GURPS News updated

[Kromm]

The major problem with the ever-popular "recapture" theory is that it ignores the time dimension. Simplified:

• If a game sells 10,000 copies a year for 10 years, it sells 100,000 copies. Great!
  
• If most everybody who buys the game drops it within a year, there aren't many more than 10,000 players at a time . . . maybe a few more, but not enough. Not so great.
  
• Because these gamers are self-siloed by year, they have little in common and can't be brought into the same "big tent." Appeals to the 10,000 gamers from Year 1 won't please the 10,000 gamers from Year 10, and vice versa.
  
• If the finances of the game show that we need, say 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 regular, paying customers at once to make it work, then calling back 10,000 people won't help much.
  
• So, the alternative is either to create a game that sells 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000 copies per year, or to create one that sells only 10,000 copies per year but has two- or five- or 10-year retention.

All of the above numbers are made up for illustrative purposes! But this is in essence the problem GURPS faces, and that has been complicated by "edition wars."

[Kromm]

Put another way, GURPS was never wildly financially successful, but it was doing okay for what it was. Since then, games like Munchkin have raised the bar for "okay." So, GURPS has to keep up, or why not invest its resources in another game that can?

[Michael Thayne]

I'm not sure "take the foot off the crunch pedal" is the right framing. Overwhelming newbies with crunch is basically the default state of GURPS. What we really need is ways of making the crunch friendly to newbies, like Douglas Cole's Delves to Grow product. Indeed, my current GURPS pet project is to try to create something even simpler than Delvers to Grow, but where you can still play classic archetypes not supported by GURPS Lite like wizards and stuff.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Durig that time the greatest success inthe industry has been WOTC launching 3.0 and recapturing a large percentage of their base that had drifted off (i.e. selling a million copies). Te relative success of 5e ahs been recapturing people they lost to 4e and power creep in late 3.5.

D&D also did something I'm not sure SJ Games is going to want to do: released its core rules under the OGL so that people could publish their own content without having to make a deal with WotC (or am I wrong about how that works?). Pathfinder followed up on that and it did well. I'm not sure any game you need to buy is going to compete as well as a game where you can start for free. (And not that I think SJ Games should do this.)

Plus, for D&D5e, there was the whole "voice actors stream-play D&D".

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Overwhelming newbies with crunch is basically the default state of GURPS.

To be very clear: The Powers That Be want to change that going forward. The aim isn't to keep the past and simplify it for the future, but to reinvent a bit and discard parts of the past that seem too weighty.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

What we really need is ways of making the crunch friendly to newbies, like Douglas Cole's Delves to Grow product. Indeed, my current GURPS pet project is to try to create something even simpler than Delvers to Grow, but where you can still play classic archetypes not supported by GURPS Lite like wizards and stuff.

We have a thread on this very forum where someone complains they're having a hard time using GURPS for supers because there aren't enough sample stat blocks.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

D&D also did something I'm not sure SJ Games is going to want to do: released its core rules under the OGL so that people could publish their own content without having to make a deal with WotC (or am I wrong about how that works?). Pathfinder followed up on that and it did well. I'm not sure any game you need to buy is going to compete as well as a game where you can start for free. (And not that I think SJ Games should do this.)

I do think that there's merit to an OGL for an RPG. That wouldn't be my decision, however; I'm not even one of the six people out of 35 or so who'd get a vote. If ever GURPS goes south and I decide to self-publish a game, it'll definitely use the OGL model.

[Michael Thayne]

One thing that's striking to me about D&D 5e, as someone who got into RPGs in 1998 or 1999, is how incredibly streamlined character creation is. A bit less so for spellcasters, but if you want to make a 1st level fighter you just need to pick your race, fighting style, and background ("noble", "folk hero", etc.) and you're good to go. There's proficiencies too, but your list of choices is much shorter than in previous editions.

Some classes are actually even simpler to create 1st level characters for because they don't lock you in to a subclass until 3rd level. Seriously. I suspect that has a lot to do with why the theater kids are now getting into D&D.

[Michael Thayne]

Originally Posted by SilvercatMoonpaw

We have a thread on this very forum where someone complains they're having a hard time using GURPS for supers because there aren't enough sample stat blocks.

Man, the presentation of that book is in some ways uniquely bad. A number of templates clearly mean to say "take all of the following abilities, plus one of the listed optional abilities" while failing to indicate which abilities are meant to be mandatory and which are meant to be optional. In at least one case this is exacerbated by an arithmetic error that makes the templates instructions literally impossible to follow as written. Really unfortunate because I love supers as a genre and there are some useful ideas in there.

[Dalin]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Some classes are actually even simpler to create 1st level characters for because they don't lock you in to a subclass until 3rd level. Seriously. I suspect that has a lot to do with why the theater kids are now getting into D&D.

A bunch of middle-school theater kids signed up for the week-long DFRPG summer camp that I'm running with a colleague next week. (With a second camp two weeks later.) We've got 32 copies of DFRPG on hand to give to our attendees (thanks to a generous discount from SJG) and will be using Delvers to Grow and, if we can get it in time, Doug's new Bestiary (thanks to a similarly generous discount from Gaming Ballistic).

This is our second year trying this out. Last year was moderately successful, though we didn't provide any actual products to the kids. (I knew at least a few of them purchased material after the camp.) I've had plenty of success getting kids into DFRPG in small groups, but it is still fairly crunchy, even after paring down other genres. We're trying out this camp idea to see how it appeals when they have a chance to really dive into it for 30-some hours. My hope is that we'll be growing the local community of GURPS fans.

We still have a few spots open in either week, if any forumites live near the Twin Cities (Minnesota) and have (or are!) kids entering grades 6-9 next fall. Here's the link; scroll down to find the two Roleplaying Games options on the left side.