I don't think D@D would actually cease to exist but to entertain the question...

There is currently an SRC for third edition if I remember right.  That has a bare-bones approach to the rules.   A number of companies would continue to publish materials, create settings and so on.  The actual presentation of ideas are protected but if someone wrote a game which represented differently enough to get away with copyright laws, perhaps a revival could start.

This would lead into the idea of is D@D simply dice and a set of guildlines or is it bigger than that?

In any case, people could either:

1.  quit the hobby.
2.  play another game.
3.  play 3.5 or earlier.
4.  homebrew a system based on d@d.

The hobby shrink from the people who quit the hobby and diverses some from people playing other games.  More people will join the retro movement and stop buying new stuff.  There might be an increase in people posting pirated material since some of the moral arguments disappear.  Might not if someone is sitting on the license and is paranoid about copyright infrigement.

In other words, the hobby becomes smaller and more diverse but it survives.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityYes, that's what I mean. It would be the death of RPGs as a business, but given Lulu and such, it wouldn't be the the death of RPGs, period.

The thing about the wargames industry is that most people who call themselves wargamers play solo only. So many games are tailored to the soloists and collectors. That means games that are nice to look at, nice to read, have interesting mechanics and special rules, but aren't necessarily engineered and tested to play well as games. It also means that artwork, maps, and relentless shilling become the keys to getting a game to market.

RPGs would have a toughter time of it if the player-base shrinks dramatically. You can't play RPGs solo, and most aren't even very good with just two players. So finding players would become a real problem without the steady influx of players drawn in by the name and mass-appeal of D&D. You'd have a cottage industry aimed largely at collectors and solitaire systems-wonks. And once the hobby tilted that way, it would reach a tipping point where it had to cater books to that market of people who don't actually play in groups, or lose most of its few remaining customers.

Haffrung, that's absolutely right, and I remember reading about some hard figures (a questionnaire published in S&T?) on the proportion of solo vs. actual play of wargames, and it was shockingly weighed towards the former.

The thing is: artwork, flavor text, metaplot, genre books, even crunch books (vehicle and planet design sequences)--those are some of the strategies RPG publishers used in the 90s to draw in former gamers turned collectors/readers. AEG, Palladium, WW, late TSR, Hero Games, SJ Games with its setting books, they all did it.

And they still would, if comprehensive RPG lines would sell at all, which at this point they no longer do. It's funny: RPGs aren't even collectible any more.

But that in turn may be a good thing because we're back to the early 80s, when a game used to be all in one book/box, because it was meant to be played, not read. It may be the collectors who've left the hobby, not the players.

And yet at the same time, publishers keep cranking out more and more overpriced ubergloss hardcovers.

I don't think the collector's influence is at all dead yet.  If it was, and the publishers had any brains at all, they'd be going back to more modest production values instead of taking such massive risks on full-colour hardback runs.

I dunno about that- I bought Earthdawn based on two things back in the day, my desire to have a new game and the full color art in ED. We played the hell out of that game, too- so much so that I had to buy a second copy.
furthermore it is my (mis?)understanding that hardbacks only cost a little bit more to produce than soft backs, the main price offset is that they are more expensive to ship. Obviously, printing in color is way more costly than black and white, but your average monthly comic uses waaay more colored ink than even the largest of game books, and at a considerably lower price point, so I'm not certain how color use or the lack thereof translates into retail price either. How much more expensive is the color hardback to produce in comparison to the black and white paperback?
Personally, if it's a game I'm actually going to play- I prefer a hardback. If it's just something i want to read and rape I'm indifferent to it's format.

This post from a thread over on the Big Purple seems VERY relevent to what we're discussing. It recounts Ryan Dancy's analysis of why TSR went under as a company.....

http://forum.rpg.net/showpost.php?p=7766559&postcount=10


This part seems especially interesting;

QuoteThat Dancey Guy said: In all my research into TSR's business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found - one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.

No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No "voice of the customer". TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn't know how to listen - as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do - TSR lead, everyone else followed.

In today's hypercompetitive market, that's an impossible mentality. At Wizards of the Coast, we pay close attention to the voice of the customer. We ask questions. We listen. We react. So, we spent a whole lot of time and money on a variety of surveys and studies to learn about the people who play role playing games. And, at every turn, we learned things that were not only surprising, they flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom we'd absorbed through years of professional game publishing.

We heard some things that are very, very hard for a company to hear. We heard that our customers felt like we didn't trust them. We heard that we produced material they felt was substandard, irrelevant, and broken. We heard that our stories were boring or out of date, or simply uninteresting. We heard the people felt that >we< were irrelevant.

I know now what killed TSR. It wasn't trading card games. It wasn't Dragon Dice. It wasn't the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.

