As every hobbyist knows, it's harder to get people to play your game than D&D.

Why is it sad that Palladium outsells GURPS?  Well I guess it's tied up in the personalities of the designers.  GURPS is clean, well researched, well laid, out, well indexed, well tested, well edited, and heck even in full color hardbacks.  Palladium is full of crazy ideas and badly in need of a true system overhaul.

I believe that GURPS could out sell Palladium.  Back in the third edition days when the books didn't seem so densely packed, the art was generally poor.  Oh there were gems but the covers were mostly recycled images from other products and the interior art was no better than what I can do.

Kevin has a better eye for art and Kevin actually cares about the art enough to spend some money on it.

GURPS has at least two numbers for everything and often more than that.  Fourth edition template builds are dense and over reliant on power modifiers.  They scare the heck out of people.  Take Mechanic "(Small Engines)/7 14 IQ+3 [12];" A pretty standard template listing.  Which number do you roll against?  You hand that to somebody who doesn't know GURPS and it's opaque.  Sure all it means is that you need a 14 or less on 3d6.

Steve also believes in picking and supporting mid-grade licences that he loves.  Which is great if you love the Vorkosign books but trying to explain that that book is the all in one book introduction to GURPS for science fiction is a bit of a stretch.

Kevin builds extravagant and geeky universes that drip with cool.  His system is a mess but it's robust in the sense that it takes a lot to kill anyone.

So, it's sad because the games both have their strengths and weaknesses but the guys in charge aren't willing to step up and do better.

Great article, Tristram.

I do believe that, outside maybe half a dozen big shots (WotC, Paizo, FFG, SJG, Catalyst, ...?), the "industry" as a distinct entity from the hobby community is dead.

Most other publishers are probably casual, "cottage" operations. Hobbyists creating materials for other hobbyists to consume, and possibly making some beer money from it.

The OSR in particular has amply demonstrated that, between PDF/PoD outlets and crowdsourcing portals, nowadays it's easy to publish if you have your shit together. Compiling your campaign notes into a PDF, comissioning a couple of pieces from a decent artist and placing it on OBS/DTRPG is probably within everyone (or nearly everyone)'s reach.

However, I do not know how, exactly, the eventual, theoretical, apocalyptic end of the bigger RPG publishers would impact the hobby as a whole. We're already a shrinking, aging community, that gets very little word-of-mouth growth and seems to hinge mostly on the Internet, as worldwide economic woes seem to steamroll local hobby stores and deprive RPGs of their chief offline meeting points.

At least in my experience, these stores were the place to get Dragon magazine every month, thumb through strange new RPG books you never even heard about, talk to other gamers about games and have the sort of [strike]pissing match[/strike] enlightened exchange of ideas that today seems relegated to online fora, recruit gaming groups and of course, pick up new games. Nowadays I mostly do all of these things using the Internet. Though I'm at a loss as to whether the Internet killed the FLGS, or just stepped up to fill an emptying niche.

For all I know, it's entirely possible that we might survive the vanishing of the 800lb gorillas unscathed; we've more or less "evolved" a new medium to generate, share, acquire and even debate new RPG material. D&D would probably go on, albeit in a dramatically reduced form (I picture something like Onyx Path is doing for the White Wolf stuff). In any case, I feel we would be a poorer hobby for it.

I think the d20 glut killed the flgs for rpgs in any case.  Too many stores got stuck with too much stuff after the boom died.

Comics, Magic, and Warhammer are the bread and butter of the geek shop these days.

Rpgs have simply failed to develop a business model that works in the new market place.  Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is one serious attempt to do so and it has lead to the new Star Wars rpgs from FFG.

The reality is to make it work in retail requires more than a shiny hardback these days.

I think the split between Pathfinder and 4th ed was pretty important here. For the first time, a previous edition of D&D was in print and available for sale while the next edition was running. While before some grognard might clutch their old edition and snarl at the new fangled hotness, this was a situation where the masses of players had a purchasing choice for a current game, instead of playing "some old game".

And I suspect this might have been part of the inspiration for the OSR. The grognards in this case didn't have to clutch their old edition it was still a living game. So they went back even further. Researching why they prefered their older editions. An interesting bit of self-examination that was incredibly healthy for the hobby.

I think there will always be a place for the industry. Having a common ruleset has it's advantages, in finding new players and integrating them. Production values are important too. I like a nice bit of art or a well done map. I also think that an imaginative set of rules or a fresh take on an old set of rules can set a GM thinking out of their own box. DCC and SWN are great examples of those. But I think the 4th ed/Pathfinder/OGL/OSR split disrupted the status-quo enough to show that the hobby doesn't need the industry as much as the companies think they do.

