GNS and game success (split)

[matthijs]

I'm not sure if this point has been made elsewhere, but it seems to me that one of the reasons that early D&D and Vampire were so successful, is their lack of coherence. That is, their rulebooks are ambiguously written, and must be interpreted (drifted) by a group before they can be used. In this interpretation, where the group tries to find out "what the game is actually about", they're actually designing their own game, more or less.

In this way, paradoxically, a badly written rulebook will provide "the perfect game" for a much wider range of gamers than a well-designed one.

(This has led me to doubt whether I'm doing the right thing, commercially, in trying to eliminate ambiguity in the game I'm designing...)

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

The above post was split from Quick ? about a couple of systems.

Matthijs, I strongly dispute the idea that D&D and Vampire were successful due to the ambiguity you're describing. Your phrase "seems to me" is important - it may seem a reasonable observation, but actually it's very naive.

There are two parts to my disagreement.

1. "Successful" can be construed as "keeping the production company out of debt." Neither game was successful in these terms. In fact, D&D may be considered one of the worst albatrosses in hobby history - its ownership has changed hands several hands (even when "TSR" stayed constant) and no one, to date, has managed to make a reliable profit from it. Vampire presents a more complex story, for another day.

The success of D&D in the middle 1970s was based on a 1000-copy print run. For some reason, people thought it would be similarly successful at the 10-million copy level. That delusion has persisted to the present day.

2. However, I think you may be thinking in terms of the limited and rather muddled subculture of gaming - what people think is popular. Two times, in the history of role-playing publishing, a company luckily discovered a current trend in teenager spending habits: (a) the swordsman-barbarian fad in the late 1970s, and (b) the vampire fad in the early 1990s. In each case, game store retailers were surprised by a number of people who came to buy the games who had no connection to hobby gaming, for perhaps six months. They've tried to recapitulate these events ever since. Without going into too many details about the hobby-game economy, don't confuse the presence of books on the shelves (which reflects retailer ordering) with response to market demand based on consumer purchases and play-preferences.

My conclusion: the "success" of both D&D and Vampire should not be considered to reflect the games' suitability for actual use in role-playing, but rather as gear for a teen and late-teen subculture. Furthermore, the success was very short-lived and persists mainly as retailer ordering habits, creating a localized supply-side economy at the retailer-to-customer level. Hobbyists develop their sense of "what's good" largely by talking to retailers, who appear to them as Grand Insider Experts. Therefore a rather vicious circle of retailer ordering and consumer spending begins, which has very little if at anything to do with actually playing the games.

The take-home message: Coherence, in Forge terms, is a matter of making games that people (a) want to play and (b) can actually play. If you're interested in how that translates to market success, perhaps that ought to be taken to the Publishing forum, but also check out Paul Czege's recent financial statement posted in the Half Meme Publishing forum.

One last point: there is a game/system which does qualify for "maximum Driftability," at least in 1980s terms. That game is Champions, later expanded to the Hero System. That's worth a whole essay of its own, currently in preparation.

Best,
Ron

[The GM]

This post is originally from 'A Quick ?....' thread.

Naw, I don't think you're doing the wrong thing by trying to be specific. Clear communication, no matter the business line that you're involved in, is a Good Thing (tm).
I think RPGs suffer greatly from a lack of clarity, and I further think this is bad for the hobby in general. After all, if there was clear communication, would there be mistaken stereotypes about what gaming actually is? Would the general population see gaming in a bad light if it weren't for ambiguous and often faulty marketing campaigns? How much easier would your (and every other game designer's life be) if they weren't fighting an uphill battle when it comes to bad press, propogated by stunning instances of miscommunication about the hobby?
Being clear is the best thing you can do, on so many different levels, from game play to game marketing.
Of course, others may have more to say on this. Just MHO.

[xiombarg]

Excellent point, there, Lisa.

Also, I suggest looking at this thread and the threads referenced in it:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=5054

[Ron Edwards]

Good call, Kirt. I just went over all those threads linked within that one, and man, there's a lot of important stuff there. I hope others take the time to read'em over, especially with some attention to the dates. It'll save a hell of a lot of recapitulation and wheel-spinning.

Best,
Ron

[matthijs]

Thanks to Kirt & Lisa for links & good advice! Ron, I'm very interested in how good game design can/will lead to commercial success. Any threads about this that anyone knows of?

In judging success, I'm going by sales numbers from the gaming store I worked in and co-managed for three years, and what I perceive people to be playing and discussing. However, I understand that who actually makes money off what may be a totally different thing.

