Why are we surprised that D&D Next is bad?

By now, the “D&D Next”  materials have made their way out into the interwebs. I spent a good ten hours participating in an all-day playtest of the system.

Yeah, it’s pretty bad. However, someone else made a point I think is important:

The game system we have in front of us is exactly what they told us it would be.

I can’t emphasize this enough. This playtest meets all of the stated design goals: it plays like an old-school game, it is ostensibly “modular,” and it has already been lauded among many players as a return to pre-3e design sentiments.

What this really speaks to is how isolated and unsupported the D&D team is at WotC. I remember stories from 5+ years ago where any team that wasn’t Magic had to go around begging for playtesters any time they released anything. With the growth of the Magic brand, this has obviously only become more of an issue. The reason this looks like the product of a couple old dudes in a basement is because it really is.

D&D is a drop in the bucket as a brand when compared to the $200+ million that Magic brings in. (Even generous estimates had D&D bringing in about 1/20 of that revenue per year.) In a sense, I kinda feel bad for Mearls & Co. They are working on something they love, but they have the dual burden of being under corporate supervision without any sort of support from the rest of the company. Somebody gave them the goal of “reuniting the editions” after Pathfinder has eclipsed D&D, and then gave them no money or time to do it in.

I remember opening the 4E PHB and my jaw dropping – not because of the rules, but simply because of the production values inherent to that book. Full-color 3/4 page illustrations for each class and chapter. Beautifully templated, color-coded power descriptions. It was the first time I’d felt that since I opened the GURPS 4E Characters book, and the only other time I’ve been so taken was with the Mouse Guard RPG.

That was the height of branding D&D for WotC. They released one of their flagship games in full force, and it still didn’t make a tenth of what Magic does. It’s over. They’re done throwing that kind of effort into a brand full of toxic fans and endless bickering about products that won’t get sold.

I’m not saying it won’t sell, or that it won’t get played. However, I can tell you that we aren’t going to see the support for D&D that we saw for third or fourth edition. D&D is officially a legacy brand now.

Let’s Revolutionize the Industry!

I wrote a while ago about how there aren’t any reliable numbers to describe the tabletop gaming industry. We have so little data, and it does such harm. Independent publishers operate without any real idea of how the market behaves, and I watch moderately “successful” companies poke in the dark with products that don’t sell. No one can explain why (but a great many people have tried, yours truly included).

So, this is it: I want to change things. I want to throw a floodlight on the industry. Get the data, and get it out there so that people, that is, anyone, can have it. So that the arguments we’re having about what sells and what doesn’t are based on facts, not posturing and secondary-level economics. It’s quite simple, in concept: gather as much statistical sales and market data from the retail side of the industry as possible.

In execution, of course, it becomes much more difficult. It involves the voluntary cooperation of literally thousands of individual elements, from online distributors to friendly local game stores. I would be committed to hundreds of hours of work to prepare, distribute, collect, analyze, and publish this data and my conclusions. What’s more, to do this properly, I’d want to travel around the country and collect data of my own observation, administer more in-depth surveys to ensure we get some proper consumer data out of this effort.

The end result of all this would be a complete snapshot of the industry - and it wouldn’t belong to one single company. As evidenced by this blog, I want to make this entire hobby a better place to work, to sell, to play. I want to light the path to a better place to game, and I think this is the best way to do it. I’m ready.

I will need your help. None of this will come cheap. The entire budget for the project is between one and five thousand dollars (postage, paper, and ink alone is hundreds!). In addition, I need participation from people around the country, and even the world, to ensure proper coverage for the survey. I plan to crowdsource many of my efforts, at once to collect enough funds and to save money along the way.

Here’s the hitch, though: This could very well piss a lot of people off. There are a great deal of established industry types that would be rather torqued when the small people on the outskirts are better-informed than they are. Imagine the State of the Mongoose without all of the tripe about the industry shrinking as an excuse for running about like a chicken without a head. Imagine an industry that knows how, and where, to grow.

I plan to have a crowdsourced fundraiser open by the end of the week. I hope you’ll join me in supporting a new day for tabletop games!

Join the Conversation!

I would love to have a lot more interaction with my readers! Follow me @yourbusinesssux on Twitter!

(I promise to try not to swear.)

“What Use is a Business Major?”

I’ve taken a lot of flack in the reactions to the blog for being a useless business major. So, allow me to show you one of my OTHER nerdy hobbies! It’s called regression analysis.

