I told you they'd get it funded.

RPGPundit

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;618824Did Dancey kill a puppy or something? Why are they so angry at him?

I will say most were not around when he was posting in the Usenet Newsgroup alt.games.rpg... he was touting off that the new d20 system would eliminate all other game systems and that survivors would switch their systems over to it. from that point on I didn't want to have anything to do with him

Quote from: Reckall;618994In UO people role-played, end of the story.

I have been schooled.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;618824Did Dancey kill a puppy or something? Why are they so angry at him?

Kittens actually.
I'm told Dancey owns a stake in some den of iniquity or another.
Daily will his customers fall into onanism, and next thing you know, God's killed a kitten.

I wonder if they feel relieved, or pissed off that it just about scraped through? Maybe some of both.

I think if you just look at the fact they clawed a million and a bit dollars out of 9,000 roleplayers (can't imagine anyone not interested in roleplaying would ever have heard of Pathfinder or Paizo. D&D is a different matter) then it's pretty impressive.

Sure, the hobby may be a fraction of what it was in the early-mid 80s, but there's probably as much or more money in potential sales if you know how to sell an idea, just shared between less people. I know I spend more on RPGs in a year for the last few years then I did in total between the ages of 10-20. Admittedly most of that is on 2nd hand stuff (ebay, forums) or cheap stuff from Amazon.

I wonder what a kickstarter for Frank Mentzer to write his own (OGL based) take on the RC with Elmore/Easley art (or equivalent - are they still alive? Retired?) would raise, with stretch goals being leather covers modules, gazetteers, signed copies, Otus art etc. Or for WOTC to reprint/pdf the BECMI line in entirety as a kickstarter.

Never happen, but you can dream

Quote from: APN;619521Or for WOTC to reprint/pdf the BECMI line in entirety as a kickstarter.

If something like this were to actually happen, I suspect this would be taken as proof positive that tabletop rpg games is almost dead as a viable business.  (ie.  A niche business with miniscule or no profit).

:banghead:

Here I'm thinking the opposite - it's already written. Errata it, clean it up, flog thousands of copies... no one knows how many would sell but it would be profitable for a small outlay. Pretty viable.

As opposed to turning out something (4e) that sells in reasonable numbers, had a fortune for the art budget and churned out loads of stuff, for a smaller profit.

For WOTC to do the former (flog old stuff) whilst they are making their new shiny thing (that a lot of people, myself included, aren't interested in and will get none of my money as a result) and not selling their old not shiny any more thing (4e) keeps money coming in and gets money out of old farts who wouldn't touch their new stuff anyway, and keeps Hasbro off their back. I reckon the profit margins on the back catalogue will be far higher than they will be for Next.

RPGs aren't dead as a viable business. The business model is changing though. Printing millions of books and leaving them on shelves hoping they sell is a sure fire way to poverty these days, with less places around to sell those books. PDF, kickstarter, print on demand, subscription model are the ways forward for RPGs, and maybe some others no one has thought of yet.

I think the days of any one or two companies/individuals earning very good money from RPGs are over unless they embrace the new way of doing things. It's a smaller pool to sell to, but there are plenty of fat wallets in that pool. The Kickstarter for Pathfinder Online showed that, as did Traveller and the Fate core thing, and others besides.

Quote from: Melan;618995Precisely, but it is when you get off the rails when it is no longer a colour-within-the-lines engineered experience, but a world of unpredictability and hundreds of possibilities. Really: the players engineered a virtual economic collapse, fucked up the faux-renfaire world of Britannia beyond recognition (also, someone killed Lord British within the first few days and got his ass banned), and built themselves a perfectly cool post-apocalyptic game world where things could happen because the players wanted it to. That's a lot more interesting to me than going on raids and questlines that have all been planned for you. Granted, it must have sucked royally for the folks who expected the "Hail to thee, noble Friend!" style of the Ultima series, or just wanted to fuck around baking virtual bread.

In practice, stuff like this shouldn't be surprising at all.  There's always going to be individuals who figure out every single loophole and/or ways to do things not intended or anticipated by the original designers.

Back in the day, I remember guys who would figure out numerous tricks/loopholes in particular arcade video games and exploiting them to the extreme, where they would end up hogging a particular arcade machine for hours and hours or the entire day on only one quarter.

Years later, there were similar style of hacks in games like Doom.  There was one where one could change some of the badguys into Barney the purple dinosaur.  Dunno if this style of hacking was initially anticipated by the original designers of Doom, but they seemed to have embraced it quickly afterwards.