[The GM]

I don't know of specific threads. I'll put in this, for what it's worth though.
I don't believe that you can have 'stunning success' by merely marketing your game through traditional game shops. I, W/ a couple of friends are doing an independent RoS supplement. We plan to cross market the crap outta this thing and see where it goes. We have a fabulous artist (Kham Ung) and so we'll market to the art and graphic pen fans, we have some great authors, and so we'll market to the fiction crowd, we have a fab layout guy, and so naturally it follows that we'll market to people who enjoy great looking books. And of course, there's the RPG crowd. It's my dream to have this particular book in a lot of different venues for sale. I'mnot an expert on selling RPGs specifically, but I do know that cross marketing as a business strategy works, and it works big time if you pay attention to your target market.
This may be a topic that belongs in another forum though. <shrugs>
Take my words for what you will. You get what you pay for. ;^D

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi matthijs,

I think Ron's point is that when those numbers were strong, it had less to do with the natutre of the game's rules than with the "Wow we hit the zeitgeist!" accident of the subject matter -- brawny barbarians, angst-ridden vampires -- that was part of the pop culture swirling around the games at the time.

I don't know if *I* buy this, by the way, but I wanted to clarify Ron's point.  My high school friends new jack about Conan, and only a few had read Tolkien when we started playing regularly.

I know also that BattleTech and Shadowrun provided good years for the staff and freelancers of FASA, so something was selling.  But...   That might have had nothing to do with the GAMES, and certainly not the rules.  FASA made bank off of Rules, Supplements (ENDLESS supplements), minatures, adventures, novels, video game deals, and tv/film deals (never to see the light of day) and more.  In other words, people who bought the material, and talked a lot about it, might not have played much.  There was plenty to read, plenty to talk about -- even if you never picked up the dice.

Finally, beware of localised, annecdotal data for sales.  One of the strangest thing about the RPG hobby I noticed was that one state's must-play game is a another state's "what? is that a game? never heard of it."  The internet might have changed this, but I moved around a *lot* in years past, and what games were bought and talked about, and what games never saw the light of a game store shifted completely from community to community.  

Christopher

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Another point to add to Christopher's clarification is this: few game stores, if any, actually track their sales rigorously. Many game retailers, if you can believe this, go by what they "feel" is selling. That's right - they don't use SKU monitoring or records at the register or anything.

Consider as well who is working the register at many stores. Many of them are consumer-advocates of a given game line. I have literally seen store clerks tell customers that the game they chose sucks, and then talk up the one they want the customer to buy, which (no surprise) is usually a supplement-heavy deep-ordered line.

Christopher, I suggest that what you are describing during the middle 1970s was the "shock wave" of the effect I'm describing, not the event itself.

Matthijs, you wrote,

Ron, I'm very interested in how good game design can/will lead to commercial success.

If you do a search using my name and the word "success," you will find a great deal of important foundational discussion before we can have that discussion, and it would be best suited in the

As I mentioned before, however, take a look at Paul's recent sales and profit figures in his sticky post in the My Life with Master forum. And bear in mind that I received from $100 to $300 per week for most of 2003, through direct sales.

Best,
Ron

[Marhault]

Before I weigh in on this discussion, a disclaimer:

I'm still trying to assimilate the whole GNS / Creative Agenda thing.  I've read the overview, simulationist, and gamist articles, but need to reread them all several times before I could honestly say that I fully understand the theory being expressed.  Also, I am still chewing on the linked threads regarding game coherence.

With that out of the way, I want to say a few things.

First of all, I think that success can also be measured in how many people know of, and are familiar with the game.  If I publish a game, and it becomes to the 2010s what D&D was to the 80s and Vampire to the 90s, I would be pretty pleased at having my game be famous, even if it didn't make a dime.  These games are succesful in that they are a benchmark for people who talk about role-playing games, they are even used here at the Forge to illustrate points, because they are so well known.  The only other game that seems to have that status around here is Champions.  D&D especially, is known to people who don't know about RPGs in general.  I can't tell you the number of times I've had this exchange with someone:
"What playing games?"
"Role-playing games."
"What are those?"
"You know, like Dungeons and Dragons?"
"Oh, that. . .

Secondly, although I can't claim to be a part of the movement, from all accounts I've heard about the period in the late 70s and early 80s that there was as much game tinkering going on as there was actual gaming.  Would anyone who was around back then (Ron's already given his opinion on this) say that being a part of that group that was "perfecting the game" was part of the appeal?  I certainly never got that feeling from playing Vampire. . .

Finally, I think you would be crazy to intentionally write an incoherent game.  It's difficult enough to write one that is coherent (or even mostly coherent).  To think (even assuming that D&D and V:tM did enjoy success based somehow on their incoherence) that you would luck into the same phenomenon sounds pretty silly to me.  As a game designer, your job is to prepare a game that can be played enjoyably out of the box, and not make the customer write your game for you.

[Ron Edwards]

Here's another older thread that people may find interesting: Incoherency and sales (apologies if it's already linked above; a quick scan didn't find it, but I may simply be bewildered)

Best,
Ron

[matthijs]

That last link was very useful. Seems a lot of this has been debated already, without any clear consensus being reached. Thanks!