For those of you who haven’t taken higher-level math, regression analysis is essentially using existing data to develop a model that can predict future behavior. Such models are used extensively in everything from stock trading to horse racing. The most simple type is a linear regression, which is used on websites like Kicktraq.com. It’s great if you have a steady progression of pledges; however, it’s often true that the number of pledges starts out high and then trickles off.

I’ve found what I consider to be a best-fit exponential regression curve for the data present, and then used a median pledge value to calculate a projected ending value for the Pathfinder Online Tech Demo Kickstarter. Keep in mind that this is a projection only, and that any change in behavior (such as people pledging greater values) will change the results.

My analysis results in a total figure of $120,463.20 at the end of the thirty days. (For those of you who know what this means, the coefficient of determination is 0.89.) I’m throwing my “bet” up here; I may revise it as we get more data, but I sincerely doubt that the result will be altered without a significant change in pledging behavior.

Also, I want to throw a link out to UnSubject, who has written a fantastic critique of the Pathfinder Kickstarter. Allow me to quote my favorite bits:

Perhaps I’m missing something there, but it appears that the Tech Demo isn’t offering anything more interesting than was available in BioWare’s 2002 title Neverwinter Nights. Maybe the “basic game mechanics” will be a bit different, but that term is so vague as to be meaningless. It’s unlikely that a $50k budget is going to show off any real sandbox potential, despite ‘sandbox’ being a key feature that PathO is trying to stand out on. Even linear theme park MMOs look sandbox-ish if there are only 5 people in-game.

If Goblinworks couldn’t find $50k to develop their own Tech Demo, then forget about PathO – the title should be considered the walking dead already. After developing the Tech Demo comes the period of time shopping it around to potential investors and publishers. The team pulled in to work on the Tech Demo will either need to be let go or continue being on payroll during this period and both options effects PathO’s resources moving forward. Publishers / investors will want time to consider their options. Time will burn money. So, again, if Goblinworks couldn’t afford $50k now for a pre-pre-pre-alpha build, PathO is already on the edge of a cliff.

The Kickstarter That is Almost, But Not Quite the Pathfinder MMO

Also Ryan “Steve Jobs” Dancey takes credit for every major achievement in the RPG industry

Well, here, have a looksie. It’s quite an impressive product page, visually. I got about twenty words in before I started laughing. (Well, that doesn’t count the video, which is fucking hilarious.)

You see, in his opening section, Dancey takes credit for a number of things. Some of them are very much his fault – like the OGL D20 licensing, which brought us such wonders as the Book of Erotic Fantasy. It makes sense that they’d list that as an accomplishment, though, since most of the principals of Paizo owe their current success to the OGL’s completely unenforceable wording.

Most of the list of “accomplishments” hangs on the idea that Lisa Fucking Stevens worked for Wizards for ten years. She’s an amazing businessperson, and you won’t hear me say anything other on that. However, it seems a bit ostentatious to take credit for the success of Vampire: The Masquerade and fucking Magic: The Gathering singlehandedly. Sounds a bit like a marketing wash…okay. They’re trying to play up their strengths, to put a successful foot forward. Why are they working so hard to get us to believe?

Wait, wait. Something isn’t quite right here…

We’ve had to do all three of these things in parallel because there are a couple of intersecting “chicken and egg” problems here. Investing at this stage of a project is very much about having faith in the people working on the project—and we have some amazing folks who want to work with us, but they have careers and family obligations, so they can’t just pick up and relocate to Redmond on the hope that we’ll get the funding we need. We’ll also need to show our investors specific details about our financials, which are affected tremendously by the deal we can secure for our middleware—the engine that runs the game. Our business experience and social networks have provided us access to some awesome middleware deals that aren’t readily available to outsiders, but sealing those deals is tied to the staff and funding issues as well. In short, we need to move forward before we can move forward.

Ryan “Steve Jobs” Dancey, Master of MMOs, Swinger of Deals, World Poker Tour Pro, apparently can’t close a contract for a god-damned thing. He apparently can’t convince his friends and family to have faith in this project. He can’t convince strangers with money to have faith in his project. They’ve been doing this for six months, and haven’t landed ANYTHING. Not a single dime, delivered or promised, in value or cash.

As they say in the business world: “Uh-oh.”