If the big companies want to stay relevant, they need to see what the hobbyists are interested in , and that requires a hobbyist mindset, and not a corporate mindset. Not in the trenches imagining up rules for how to slay dragons. I think Next/5th is a stumbling baby step in that direction.

I don't think the industry harms the hobby. It's so easy to share information on the Web that commercial outfits are no longer "gate keepers". If someone can sell something, fine; that's because people want it that much!

The people who were in the hobby just because it was the closest thing to electronic games (or whatever) they really wanted were getting shortchanged. It's better to have more options, so everyone has something - maybe several  things - to like.

Really, if you have no interest in Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder, the "industry" has no sway on you. I used to care more about what Wizards was doing when they were doing things like d20 Modern and Star Wars, maybe even Gamma World. Now, not so much.

You don't have to look any further than Far Future Enterprises to see how the hobby can survive the demise of the industry. Of particular note is the FFE Fair Use Policy, which deserves a read for anyone looking for a way to extend the long tail of sales for their product - free advertising, by the fans using the product material themselves.

We need new hobbyists who actually play RPGs. I don't see how that happens without an industry spending marketing dollars and FLGS's that promote live events.

Right now, I see 3 distinct hobbies in RPGs.

1 - online forum bullshitting
2 - collecting / reading books
3 - actual play

My concern is hobby #3. The 400 page thick glossy art books posing as game books are good for hobby #1 & #2, but it harms hobby #3.

Have you seen the rules to even complex boardgames? The rules to Magic? I don't get that the industry doesn't notice that the biggest sellers in RPG's past would be pamphlets compared to the tomes they think will sell today.

But the industry only really  about hobby #2, and they can probably suck money out of the aging readership for 30 more years.

Games stores need the industry, and the hobby needs the stores. Good game stores that are community hubs are vital for promoting actual play. [Except for you, my good reader, and your group who has been gaming together twice a week since birth. Sadly, most of us are not as blessed.]

When I agree RPGs are in trouble, I am talking about Actual Play of RPGs.

Quote from: Spinachcat;814732We need new hobbyists who actually play RPGs. I don't see how that happens without an industry spending marketing dollars and FLGS's that promote live events.

Why can't fan-run conventions and clubs work for the latter?

Quote from: Spinachcat;814732[Except for you, my good reader, and your group who has been gaming together twice a week since birth. Sadly, most of us are not as blessed.]

I've been gaming since 1974. Currently we play once a week. The current campaign is set in 1624 in a historical version of France (and Europe). We have been playing since the summer of 2012. We are using Honor+Intrigue a game I learned about and purchased online. It was published in 2012. Of my current players, I've gamed with one off and on with various life hiatuses since 1975, one regularly since 1982 (I married her), one is the wife of the first guy. She's new to gaming and has been playing with us for two years. One player dropped out/went on hiatus. She'd been playing with us since 1992.

I don't know what that says about the publishing side of the hobby, but I'm happy that Chris "Bashman" Rutkowsky did the system work and published a game I could buy and play out of the PDF rather than having to adapt and cobble together something myself.

Quote from: rawma;814738Why can't fan-run conventions and clubs work for the latter?

Because most of them are incompetent. You're not up against home games. You're up against World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering. Those clubs and conventions have to be better organized, better operated, and provide better outcomes than logging into the aforementioned D&D of its niche and joining a pick-up group to raid Dumbass Mountain or going one hall over to throw down a $20 and do a draft-only tournament. If you can't do that, don't bother trying.

"Don't bother trying," is a great attitude that has brought us so many wonderful innovations and improved our lives so much.

Bother trying, keep on trying, but be willing to grow and learn and develop too, I think that's often where people go wrong.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;814748Because most of them are incompetent. You're not up against home games. You're up against World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering. Those clubs and conventions have to be better organized, better operated, and provide better outcomes than logging into the aforementioned D&D of its niche and joining a pick-up group to raid Dumbass Mountain or going one hall over to throw down a $20 and do a draft-only tournament. If you can't do that, don't bother trying.

I haven't observed a shortage of players at the tabletop RPG events at fan-run SF conventions; I wouldn't have played Golden Sky Stories or Monster of the Week except for such events. They are not quite so effective at recruiting new players; but at the conventions I ran, we demanded the gamers offer beginner-accessible games and most that we recruited had not planned to do otherwise.

If people think it can't be done, it's because they're psyching themselves out.

Quote from: rawma;814738Why can't fan-run conventions and clubs work for the latter?

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;814748Because most of them are incompetent.

But not all of them.

Quote from: rawma;814738Why can't fan-run conventions and clubs work for the latter?

Conventions tend to cost alot is one problem. They cost to host. And they cost alot to attend, even if it is just travel and hotel time. Unless it is very local.