Jon H wrote: This is fantastic to hear.

How I personally think this relates to RPGs: Products that require a vast collection of supplements. The idea that supplements prove a game is alive. The urge to appeal to collectors. The urge to stick to the same old 'geek-genre' approach. Preaching to the choir.

Your comment about prolific supplements (in RPGs) ties in with other's comments on issues-vs.-compilations and pre-orders (for comics). One of the problems i see with this is that it's much less easy to satisfy the hard-core gamer with a preorder list, etc., than the hard-core comic enthusiast. Since comics come in series, it's easy for the comic reader to predict what they want, and thus preorder it ("i'm in the middle of story X, so i want the next issue of story X; repeat, indefinitely"). RPGs, on the other hand, are a much trickier bunch. Partly because of higher relative costs (comics are, what, ~$5/ea these days?), and partly because they are judged more utilitarianly (so the gamer doesn't necessarily want the next product, unless it appeals to them), very few gamers buy every product for every game line they play. And, i suspect, very few of them are confident enough of a line to buy things sight-unseen (with a comic book, if you like the combination of characters and creators, you'll probably like one issue as much as the next; in addition to the utility question, above, RPG products in a given line are created by different people, and explicitly try and address varying goals, rather than constant ones). Frex, even for Ars Magica, which comes from a company i adore and for which there is no element of the setting i'm not interested in, i don't necessarily buy everything (though i can mostly predict, in time to preorder, which ones i want and which i don't).

RPG connection: D&D is a by-word for rpgs in many people's heads. The format of D&D appears the easiest to explain to a new customer. But is it? Why do I think that? Is using Dungeons and Dragons as a model for explaining roleplaying games reinforcing a certain gamer stereotype?

I've long said that D&D is the most-representative RPG in the sense that given a random RPer they'd probably know it, and it's the easiest to find; but the least-representative in the sense that it's out on one end of the spectrum of RPGs, rather than as ort of middle-ground example. It's a bit like different kinds of "average": D&D may be the mode of RPGs, but it's nowhere near the mean or median (when we get away from statistics and address market, i'm not sure whether mean or median is the best analogy).

I never know how to answer the inevitable "oh, you mean like D&D" responses to me describing what i write. I usually say something like "well, yes, but, no, not really," and then go on to explain that D&D is actually horribly misrepresentative of what i'm talking about, except in the broadest of strokes (with more detail if the listener is interested).

mearls wrote: I think the Page 45 model is interesting, but I think this discussion misses what cuts to the heart of its success. It isn't the genre of comics they sell, but the presentation. Any product can benefit from intelligent, thoughtful sales people.

Brent Erwin of smallpresscomics.com is a living example of what mearls is talking about regarding sales people. I've read several statements from my small press cohorts praising Brent's ability to sell comics...any kind of comics...at conventions. David Hedgecock remarked that at a con this past summer (SPX, maybe?) he was not selling many books at all. Brent shows up and WHAM! he literally drags people in and they walk away carrying comics. These are people who would not have otherwise even taken a first look at the little "ashcan" comics tables.

You can't sell something to people who don't know what it is you're selling, and you can't depend on them to come to you and find out.

This doesn't add much to this already extensive and intriguing thread, but there ya go.