Now Dancey wants to crowdsource his funding to build a technology demo so that investors will take him seriously. How cute. I’m sure the $50,000 someone else has put into this game for him will look amazing on a prospectus. Investors will sure think a small demo for a computer game that looks like it came out two years ago shows progress. His friends will flock to work for him when they know he has enough money to pay their salaries for…maybe a month. Possibly two.

Judging by the flock of people that have come to donate (as of right now, it’s at 10% funded just a few hours in), maybe it’ll work. Perhaps his genius plan is to undershoot, and get a BUNCH of money to started out with. Hell, I have no idea what goes on in Ryan “I Can See The Future” Dancey’s head.

What is telling to me is that despite her involvement, Lisa Fucking Stevens is playing it safe. She’s a sound business mind; if she thought there was enough money in this, I have no doubt she could pull $50,000 (and a lot more) out of her business. She does, after all, control the Best-Selling Fantasy RPG! If she had, we could be spelling out the end of Paizo (and with it, Pathfinder).

As it sits, we just get to watch Ryan “Steve Jobs” Dancey play out his mid-life career crisis in public. Give it up, dude. Everything you touch turns to shit. The President of EVE Online had to apologize publically for your direction before they locked you out. You were run out on a rail once your OGL D&D fever dream turned out to be suicide for the brand. You were personally responsible for shutting down the White Wolf print lines.

I look forward to who you’ll blame for this next failure. Oh, let it be Erik Mona. I’d bet he would react well to that.

Lions of the North!

I talked about funding at length in another article, and it’s worth mentioning that Kickstarter has become a haven for funding games. One particularly promising, original game is Lions of the North, a post-post-apocalyptic game with a fantastic take on humanity might turn out.

Lions of the North is a roleplaying game that takes place in the future after the destruction of our current civilization. New nations and states have appeared in Northern Europe, struggling for their place in the sun. The new nations have abandoned the dead past and have embraced equality in a way our society hasn’t. Racism and sexism are things of the past.

The nobles of Peimar, the traders of Kirkoslet and the despots of Hanö are all seeking fortune and power. The pirates of Bornholm seek to gain wealth by raiding merchant vessels and the Gotlanders try to keep control of their island when the great powers of the age start encroaching on their territory. It’s The Age of Lions, and it means means that anyone is free to carve out their own destiny on land or at sea. It’s an age of free women and men, an age where your birth and gender don’t mean anything, having a strong swordarm or a cunning mind means a lot more.

Beyond this struggle, mythical creatures and strange magic appears on the new frontier. What are the dark forests hiding and are you brave enough to find out?

I really like the idea, and Kemper’s blog puts out some more fantastic details about his setting and system. Please support this awesome project by pledging!

Dooming Yourself From Day One

I have a friend who decided to start a small press (Small Tomatoes Press) to print her books and a few others authors’ works. She reads this blog, and she asked me for advice on how to make it successful. Mind you, this was after she set up her business, ran to a high-cost POD distributor, and set up her Amazon, blog, and all those wonderful things that people call “marketing.”

I like her. I wanted to help her. I want her to be successful. If she’d asked me a month or two before that, I might have been able to help her. If I’d had a hand in catalyzing the business concept before it was all set in stone, maybe, just maybe, I might have had some miracle to increase her sales. However, the sad, cold reality is that her ship was scuttled as soon as she launched it.

Self-publishing in any industry (including tabletop games) is just a thin green line from vanity publishing. If you publish, they will not come. The real mistake here, however, is not the type of publishing venture she entered; it’s that she dived into it with very little research or consulting. She had it all set up before she even called me.

She’s not alone; actual, real companies do this all the time. Mongoose Games spent tens of thousands of dollars on a POD setup, only to realize it didn’t work. In the process of trying to fix it themselves, the managed to break it so that an actual expert couldn’t fix it without spending a lot more money*. Wizards of the Coast pushed hundreds of thousands of dollars into a virtual tabletop for Fourth Edition that never materialized (I still love the ad in the back of my original printing PHB).   As I write this, Paizo is sinking time and energy into a Pathfinder MMO that reeks of vaporware.

It’s one of the largest mistakes you can make in business, and even the wisest aren’t immune; if Lisa Fucking Stevens can be convinced, anyone can.

So let’s be clear: don’t doom yourself. Don’t dive in. Do the research, do the work, and do it right. Stop writing your game; start planning your business.

