This is something I started touching on a couple of days ago, but I decided it would be better served if left to stand on its own.

In the ’90s, the RPG industry embraced the supplement treadmill. Led by TSR, White Wolf, AEG, Pinnacle, and a host of others, publishers discovered that they could monetize their game lines by turning out a constant stream of supplements. If you’re cynical you can describe this as “greed”. If you’re realistic, you’ll realize that a lot of great games got produced and supported which would otherwise not have existed in a shrinking marketplace.

What most of these publishers realized was that player-focused content sold better than GM-focused content. (The simplistic explanation is that there are more players than GMs.) And that gives us the era of the supplement treadmill driven by splatbooks and the class books.

THE WRITING ON THE WALL

By 2000, however, there were clear signs that this supplement treadmill was a short-term solution that led to long-term burnout: Eventually you saturate your market (when your players have more options than they could play in a lifetime), and then the only solution is to burn it all down, revise your rulebooks, and start over again. After several cycles of this, for example, White Wolf eventually had to reboot the entire World of Darkness in an effort to restart their treadmill.

But, ultimately, this isn’t smart business: You’re needlessly tossing away thousands or millions of dollars in development costs every time you burn down your previous edition. And you’re risking alienating your customer base (or losing them altogether).

Right around this time, Ryan Dancey tried a radical new strategy for selling RPGs. The better known part of that strategy was the OGL, but let’s ignore that for now and focus on the other part of the strategy: Evergreen products. Dancey wanted WotC to get out of the supplement business and instead focus on the evergreen products — the products that produce significant sales for significant periods of time.

To cut a long story short, Dancey’s strategy failed: The first two evergreen products WotC launched (Psionics Handbook and Epic Level Handbook) were spectacularly poor in their design and landed with wet, dull thuds. So ’round about 2002, WotC discovered that their evergreen strategy wasn’t working and their B&W, softcover class supplements were being blown away in production value by third party developers.

So WotC did what every major RPG publisher had been doing for the last 15 years: They rebooted the rule system so that they could reboot their supplement lines. In 2003, 3.5 was released and it was followed by a line of full color, hardcover class supplements.

THE DILEMMA

Fast forward a few more years and WotC discovers that the market for 3.5 class supplements has become saturated: Their second (and third) passes through the core classes just aren’t selling as well as the first pass did. Cue the rules reboot.

And this is where WotC made several missteps which has badly fragmented their former market. I’m not going to dwell on that again, but I am going to make a couple of points here:

1. As long-tail economics and the digital era lead to creative material being available in perpetuity, the viability of rebooting your rule system every couple of years in order to reset your supplement market becomes increasingly problematic. The old stuff is still available. (Even if you pull all your PDFs off the market, the used market has become global. And, of course, there’s also piracy.)
2. WotC does not want to risk a repeat of 2008: I’m guessing they would like to do absolutely everything in their power to avoid a 5th Edition because it runs of the risk even further balkanizing their customer base.

I’ve seen many people describe WotC’s recent actions as “flailing”, but I don’t think that’s strictly true. I think they’re experimenting. They are trying to figure out if there’s any way to make D&D profitable in a long-term, sustainable fashion.

And that, IMO, is a good thing.

CHARTING NEW WATERS

Nor is WotC alone in this. There are a lot of publishers trying to chart a new course. Unfortunately, IMO, the solution a lot of those companies have found is settling down into a mindset of “produce little, coast on the marginal revenues from the long-tail of PDF”.

But there are other paths.

Paizo, for example, seems to be having success keeping their core system relatively contained while creating product churn through material which is inherently perishable: Not everyone needs adventure modules, but the people who do will want a new one when they finish the one they’re currently using.

Back at WotC you have the Essentials line as an effort to create a stable set of core products. You have boardgames tapping markets where long-term sales and stocking are more of the norm. You have Fortune Cards as a collectible (and as a way of monetizing organized play without, theoretically, seeming draconian).

