Here’s a fun interview with gamemastering-guru Robin Laws.
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Laying down the Laws
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Monthly Archives: February 2006
How will the next D&D compete with Warcraft?
Interesting musings at OgreCave about the future of D&D. As games like World of Warcraft begin to compete successfully for the attention of tabletop gamers, what can D&D do better than an online roleplaying game?
A few years ago, nobody would’ve been taking this question seriously, as computer RPGs were still relatively crude and offered little of the social experience that’s so integral to a tabletop RPG. But that’s changing rapidly, and it may fall to the next edition of D&D to demonstrate what a traditional tabletop RPG can do better than a beautiful-looking, highly interactive online RPG can. Then and now, most people would cite face-to-face interaction as tabletop RPG’s trump card. From the OgreCave post:
So here’s the question: if having other real live in-the-flesh people at the table with you is a competitive advantage over WoW – and I think it is – how can the next version of the D&D rules take advantage of it instead of just falling back on it as granted? How can tabletop RPG rules actually make the fact of tabletop-ness part of the game itself?
That’s a great question with which to begin!
(As an aside: I’m glad somebody else is talking about it, because I too have been getting the exciting-yet-ominous sense that a new edition of D&D is out on the horizon… distant, to be sure, but getting closer.)
by Nemesis held for ransom
I note with great joy that Nemesis, an all-purpose horror RPG by Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze, is up for ransom at Fundable.org. The way it works is simple: if enough people pledge money to the project by the deadline at the end of February, the game gets released in lavish PDF format. (Read more about this new-fangled “ransom model” of publishing.)
Who could possibly resist a horror game drawing on the mechanics of Godlike and the fevered genius behind Delta Green? Do the Right Thing and help make Nemesis a reality.
by TSR, we hardly knew ye
Whatever happened to TSR? The company that was almost synonymous with Dungeons and Dragons, the company that sat atop the RPG industry for decades?
I’ve read lots of different online explanations over the years trying to pinpoint what exactly went wrong. Most of the rumors sound a bit too melodramatic to be entirely true, even if they have some basis in fact–there are reports that the company’s CEO actually hated gamers; that draconian copyright enforcement alienated its core customers; that nepotism and corruption were rampant.
Today I stumbled across an essay by Ryan Dancey (himself a bit of a controversial character) which gives as good an explanation for TSR’s failure as any. The bottom line: TSR had almost no understanding of their audience and put very little effort into maintaining a workable business model:
I walked again the long threads of decisions made by managers long gone; there are few roadmarks to tell us what was done and why in the years TSR did things like buy a needlepoint distributorship, or establish a west coast office at King Vedor’s mansion. Why had a moderate success in collectable dice triggered a million unit order? Why did I still have stacks and stacks of 1st edition rulebooks in the warehouse? Why did TSR create not once, not twice, but nearly a dozen times a variation on the same, Tolkien inspired, eurocentric fantasy theme? Why had it constantly tried to create different games, poured money into marketing those games, only to realize that nobody was buying those games?
And what was at the heart of that failed business plan? The real kiss of death for TSR was an absence of any real understanding of what their customers even wanted:
In all my research into TSR’s business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found – one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.
No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No “voice of the customer”. TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR lead, everyone else followed.
In other words, TSR was full of people who loved their work and were passionate about the games they created–but who had little or no sense of running a serious business. I suspect this weakness isn’t limited to RPG publishers alone; several game and hobby stores in my area have gone out of business in recent years, and I’ve often wondered if the owners’ enthusiasm for gaming blinded them to the need to learn the basics of business and marketing.
TSR is gone, but the current top-tier RPG publishers seem to have learned the lesson of its failure–Wizards of the Coast, White Wolf, and others are steaming along with no signs of faltering. Let’s hope that TSR’s demise will at least remind would-be RPG publishers today that business savvy and customer awareness are no less important than creative passion when it comes to success.
by Ferry disaster
The recent Egyptian ferry disaster is terribly sad news. If the projected death toll of 1,000 people is accurate, it’s one of the great maritime disasters in recent history.
I’ll confess to a bit of extra interest in this rather depressing story. Several years ago, I was on one of these ferries, traveling not between Egypt and Saudi Arabia but between Egypt and Jordan. I was in Jordan for a few months on an archaeology dig, and after the dig finished, I decided along with a friend to travel to Cairo. Boarding an Egypt-bound ferry at the Gulf of Aqaba was the cheapest such option (and had the advantage of not passing through Israel; several of the enlightened nations of the Middle East won’t let you in with an Israeli stamp on your passport).
And so it was that we ended up on one of these ferries, very similar (as far as I can tell from photos) to the one that just sank. As far as unpleasant experiences go, it was pretty high up on the list. The ferry was obviously antiquated and was ridiculously overcrowded–we spent the several-hour journey sitting squashed on the floor of the main deck along with hundreds of other people, mostly (from what we could gather) Egyptian workers traveling to and from jobs in Jordan. We made many, many morbid jokes during the journey about the ratio of lifeboats to passengers.
It was a hellish trip, but we arrived safely enough, and the experience was quickly blotted out by the even more hellish overnight bus trip from the port to Cairo. The return journey to Jordan was just as tedious, overcrowded, and generally unpleasant.
Of course, my one brief experience riding the Jordan-Egypt ferry does not qualify me to offer an opinion about the ferry disaster. Reports claim that the doomed ferry was well-maintained and operating in accordance with safety regulations. But I hope somebody is paying attention to this guy, quoted in the aforementioned CNN story:
However, one man in the crowd told CNN he had taken the same ship on the same route a month ago and that the ship appeared overloaded on that trip, packed with passengers and laden with eight large trucks filled with freight, the man said.
He also said the clasps that secured lifeboats to the ship were rusted.
Other former passengers also reported that the ferry was antiquated.
“It’s a roll-on, roll-off ferry, and there is big question mark over the stability of this kind of ship,” David Osler, of the London shipping paper Lloyds List, told AP.
Yeah.
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