*I would link a source, but they have apparently taken down that State of the Mongoose. So much for their whole “transparency” bit.

Piracy and Sales

Intellectual Property Piracy is a ridiculously divisive issue in our culture, and despite my “in your face” leanings, I’m not here to take a moral stand. Piracy is, generally, illegal in my country, and the noose is likely to get tighter before it gets looser; the looming threats of SOPA/PIPA are evidence that the money is going to try to protect the money.

What I am here to talk about, after my long absence, are the effects of piracy on the gaming industry. It’s no joke to smalls publishers; there is a distinct feeling that the proliferation of digital ‘scans’ has been a major factor in the ruining of the market. As Matthew Grau, creator of the game CthulhuTech, notes:

That doesn’t even address the issue of piracy. I remember a day when a mediocre release of a game book sold 3000-5000 copies, with healthy restock orders. Now, a successful release might sell 1000, if you are lucky, selling through the rest of your 3000 unit print run in three years – many companies print far less. Not only is the industry shrinking, but people don’t have to pay for their gaming books anymore if they don’t want to. Unfortunately, unlike the music industry, we are not made of money. It costs a surprisingly large amount of money to develop a well-written and attractive gaming book and the return is not so hot. Without those extra sales, the traditional model of core plus regular supplementation isn’t really viable.

Oh, really?

A follower of mine, Old School GM, posted an interesting article about the sales of Eclipse Phase, taken straight from the horses’ mouths: their company report. This got me thinking, much as my article and blog got him thinking. We don’t have any concrete idea just how big the industry is, but the numbers behind those links show some fantastic progress for the folks at Posthuman Studios.

What is most interesting is that Eclipse Phase is FREE. Free as in beer. You can download it, legally from torrent sites, sanctioned by the publisher. What’s more, you have free reign to remix or redo the game and publish it yourself. In the spirit of the posthuman information age, ownership is nothing. Want to pay? Sure! Thanks! Don’t want to pay? Here, you can have it, from us, for free.

Under this model, Posthuman Studios sold a tremendous 8,422 units in 2010. That’s big numbers for a small press publisher. One could crunch the numbers and reveal their probably gross, but I won’t do that to them. It’s not important. They’re moving units of a product that they’re also giving away for free. Meanwhile, the Cthulhutech guys are spending a lot of time whining about how piracy is ruining their business. A not-insignificant amount of time and effort is wasted by them (and many other small press companies) “chasing down pirates.”

So, we have two games of comparable scale. Why is one selling, when it’s available for free, and another is struggling? Well, friends and grognards, I think you already know the answer. It’s Quality.

You see, Eclipse Phase is a magnificent game. The setting is a genius take on the idea of a Posthuman world; the background and adventure work is top-notch. Players love it, because it’s an empowering, vast solar system of intrigue and information. There are nearly infinite possibilities for adventure, and new sourcebooks are being released all the time. And, despite the fact that you can have them for free, many customers are willing to pay for the books and PDFs.

Cthulhutech, on the other hand, is a mess. The system sucks, the setting is full of stereotypical, mustache-twirling demons that betray the basic principles of Lovecraft’s mythos, and the developers are fond of telling the players that they are playing the game wrong. New supplements aren’t coming out (mostly because of the aforementioned whining about sales).

It’s worse than that, though. The books and adventures are chock full of fetishistic descriptions of murder, rape, and misogynistic and/or racist portrayals of, well, just about anyone the authors can think of. If you don’t believe me, I encourage you to read Ettin’s reviews of Cthulhutech and its supplements. One of the adventures ends in a narrated rape scene. (One of the writers once claimed the game was only around 2% rape.)

Yeah, I’m really wondering why one of these games is selling, and another isn’t. If you’re not convinced, though, I encourage you to look at a big player: Paizo, who literally gives their core rules away for free. Do people pirate their PDFs? Sure, almost certainly they do. However, they’ve chosen a winning business practice out of making people desire their actual products.

We see the same themes repeated throughout the industry: if a release is good, if the art is beautiful, if the rules are laid out well, if there are useful game aids and accessories, customers will want to purchase the product.

It’s almost like I’ve said this before.

Dispelling Some Myths About Fifth Edition (Part 2)

Unless you’ve been living in a particularly deep portion of the Underdark, you know that Wizards of the Coast announced that it is working on the Fifth Edition of D&D last week. Let’s be honest here: we know so very little about the system that any sort of useful speculation on its actual content is impossible.

