Quote:
Originally Posted by warmachine
GURPS authors have told me they don't write adventures because they don't sell. This has changed?
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There are a couple of different issues here, so I'll tackle them both:
- GURPS authors don't want to write adventures because they don't sell. This may well be true; given sales of past adventures, it wouldn't surprise me if many established GURPS authors would rather spend their time reaching a larger audience. If Random GURPS Adventure takes the same amount of time as GURPS Ultra-Cool Add-On Design System but only sells half the copies, it'd be an understandable decision to go with the latter.
- GURPS authors don't write adventures because we don't try to wrangle them up from authors (because they don't sell). Again, there's also truth to this. From my POV, Mirror of the Fire Demon is quite probably the most complex project we've assembled that didn't receive a hardcover-level 40-person playtest (which would've been counterproductive). Unlike other projects that benefit from "armchair reviews," a full adventure really requires extensive play testing to make sure it works. If something needs to be tweaked significantly, than it usually has to go back and be played again. Taking care of corner cases, contingencies, and other unforeseen difficulties adds to word count, which adds its own problems. So, since adventures take a lot more work than a normal project and don't turn out to be as worthwhile, we need to careful in how we proceed.
(Let me also take this moment to offer a special thanks to those brave souls, who -- with their groups -- truly kicked the tires on this one to the best of their abilities. Thank you, Peter, Antoni, Christopher, and Emily!)
We took great pains to ensure that
Mirror of the Fire Demon was just about the "best case scenario" (pun only slightly intended): It's for our most-popular
GURPS sub-line, written by an established author, and designed to have reuse applicability for other campaigns. Because of this, we'll be looking at its performance closely when deciding if/how we should tackle other adventures; if the sales of this adventure don't justify the effort we put into it, any future adventures will have a
much harder time.
Which is to say, a dollar-vote for
Mirror of the Fire Demon is also a dollar-vote for more adventures. :-)