Amazingly, despite all those problems, and despite years of neglect, the D&D game itself remained, at the core, a viable business. Damaged; certainly. Ailing; certainly. But savable? Absolutely.

Yawn. There's no option for the not worried, or following this part of the game.

Seems to me like a lot of the threads in the RPG section are about the "industry", and less are about the game. I'm just barely interested int he "industry" and my players could care less.

IF D&D dried up tomorrow, we wouldn't care. We'd still play our games.

Quote from: Pierce InverarityHaffrung, that's absolutely right, and I remember reading about some hard figures (a questionnaire published in S&T?) on the proportion of solo vs. actual play of wargames, and it was shockingly weighed towards the former.

Yes, Dunnigan has mentioned this a number of times...however, he was talking about the S&T subscriber base; these were people who IIRC received twelve magazine games a year accompanied by historical articles on the subject; many of the magazine games were fair illustrations of a thesis but not very involved, and so they were suitable for a person to take out, fiddle with a bit to learn about the situation, and then put a way. A few, especially later on, were much more "full-featured". Non-magazine games (especially by Avalon Hill, but also by SPI and other publishers) were both more polished and more likely to include rules that made them unsuited to solitaire play. E.g., both Columbia block games and card-driven games make use of a lot of hidden information; so do the earlier Si-Move games, Kingmaker Diplomacy, etc.

All that said--yes, I think there's a lot of collecting going on these days. I got off the carousel a few years ago once I realized that I no longer had any opponents even for the CDGs and block games. Twilight Struggle, Hammer of the Scots: I'm tempted, but for now I'm doing the RPG thing.

Quote from: jhkimWhat is meant by "survival"?  For example, if total sales dropped 50%, would that be "dead" -- or would it mean pulling through?  WotC has generally managed about a 50% market share, with White Wolf second at around 20%.  If Hasbro decided to drop the line as part of a larger strategic move, then I'd guess that other D20 producers (like Green Ronin and Mongoose) would pick up most of the customers.  At most a quarter of D&D players would stop buying commercial products, I would guess -- which would be roughly 1/8th of the market.

To my mind, only way the gaming industry can meaningfully said to have been "destroyed" is if it is reduced solely to small-press self-publishing concerns - in other words, if publishing RPGs becomes something that people do in their spare time, because they care about the hobby. Chances are there'll be nobody selling enough to actually make a living off RPGs any more, and there almost certainly won't be anyone who'll be able to afford to hire full-time staff. So I suppose "survival" would mean "avoids that particular fate".

Quote from: Elliot WilenBut...the wargame industry is still alive, just very, very small. I guess the poll is (as common with these polls) badly worded, as I don't see any option that clearly represents "the existing non-D&D industry keeps going more or less as it has, as a bunch of insular interest groups".

Is... is that thing about the industry being reduced to small-press self-publishing concerns invisible or something?

Or do you mean you think that D&D will just disappear and all the other gaming companies out there will chug along happily just as they're doing now? I didn't put that option up there because I considered it wildly unrealistic; the disappearance of D&D would be such a big deal that it would have to effect those publishers one way or another. If that's honestly your opinion "It'll dent the industry, but the industry will probably survive" seems to fit your view.

Quote from: Serious PaulYawn. There's no option for the not worried, or following this part of the game.

Seems to me like a lot of the threads in the RPG section are about the "industry", and less are about the game. I'm just barely interested int he "industry" and my players could care less.

Maybe we should have an actual forum for talking about the industry?

Quote from: WarthurMaybe we should have an actual forum for talking about the industry?

Agreed. Whilst it can be an interesting subject there seems to be a nigh obligatory amount of hand-wringing and hysteria that attends any lengthy discussion of the topic. Not just here, everywhere.

So from a purely personal point of view I'd prefer it all to be lumped into the same place.

Naw - we probably don't need that.

 I think the recent announcement about 4th edition D&D has maybe got some thinking about the whole industry more than they would otherwise.

It still relates to roleplaying....

 just an opinion, your kilometerage may vary.....


- Ed C.

Quote from: KoltarI think the recent announcement about 4th edition D&D has maybe got some thinking about the whole industry more than they would otherwise.

I had exactly the same thought the other day.

Still, an industry related forum would be nice, mainly because I'd like the RPG one to be more about RPG's than the people who publish and distribute them.

It's not that big a deal to me, though.

I have a query about the status of wargames.  Are we talking wargaming as a whole or just some small subset of which I am unaware.  Because the first things that pop into my head when people say wargaming is Games Workshop and Wargames illustrated.

Saying that these are lesser to RPG's in terms of "industry" and "worth" strikes me as somewhat deluded.

(Not that I'm comparing the two hobbys or stating a rivalry where none exist, merely pointing out that if you want to point out a weaker/smaller hobby than RPGs then wargaming isn't the one to pick.)