Default DriveThruRPG, community content and writing for GURPS

[aaron819]

I'll add my anecdote to this conversation; while bad 3rd party savage worlds books undoubtedly exist, I've never heard the names of any of them and they certainly don't affect the system's reputation.

[Refplace]

I see the following thrusts of this thread.

1. Get more content on DriveThrough RPG
2. Lower the bar for entry for new writers
3. Speed up publication time by self publishing instead of going through the standard process
4. More adventures

On #1 I'm not sure of the value, we already have GURPS content over there, so would a spurt of lower quality material really help the line? Even more than just GURPS W23 sells a lot of product and thus its good for the company to encourage sales through it.
On #2 and #3 I see the value in getting more writers and the bottleneck of the current system, but again I worry about quality.
On #4 I personally dont generally buy adventures as I prefer to make my own and they are alot more complicated for GURPS than D&D because of the versatility and the point instead of level based mechanics. I do like the Locations series though as they are often easier to use repeatedly and modify for different campaigns.

SJG is already testing the idea of third party content with Gaming Ballistic and with a lower bar to entry for TFT. If the TFT thing goes well I can see adventures and locations books being allowed that way in GURPS and that was already speculated on by staff. Though I'm doubtful of the benefit of pushing to DriveThrough over W23, especially with the Traveler example noted above.

[dbm]

I think that it’s more a case of the type of material that gets made / sold. For other games, people make a lot of custom classes, feat collections, new monsters and then you get some locations or campaign sites and full adventures. Whilst SJG does publish content of this kind they can’t produce enough to provide something for everyone. Crowd sourcing that might.

For GURPS, custom classes would be meaningless, but more templates could be cool. Feats are, again, meaningless but power sets could also be interesting. Monster stat would be good. Locations, campaigns and adventures providing GURPS stats could be very useful.

All these things are tools that GMs could use to reduce prep-time. GURPS provides a fantastic set of tools, but using them can take a lot of time between sessions. Some people want to focus their RPG predominantly on the playing and not so much between sessions.

The barrier to SJG is that they need to produce materials with enough broad appeal to pull in sufficient numbers to be commercially viable. Amateur producers are doing it for kudos or maybe enough funds to buy a single book for themselves. They aren’t looking for the same return as SJG and that means what is a viable project for a self-publisher is a broader range of products.

Yes, people can do this for fun and self-publish on a blog currently but discoverability is terrible that way and collecting content published in this way is tricky. I have literally thousands of PDF products, all nicely filed in my cloud storage and searchable / accessible on my iPad. Web content is only available on line, fragile as the publisher may pull it (or be forced to do so...) and spread around. I can harvest web content as a PDF scrape but that still isn’t as useful as a document with even basic structuring.

SJG have taken big an positive steps towards increasing their visibility in the market place and that is great. Hopefully those steps will continue based on success.

[acmegamer]

It's always been something of a tragedy to me that GURPs, one of the best if not the best table top rpg tool sets out there has always been handicapped in it's potential growth by the very company that created it.

Not everyone has the free time, creative ability or will to pick up this tool kit and spend the man hours required to build an in depth, immersive game setting plus adventures. GURPs has always had this high bar that prevents it from being as popular as it should be.

This could change but SJG has to change it's stance on allowing third party developers via sites like DriveThruRPG, it's been quite apparent for some years that SJG's lacks the resources and desire to develop in the directions that many other rpgs find that players want and purchase.

I don't see this stance changing which is a pity, because it means that GURPs will never see the growth it deserves in the table top role-playing games community.

[MadCoder]

Originally Posted by robertsconley

I been publishing my own material for ten years now. Mostly dealing with older edition rules or clones like Swords & Wizardry and the Judges Guild Wilderlands series.

I am also an advocate for open content licenses and the Open Game License. Because of this, I try to keep up with what people are doing with open content license.

So my prediction is thus. If SJ Game was to release a SRD that was open content under the OGL. It would dramatically increase the variety and number of GURPS releated works. It would not impact the quality or release schedule of what SJ Games does. There would be a considerable crossover of support between the different subgroups.

Why?
Because at the level of GURPS and Traveller is more about the reputation of the author or company than the brand. With GURPS and Traveller hobbyists know what they are getting when they sign on. What they don't know is how well the products that John Doe or Acme write will support that.

Thanks robertsconley, good stuff.