A Bad Marriage
By The Warden
As fans of RPGs, we yearn to soak up as much as we can on the trade of design and publication in the hopes we too can one day produce our own addition to the market. Of course, in our dreams, our RPG is the one to change the world and be taught in high schools across the developed world. When experienced designers, artists, and publishers use their blogs to share the exploits of the professional tabletop RPG world, we gather ’round with rapt attention, our legs crossed on the floor like a kindergarten class.
One of those blogs is Howling Tower by Steve Winter (who also posts additional columns through Kobold Quarterly’s website). This past week, Mr. Winter talked about the dysfunctional relationship between game design and success as only someone who’s been around the block could. The short and sweet of it? When your game becomes wildly successful (100,000 copies successful), the natural solution is to broaden your staff to create more and more material, yet the more material you produce, the closer you get to running out of material. Hence why we’re looking at new editions every 5-7 years.
There’s something in particular I found interesting in Mr. Winter’s post:
“Small publishers don’t stumble over this. The writer/designer with a day job who devoted countless evenings and weekends to pushing out an RPG that enjoys slow but steady rulebook sales doesn’t depend on sales volume to pay the bills. The garage operation with one or two full-timers and a handful of freelancers can survive on just two or three high-quality releases a year.”
– From Howling Tower (March 14th, 2012)
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I fall in love with a system, I want to see as much of that system as possible and delve deeper into the world provided. Such has been the case with all my games of passion – D&D, Earthdawn, Vampire, Werewolf (those I’ll be damned if I can find my old books… Dad!) and particularly the old Planescape setting. Over the past two decades, publishers have been more than eager to scratch that itch and recent trends have revealed player material sell more consistently than GM supplements as the average ratio of players to GM is 5:1.
So we come to the crux of this week’s post for Under the Hood. In this day of mass consumerism and branding, is it possible for RPG geeks like us to accept a game with only a handful of releases per year? If marketing a successful game requiring monthly releases is so deadly for the brand, why are so many publishers undertaking the risk? Are we all just destined to live through the TSR curse all over again?
BUT OTHER GAMES DO IT…
It’s questions like these that reveal why so many RPG publishers are turning to board games as supplemental or primary sales. Just look at Fantasy Flight Games. In the last decade, they offered a slew of d20 supplements and now stand as one of the premiere board game producers on the market. Board games don’t require supplements; everything you need is provided in the box and can be played time and time again. It is possible for these games to provide supplements (Heroscape has numerous sets available since its initial release back in 2004), but they’re the exception rather than the rule. Wizards of the Coast’s foray into D&D-themed board games has been successful and each game exists as its own entity; if you want to play the new Lords of Waterdeep game, you can’t use the Castle Ravenloft board game.
This trend is a polar opposite to the collective card game genre started almost 20 years ago, where the player with nothing but the starter deck was wholly screwed. While this style of game play has been revised to avoid such issues, it is still a game requiring purchased products, just like board games. No one pulls out their own homemade Magic card or slip a paper tile on the board because these games only allow manufactured material. (Note: While I’m sure some people buck the trend and allow homemade cards and material for their own CCGs and board games, I think it’s safe to say it’s enough of a minority and disallowed in competitions that it’s not inclusive to this argument.)
Role-playing games rely on imagination for game play. While published adventures are commonly available and sought out by GMs around the world, they do not sell enough on their own to make adventure production a lone salvation for the long-term viability of a product line. Once again, it’s the player to GM ratio at play, complicated by the fact that many GMs take the game and create their own adventures and campaigns suited to each group and/or their own aspiring novel. When the 4th edition of D&D was released, they didn’t even bother with a home world like Greyhawk because they knew GMs were more likely to insert their own world. Publishing a RPG is very much like the iconic double-edged sword – it cuts both ways.
GARAGE PUBLISHERS
According to Mr. Winter’s earlier quote, smaller publishers – whom I refer to as “garage publishers” with nothing but the utmost respect because I’m one of them – have the best chance of stable survival because they don’t reach that pinnacle of success. The success they gain works well for them and the worst thing they can do, apparently, is strive for the highest rung on the ladder.
Of all the garage publishers out there, some appear to have great success with multiple product lines with frequent publications – PDF and POD (Print On Demand) publications. Adamant Entertainment has numerous lines under their banner, including the ICONS superhero RPG (created by Steve Kenson, co-creator of Mutants & Masterminds), MARS, and the upcoming Kickstarter-driven Far West. In just over ten years, Adamant has over 250 titles under their belt to create an average of 2 releases per month. ICONS alone already has 16 titles since its release in July 2010. Without any concrete numbers, it’s impossible to gauge just how successful any of these lines, or Adamant as a whole, may be except to say there must be some level of profit or else this publisher would have thrown in the towel long ago.
This takes frequency of publication out of the picture. While Adamant may be an exception to the rule, there are plenty of other garage publishers out there pumping out titles left, right, and center to negate that point. What makes these publishers different from Wizards of the Coast, Paizo Publishing, Fantasy Flight Games, and more is overhead. More specifically, print production.
Garage publishers produce products within their means and the tools available to produce them have increased over time, particularly with the rise of tablets and the decrease in periodical print production. It costs nothing to output a PDF from layout files and sell it as is; running 5000 copies of a physical book runs you into the thousands. You also don’t need to output 5000 copies and store them in a hard drive. All of these are points well-established by many others before me, so I’m just driving a stake through a corpse at this point.
FAILURE FROM SUCCESS
The question is why are major publishers racking up their print productions when the trend is to simplify? Everything’s in full color and most rulebooks are hardcover. Admittedly, Paizo’s adventures are softcover and assembled as cheaply as possible, but those savings are passed to the consumer with a lower price point. Yet the bulk of RPGs sold in stores are high quality, glossy, full color, high quality artwork masterpieces. Not including the limited leather-bound editions.
There’s a quintessential reason to ask these questions and ponder these developments as a role-player. And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing I love more than a good book, but what I love more is to see my beloved settings continue on for generations. There’s a reason why I can’t buy any more Planescape material and it’s not because of demand. There’s a reason why Earthdawn is on its third publisher (and that publisher – Redbrick – is no longer in contract with Mongoose to create print runs of their products). Our favourite games are drowning under their own success.
I’m afraid it’s the same point I’ve come to time and time again, whether it’s been here or on my own blog: the RPG industry is not large enough to sustain rapid growth. It’s a genre industry fueled by few and passionate consumers. All these efforts made to swell its influence in the overall gaming market is causing more harm than good because publishers are too ambitious and don’t seem to be learning from what exists and what works. It’s a point easily made by looking at Wizards of the Coast’s reaction to PDF releases of all their out-of-print editions, adventures, supplements, and more. If we base it on the number of people charged with pirating WotC products, none of us can legally buy D&D PDFs because of twelve people. Take a look at the ratio of known pirates to legal customers – 12:1000 – and I can’t help but have doubt RPGs will face the same dilemma as the newspaper industry.