What GURPS needs... now

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

* The essential element of metaplot is not that the world changed because the PCs chose to take no action; it's that the world changed (a) despite the actions of the PCs and (b) in a way that affects the PCs.

So: Luke Skywalker comes back home and finds his aunt and uncle dead and their farm destroyed, and is overwhelmed with despair; he flees into the desert and becomes a wandering beggar. The Death Star destroys the Rebel base and ends the rebellion while Leia watches. No plot.

Luke acts as he does in the film. Plot.

Luke acts as he does in the film. Just as he's getting ready to fly his mission, the Death Star shuts down in space, because a group of dissident programmers have disseminated viral code that deactivate Imperial weapon systems, shifting the fight from battles in space to cyberpunk style netrunning. Metaplot.

Presuming Luke and Leia are our "PCs" in these scenarios...

1 and 3 are fundamentally identical, with 1 having the metaplot shift at the beginning of Act One and 2 at the end.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Somewhere in the arguments the point I was making got lost. I wasn't saying that OISTNB RPG was the next hot RPG product that should be made, I was saying that OISTNB is a far better known property than the various Discworld TV Movies (which, actually, Discworld currently is not in the US), even if both happen to be available on Netflix. Or, in other words, just because something is on Netflix does not make it a "hot commodity."

My point was that Netflix is probably as mainstream as movie theaters or television.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

My point was that Netflix is probably as mainstream as movie theaters or television.

Netflix is mainstream. So is Cable Television. However, just because it happens to be carried by Netflix does not make it mainstream. And that, unfortunately, is true of the Discworld TV movies in the US - they are not mainstream, and happening to have been available at one point on Netflix did not change that.

[Anders]

I don't know that we have the data to assess what GURPS needs... now. We don't have sales figures, and that would seem to me to be vital to such a discussion. Without that, we might as well consult the sacred chickens for an omen.

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Somewhere in the arguments the point I was making got lost. I wasn't saying that OISTNB RPG was the next hot RPG product that should be made, I was saying that OISTNB is a far better known property than the various Discworld TV Movies, even if both happen to be available on Netflix (incidentally, Discworld currently is not available in the US on Netflix). Or, in other words, just because something is on Netflix does not make it a "hot commodity," or even "well known" or "mainstream." Netflix has a lot of back catalog that most people have never watched, and that is where the Discworld movies resided on the scale of popularity.

Or perhaps I understood the point you were making and just disagreed with it?

Specifically you wrote in regards to 100 friends hearing about OITNB vs Discworld.

I would say that's a straw man argument.

[Kalzazz]

Maybe buy DreamWorks Dragons? I bet more people recognize it, and Douglas could write up GURPS Technical Viking to go with

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

Netflix is mainstream. So is Cable Television. However, just because it happens to be carried by Netflix does not make it mainstream. And that, unfortunately, is true of the Discworld TV movies in the US - they are not mainstream, and happening to have been available at one point on Netflix did not change that.

Being bestsellers probably does make the novels pretty mainstream, at least as much as any genre fiction can be. Certainly when I first read Game of Thrones more people had read The Light Fantastic. HBO shows B-movies too, BTW. Is A Song of Ice and Fire a hot license or not?

Which is probably another example of hot licenses mattering very little, incidentally. I have the Guardians of Order A Song of Ice and Fire game; which they published shortly before declaring bankruptcy.

Originally Posted by lachimba

Specifically you wrote in regards to 100 friends hearing about OITNB vs Discworld.

I would say that's a straw man argument.

Based on that logic they should try to get the license to make GURPS Juggers (or give themselves the license to make GURPS GURPS). My 100 friends are maybe not a representative sample of the gaming market...

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Specifically you wrote in regards to 100 friends hearing about OITNB vs Discworld.

Actually, I was contrasting the popularity of OITNB vs the Discworld Movies. And I wasn't talking about the gamability of the two properties at all, just the media penetration of them. I still contend that OITNB is far better known in the US than the Discworld Movies are.

[Kalzazz]

Actually, some episodic TV like DreamWorks Dragons, or Sailor Moon, or TMNT, or Pokemon I have a much clearer grasp on how to DM than Discworld

I would though feel a bit of worry about avoiding blandness in the DreamWorks Dragons game as the entire party is using the 'Viking Dragon Rider' template

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Being bestsellers probably does make the novels pretty mainstream, at least as much as any genre fiction can be.

I think Andrew did a pretty good job of contrasting bestselling novels vs bestselling movies & TV, and why movies & TV interest people in RPGs more than novels do. So I won't retread that ground again.

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Is A Song of Ice and Fire a hot license or not?

I don't know if the license was hot, but the property certainly is right now. Largely because of the HBO TV Series which is currently airing and all the media hype and fan frenzy around it. That's something that didn't happen when the Discworld TV movies came to Netflix. Or even when they appeared on BBC originally (at least, not in the US). And that's the difference between something being a hot property which can draw new customers in and one that doesn't. If there's no media hype and no fan frenzy then the fans aren't going to go looking for, or be led to, the RPG (or other gaming licenses based on that property, for that matter).

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Which is probably another example of hot licenses mattering very little, incidentally. I have the Guardians of Order A Song of Ice and Fire game; which they published shortly before declaring bankruptcy.

Without knowing anything about Guardians of the Order, there are a lot of reasons that could have happened completely unrelated to acquiring the license. And there are some reasons that acquiring the license could have played into that. But it's all speculation I don't care to get bogged down in.