenarios for my player group - boring and a chore. They don't sell enough to make it worth my while. You are lucky if you enjoy the process. Perhaps that's why your adventures sell better than mine do - the customers can feel that and respond to it. OTOH, most publishers who have posted about the subject on-line seem to be in my boat, at least as regards sales.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceHi Bill!

Different experiences are vital to understanding a question fully. I find writing adventures for sale - as opposed to coming up with scenarios for my player group - boring and a chore. They don't sell enough to make it worth my while. You are lucky if you enjoy the process. Perhaps that's why your adventures sell better than mine do - the customers can feel that and respond to it. OTOH, most publishers who have posted about the subject on-line seem to be in my boat, at least as regards sales.

-clash

I wont argue and I am sorry if I came off as saying you were wrong. My point was that they can sell well. I believe that the format is important as well as the style and just the general approach.

That said, yes, common wisdom either as PDF or print, adventures sell poorly.

Bill

Quote from: HaffrungSure. Just wondering why, according to the market:

Adventures = something you can make yourself

Splat books = something you have to buy

I will take a stab. Adventures are basically stories (let's not get hung up on terminology). They are "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if..." kind of things. Splat books or what I know them as "Source" books are just that, the source of new rules. In theory, they are balanced to the setting and supply playable new rules. The former can be done with existing rules while the later is best done with someone with intimate knowledge of the base rule system. Now, if you have read the core cover to cover, well, yeah, you can do source books too. And guess what? If you are only vaguely aware of the rules you can often do source books. The theory is that if you are very aware of the rules you will be better suited to making useful and balanced extensions of the rules.

However, the above is not always the implementation.

Bill

Quote from: HaffrungSure. Just wondering why, according to the market:

Adventures = something you can make yourself

Splat books = something you have to buy

Because creating adventures is way easier than writing crunch nowadays. It's writing everything down and illustrating it, and making all the maps and charts that's a pain. People won't buy adventures scrawled in longhand notes written on the back of 3X index cards, but they will run them if they wrote those notes themselves. Illos? DL pics from the web. Maps? That's what hex and graph paper pads are for!

OTOH, tightly woven single-engine systems like modern RPGs are a bitch to house-rule, though they're easy to extend. That's how they're written now, because that's what the customer wants. It's easier to buy a set of integrated, balanced crunch than to create and balance them yourself. Back in the old days it was a different story. You didn't need to do all that work because the rules were unbalanced and modular in the first place.

Mind you, I PREFER modular systems to integrated systems, and I write them myself, but other people have different tastes, and those like me appear to be in the minority. I also do my best to offer complete core books with fun but un-neccesary supplements. It works for me, but other designers are different, and their games are more popular, so people must prefer them.

-clash

Quote from: HaffrungSure. Just wondering why, according to the market:

Adventures = something you can make yourself

Splat books = something you have to buy

Because

Adventures = low income

Splat books = high income

According to the market.  I think your ACTUAL question is "Why do consumers buy that way"?

The market merely supplies what people are willing to pay for.

Quote from: flyingmiceMind you, I PREFER modular systems to integrated systems, and I write them myself, but other people have different tastes, and those like me appear to be in the minority. I also do my best to offer complete core books with fun but un-neccesary supplements. It works for me, but other designers are different, and their games are more popular, so people must prefer them.

-clash

Oh, you....Oh, you better watch it buddy! I have my eye on you. The Modular Game Designers Secret Cabal will revoke your membership for talk like that!:nono:

:emot-ssh:

Crap.:duh:

Bill

Quote from: Old GeezerBecause

Adventures = low income

Splat books = high income

According to the market.  I think your ACTUAL question is "Why do consumers buy that way"?

The market merely supplies what people are willing to pay for.

Thank you, Geezer! You have reduced my original point to its absolute essentials, and it stands there in naked sublimity like unto a goddess!

Meanwhile, I got sidetracked!

-clash

Quote from: HaffrungSure. Just wondering why, according to the market:

Adventures = something you can make yourself

Splat books = something you have to buy

Adventures are repackaging things that already exist. You take monster X, give it motivation Y, and send the PCs after; or however your standard adventure runs. But almost uniformly an adventure is created with mechanics that are already in place. There may be a new monster or two to showcase, and perhaps a spell / item or four, but in general the vast majority of adventures published are a laundrey list of previously published things tied together with a few cliches.

Splat books on the other hand require a lot more work. Creating rules is hard. Creating rules that mesh well with the game system harder, and creating well balanced and fun rules that mesh well even harder still. It's one thing to create 3 spells or a monster for your adventure. Quite another thing still to create a book with 100s of one of those.

When you get back to time being limited for people who don't design games for a living, it makes sense that most people would prefer to do the easier stuff themselves. I know I do.

It's easier to memorize the key points adventures in comparison to rules when you're browsing with no intention to buy. I do this a lot.

Quote from: HinterWeltOh, you....Oh, you better watch it buddy! I have my eye on you. The Modular Game Designers Secret Cabal will revoke your membership for talk like that!:nono:

:emot-ssh:

Crap.:duh:

Bill

The Cabal has been OUTED!

-clash