Report To The Stakeholders

[philreed]

Originally Posted by Jetman

I was surprised there wasn't any mention of Illuminati, given the playtest and all. Does that mean it's a 2019 or later project?

The new edition of Illuminati is in excellent condition (and looking spectacular!) and on track for release this year. The priorities listed do not cover _every_ project we have in the works. Those are intended as big, umbrella guidelines.

[rknop]

Originally Posted by ArchonShiva

The draw of DFRPG, compared to GURPS is threefold: a small number of books containing all relevant material; a common set of rules and options for every grioup; and almost all design decisions already made (the optional rule for training costs is a painful outlier). Gotta-catch-em-all mini-supplements don’t seem to see much adoption, the way they work for GURPS. People are using the boxed set. The idea is that someone can say “These books here are what we’re playing.”

Yeah, the self-containedness, and coherence (DFRPG is more of a game where GURPS is more of a game-building toolkit) made me think that DFRPG is something where an organized play system might almost work. It's really hard to imagine that working for GURPS, because no two GMs run quite the same way. (Which optional rules are you using? What have you tweaked? Who read the character sheet and allowed or disallowed various options?) DFRPG is still more flexible than the systems that have thriving organized play systems, but it might actually work there. (Perhaps looking at 13th Age and seeing how their OP campaign is going, or was going, would be informative, because that game is more flexible and more (at least obviously) GM-judgement dependent than Pathfinder or D&D.)

I suppose if I were independently wealthy and didn't have to spend the utter vast majority of my time and energy on work, I would attempt to create a fan-led version of such a thing.

[Ulairi]

I’m sad that we won’t be receiving anymore box sets or physical releases like Dungeon Fantasy. It sucks that even though the product is selling well it is not enough to make up for the failings of production. I’m also sad that DF isn’t selling well enough to earn continuous physical product to help keep the box set sales going.

I’ve known that RPG aren’t important to the organization for years now. I’ve been to cons with no GURPS products, there is no organization around running public games and promotion, and missing the summer cons for DF was a big hit.


It really sucks for me because I’m not a pdf gamer. It’s very difficult for me to read from PDFs so unless I print out the book (which is very expensive) or luck out with a PoD choice I’m SoL when it comes to GURPS products.

[JMason]

Originally Posted by Ulairi

It really sucks for me because I’m not a pdf gamer. It’s very difficult for me to read from PDFs so unless I print out the book (which is very expensive) or luck out with a PoD choice I’m SoL when it comes to GURPS products.

Well it looks like the POD choices are continuing to rise, with 30 titles listed as "Releasing throughout 2018" (http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ondemand/). These are all 3rd edition books, though.

I would like to see more larger pdfs that then get POD releases, or collecting several pdfs into a POD book. Here's hoping.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by JMason

Well it looks like the POD choices are continuing to rise, with 30 titles listed as "Releasing throughout 2018" (http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/ondemand/). These are all 3rd edition books, though.

Indeed. I suspect that there are technical or economic reasons we're not seeing 4e PDFs offered for POD, but I, for one, would really like to be able to order, or at least offer to my players, physical copies of things like the DF or Action series, which I can use in my current games, rather than 3rd edition books, which I can't.

[JMason]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

Indeed. I suspect that there are technical or economic reasons we're not seeing 4e PDFs offered for POD, but I, for one, would really like to be able to order, or at least offer to my players, physical copies of things like the DF or Action series, which I can use in my current games, rather than 3rd edition books, which I can't.

I'm going to guess that the margins on lower page counts is much lower. And I think I recall there being some reason (quality standards) why sjgames didn't just merge pdfs into print releases. But the DF Companion was pretty much that, so maybe we will see this sort of thing in the future?

I would totally be down for Action and AtE collections!

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by afschell

Would I, as a newcomer, spend $60 for a boxed set knowing that there are only a few adventures ready to run without a lot of effort?

I really, truly see your point, but this can be inverted: Would I, as a publisher, spend large amounts of money on the production of adventures without knowing that people will buy them? The lack of screaming, break-down-the-doors demand for the DFRPG doesn't tell us that adventures would be a safe bet. This is, of course, a chicken-and-egg matter.

Speaking to the matter of budget and overruns:

Ultimately, much of this comes down to "SJ Games hadn't released a bona fide boxed roleplaying (not board, card, or dice) game – with dice, figures, and everything – since GURPS Second Edition in 1987." Realities do change over 30 years. We knew things had changed and that we were taking a risk, whence our use of Kickstarter.

As the primary writer, I'm willing to take some responsibility for the excess time required. Yet in purely mathematical terms, writing on the DFRPG proceeded at a breakneck pace: The GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition was a very similar redesign and streamlining task. It had about 1.7× the word count of the DFRPG, but it also had 4× the development time and 2× as many hands-on designers, for 8× the person-hours, meaning it moved at between 1/5 and 1/4 the speed . . . That seemed entirely reasonable in 2002-2003, but it evidently wasn't as workable 15 years later. Which doesn't change the fact that had I spent even less time on the text, the rules wouldn't have been as good.

Also, many of the delays had nothing to do with text. Art was at least as big a deal – especially when you factor in cover art, figures, and poster maps. Changing all our production assumptions from the 8 1/2" × 11" format used for GURPS to an 8" × 10" one also slowed things down. Even taking breaks from product-creation to write up Kickstarter support and promotional pieces, and give interviews, took its toll. Yet had we not had good art*, a box-friendly format, and advance marketing, who's to say things wouldn't have been worse? Not us, because we hadn't actually done it in 30 years.

—

* Regardless of whether you like the aesthetics of the art, we took pride in avoiding things like making all the characters either white men or women in mail bikinis. We also tried to depict plausible weapons and armor, and match creature art to creature descriptions. All of which meant a lot of back-and-forth over art long after the text was a done deal.

[rickr]

Is this a typo?

In the Overview section, it says: "At the end of 2016, we had 41 full-time staff and contractors, plus a few part-timers."

Shouldn't that be at the end of 2017?

[Darryll]

Originally Posted by JMason

I'm going to guess that the margins on lower page counts is much lower. And I think I recall there being some reason (quality standards) why sjgames didn't just merge pdfs into print releases. But the DF Companion was pretty much that, so maybe we will see this sort of thing in the future?

I would totally be down for Action and AtE collections!

Hey guys, thanks for discussing your interests on POD GURPS books.

We setup the On Demand page with our future planned releases at the bottom of the page. What you see on that page should be released sometime in 2018.

If you have some books you'd like to see, I suggest posting on the GURPS forum. Keep in mind, while we would absolutely love to have a plan for many of the GURPS books to be available in POD, some of them aren't in shape to be easily converted, and would take immense amounts of work to get them into a state that Createspace/Amazon will accept.

As a small footnote, if we put up editions that aren't already converted to 4e, you should find the back of older edition books to contain GURPS Update. If my memory is correct, when we put up Warriors and Rogues, they both contained the 32 pages to assist with conversions.

[HunterS]

Originally Posted by Tom H.

I am patient and do not begrudge the wait.

But for whatever reason, it does appear that some delays are deemed more forgivable than others.

Delays in the stage that Car Wars is in are not great, but they aren't budget killers. Delays at the stages that Dungeon Fantasy RPG was at were an entirely different animal.