GURPS Realm Management

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

I own City Stats, Board Rooms and Curia, and Realms. I love them all. I love worldbuilding and as both a GM and an aspiring novelist I find these to be useful.

:-)

Originally Posted by Been

I must admit I would like to see kingdoms that have little farming but vast mineral wealth ( Your typical dwarf mountain hold)

Zarthus is kind of like this. Their black gold mines are seemingly endless, but they can't really farm food there. Not enough at least. The necromantic energies that spawn undead galore ensure life doesn't grow well there.

[Emerikol]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

:-)

I'm going to be using realms very soon to detail out the nations of the campaign world. So I will have a firmer grip on the details of using the system. I've read it through and liked it a lot.

I saw the discussion above concerning page length and forcing it to fit the size it was contracted to be. I just wonder if the size should have been reconsidered since you seemed to have so much extra stuff that had to be cut away. If you went one size larger and charged the extra amount do you think it would have killed sales. Is there a price that is key to getting the most sales?

My guess is that those that want it are buying it even with the stuff cut out. They'd have also bought it if the stuff was in there of course. But if in and the price jumps a couple bucks does that stop some of those people from buying it. Long term it doesn't stop me probably but I do have a budget and only spend so much at any one time.

[hal]

Originally Posted by maximara

So Area = X/2 actually becomes Area = e^(ln(10)*Size/3)/2?

2*Area = e^(ln(10)*Size/3)
ln(2*Area) = ln(10)*Size/3
(ln(2*Area) / ln(10)) * 3 = Size

That is a far saner equation. Thanks

it would appear that ln(10) is always 1. Thus, the above reduction (ie last equation would seemingly work out to:

ln(2*area)*3

Now, I tried using the formula for someone who holds say, 1400 acres. Dividing this by 640 acres to a square mile, we have 2.1875 square miles. Multiply by 2 and we end up with 1.922934172074996149571782039084. I presume that this rounds to a +2 realm size?

Note: that value of 1.922 something is just a copy and paste from the calculator from Microsoft windows. Normally i'd not bother entering all those digits!

[maximara]

Originally Posted by hal

it would appear that ln(10) is always 1.

Uh, no. ln(10) = 2.302585093

We are told that Vatican City is -1 on page 4. Looking Vatican City up it is 109 acres (0.170313 mi²)

Using your version (ln(2*area)*3) we get -3.2309 which would round to -3.

(ln(2*Area) / ln(10)) * 3 on the other hand gives us -1.40316 which does indeed round to -1.

1400 acres (2.1875 mi²) using your formula would produce 4.4277. The formula I gave does produce the 1.9229 you gave us so I don't understand how you can say "it would appear that ln(10) is always 1."

[Gnaskar]

Originally Posted by hal

it would appear that ln(10) is always 1.

ln(10) is 2.30something. You may be confusing the natural log with the "log" symbol on many calculators, which is actually a shortcut for the function ln(x)/ln(10). ln(10)/ln(10) is naturally always 1.

Oh, hey. log(2*Area)*3 is another way of writing the correct formula, so you hit the right answer by mistake.

[hal]

Originally Posted by Gnaskar

ln(10) is 2.30something. You may be confusing the natural log with the "log" symbol on many calculators, which is actually a shortcut for the function ln(x)/ln(10). ln(10)/ln(10) is naturally always 1.

Oh, hey. log(2*Area)*3 is another way of writing the correct formula, so you hit the right answer by mistake.

Right, I was confusing Ln with Log. My bad. I did run the numbers for 500,000 sq miles etc and got numbers that matched the table, which is odd.

[Tymathee]

Originally Posted by Emerikol

Is there a price that is key to getting the most sales?

I'm just another GURPS fan, but I suspect they've set themselves in a pattern of bite-sized, niche content at relatively cheap prices for PDFs. In theory, this would incentivize people to purchase lots of content. It's a good strategy; there's a reason why "microtransactions" are so profitable for a lot "Free to Play" desktop and mobile games. Part of what makes those games successful though, and the constant cheap content profitable, is highly aggressive marketing.

I'm sure the community and even authors are aware of this, from some skimming of recent talk there's been some push to at least try and garner more social media attention.

What does GURPS need? Better marketing, which will attract new players and thus more product being sold. What does GURPS need for marketing? More money. So buy more GURPS products. Once it's established that GURPS has made improved profits and consistently upholding those improved profits, then they can safely put out heftier books that likely require those profits to warrant writing and publishing them.

The problem is the money isn't coming in. The game is stagnating and not seeing profitable growth for a multitude of reasons... one thing that can be done that won't cost SJG a lot of money is to encourage the consumer base, the fandom, to market the product line for them. Spread the good word of GURPS.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Tymathee

What does GURPS need? Better marketing, which will attract new players and thus more product being sold. What does GURPS need for marketing? More money.

There are actually three categories of advertising: Owned Media, Paid Media, and Earned Media (Game Theory: YouTube is Ruining Gaming! makes it easy to understand)

What GURPS really needs is what is known as Earned Media.

In the pre Internet days Owned Media would have been things like Dragon Magazine (TSR/WotC) or Pyramid Magazine vol 1. (SJG); where the company had an in house method to making people aware of their game

Paid Media was the ads for GURPS or Car Wars or Ogre in Dragon Magazine ie SGJ paid someone to make people aware of their game.

Earned Media is "the holy grail" as "it is what you get for free when you inspire
people to talk about or share what you done."

This is why WotC created the open game license for D&D and later a webpage with the guts of it; They were largely obsoleting AD&D1 and 2 and needed material to push the revised mechanics and so opened things up and let the fans largely go to town.

Earned Media is all the fan adaptations and conversions of other properties to GURPS as well as the original stuff.

It is updates of things like GURPS 3x3 Eyes and GURPS Mummy and original settings Netbooks and various fansites/blogs

With Covid still putting a hammer to the economy Earned Media is the better option as many people just don't have the disposable income to make a meaningful dent in how SJG sees GURPS as far as either Owned or Paid Media is concerned.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Isn't this kind of off topic for this thread?

[Tymathee]

Originally Posted by maximara

*snip*

Oh, I suppose this falls under my "Spread the good word of GURPS" comment. Neat stuff though, I learned new vocabulary today! MatPat puts out some neat content, I'll have to give the video a full watch.

Some campaign ideas I have brewing pretty much require that I write up a whole book (or rather a dense collection of notes) that with a bit of spit-polishing could get posted for the internet to peruse.

Perhaps this is off topic though, but I think between the two of us we more or less answered Emerikol's question.