However, there are several myths that are thrown around on the internet about D&D and its history that I would like to address. We covered one myth on Monday, here are two more!

Myth #2: The New Edition is Too Soon/a Money Grab

Well, let’s do some math:

First Edition (1978) to Second Edition (1989): 11 years

Second Edition (1989) to Revised Second Edition (1995)*: 6 years

Revised Second Edition (1995) to Third Edition (2000): 5 years

Third Edition (2000) to “Three Point Five” (2003): 3 years

Three Point Five (2003) to Fourth Edition (2008): 5 years

Fourth Edition (2008) to Fifth Edition (2013?): 5 years

The mean time between the release of a new Player’s Handbook is 5.8 years, and the median and mode are five years. What this tells us is that we are, based on prior performance, DUE for a new edition of D&D. There is nothing anomalous about their announcement. In fact, the anomaly here is the delay between the release of First and Second editions!

*”Wait!” you’re saying, “Revised wasn’t a new edition!” The problem with this is that there are quite a few indicators pointing the the fact that TSR wantedto release a new edition in 1995, and that they did, in a way. There were rumors of its development, so much that “This is not AD&D Third Edition” was printed in big, red letters on the first page. What’s more, the release of the Player’s Option rules really pointed to the development of a new, improved game (those books didn’t come out of nowhere). Player’s Option is, truly, a different game than core AD&D.

Myth #3: Gygax Would Hate All These New Editions

Well, this one is technically true. However, it is often rolled out in defense of Third Edition play, as if the style of play encouraged by that game is “what Gary wanted.” Nothing could be further from the truth. In his own words:

I’ve looked at them, yes, but I’m not really a fan. The new D&D is too rule intensive. It’s relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It’s done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good.

As a matter of fact, Gygax disliked Second Edition.

Dispelling Some Myths About Fifth Edition (Part 1)

Unless you’ve been living in a particularly deep portion of the Underdark, you know that Wizards of the Coast announced that it is working on the Fifth Edition of D&D last week. Let’s be honest here: we know so very little about the system that any sort of useful speculation on its actual content is impossible.

However, there are several myths that are thrown around on the internet about D&D and its history that I would like to address. Quite simply, I believe D&D 5 could be an amazing move for Wizards, and gaming as a whole.

Myth #1: Rebooting D&D is Killing It

This sentiment is often followed by “X Edition is just fine!” Often, people point to the fracturing effect of edition wars as evidence to the idea that no new editions should be released. The idea that the shitty, toxic parts of the fanbase should rule the industry just baffles me.

Truth be told, this is a perfect opportunity for Wizards to do something awesome with D&D. Why? The answer is simple: DDI.

Dungeons & Dragons Interactive, a subscription-based set of web-based tools for creating characters, monsters, and scenarios, is one truly new thing in the industry. It’s a consistent, participation-based source of revenue for Wizards: basically, it allows them to monetize the fact that people are playing D&D! You don’t have to sell books, you just have to keep the players playing!

Every marker show us that DDI has been remarkably successful. A subscriber count from the WotC forums shows us that Wizards is raking in revenues of at least $400,000 a month from DDI, or $4.8 million a year. To put that in perspective, they would have to sell 342,000 more books (34.95 a book) a year – more than any edition of D&D has sold in decades, if not ever – to equal the revenues from DDI.

(Incidentally, this is the source of the “X game outselling D&D” claims. It’s true, they are being outsold on the book market; however, Wizards likely doesn’t care about anything but the bad press.)

What’s more, DDI is great for players. A new player can spend less than $40 and have access to every bit of rules content out there, fully errata’ed and revised. An existing player doesn’t have to purchase new books to keep up with everything. All you have to do is subscribe.

If DDI is so successful, though, then why a new edition? Well, Wizards isn’t perfect. Fourth Edition has succumbed to the same heat death that killed Third:bloat. There are thousands of powers, over five thousand feats, dozens of classes and builds. Quite a bit of those are useless from a player standpoint, and just clog up the character builder. Monsters are wildly variable in power and staying ability. Skill challenges still suck as written.

They tried the halfway-reboot strategy with Essentials. The best option is to tear down the system, and build a new one out of what worked in previous editions. They have the opportunity to build Fifth Edition around the DDI platform, instead of adding DDI as an afterthought. This is a real opportunity for success.

We’ll see how they handle it.