Of course, you also have the DDI. Unfortunately, WotC’s execution of the DDI has also been infamously (and repeatedly) botched. The ideal would be charging a subscription fee for a set of useful evergreen tools (the most obvious of which would be the virtual table). In practice, however, it has been a digital subscription to the same burn-out content as the supplement treadmill (and may have arguably hastened the speed of that burn-out for 4th Edition). WotC’s decision to move the character builder online can be best understood as an effort to prevent saturated customers from saying “thanks, I’m good now”, canceling their subscriptions, and continuing to use the builder offline with the content they already purchased.

Personally, I suspect the most successful course would include returning to Dancey’s vision of evergreen products and studying what went wrong with those efforts. And I think a large part of that will be understanding that toolkits don’t sell unless people have projects that require those toolkits: It’s not enough, for example, to provide rules for ship-to-ship combat or mass combat… You need to offer people a mode of gaming in which ship-to-ship combat or mass combat are integral to their games.

This will also begin to tie back into open game tables. But open game tables will also be important because monetizing your existing customers won’t be enough; we also need to figure out how to grow the RPG market again. And I think a large part of the problem has been that the viral speed of the RPG meme has been reduced to molasses by the modern paradigm of gaming. Most games appear to get sold because of actual play experiences: You buy Monopoly or Arkham Horror because you played it with somebody else and enjoyed it. If Monopoly or Arkham Horror had an expected play mode where you got together with the same group of 6 people for 6-18 months before starting a new game to which you might invite new people to join you, then Monopoly and Arkham Horror would not be as popular as they are. Notably, D&D exploded during a time period when this wasn’t the expected mode of play.

According to my e-mail inbox, this apparently needs to be said:

Yes, the new collectible Fortune Cards for 4th Edition are massively dissociated mechanics. But since this is already 4th Edition we’re talking about, I’m not sure that it really matters very much.

Poking around the web to see the full scope of this fuss, I have two additional reactions:

First, the cards are obviously going to create a power creep within the system. The effects on the cards are not even attempting to be balance-neutral, so the net effect of using the cards will be to essentially give everybody free one-shot magic items that can be used every session. I’m surprised to see anybody actually trying to dispute this; it’s like trying to dispute that water is wet. The only interesting point to consider here is that they just recently got done rebalancing the monsters because they decided they had been underpowered when they released the game. Did they rebalance with these cards in mind? Will they need to issue another sweeping errata to take the cards into account? Or will they simply live with the imbalance?

Second, it is absolutely true that WotC is trying to create an MtG-style market for D&D. Again, I’m not clear on how this could even be a matter for dispute: They are selling collectible cards.

Does this mean they’re trying to turn D&D into MtG? Almost certainly not. They’ve already got MtG.

But it does appear that WotC is trying to figure out how to make money from selling accessories for D&D. Or, to put it more accurately, how to get enough of their customer base to continue making regular purchases that aren’t part of the supplement treadmill that D&D can sustain a viable market without rebooting the rule system every 5 years.

And I think, on the balance, that’s a good thing. It’s something that WotC almost certainly needs to do: 2008 was a very bad year for them, and I suspect they’re trying to figure out how to avoid ever splitting their market like that again.

When encountering a hostile force, a group of PCs can:

1. Fight
2. Avoid
3. Flee
4. Negotiate
5. Trick
6. Suborn
7. Call Reinforcements

First Thought: When you’re designing a scenario, just give a couple seconds of thought to how a group of NPCs might react to each stratagem. If something particularly clever occurs to you, jot it down and perhaps restructure the scenario to better support it.

Second Thought: When NPCs encounter a hostile force (i.e., the PCs) they can have the same reactions. Think about it.

A few years ago Monte Cook posted an essay on his website called “Ivory Tower Game Design“. It raises some very important points, but over the years I’m afraid I’ve come to find it deeply annoying because whenever somebody links to it or quotes from it, I can almost guarantee you that they’re about to completely misrepresent the essay’s entire point.

What Cook basically says in the essay is, “Instead of just giving people a big toolbox full of useful tools, we probably should have included more instructions on when those tools are useful and how they can be used to best effect.”

But the vast majority of people quoting the essay instead snip some variant of “we wanted to reward mastery of the game” out of context and then go ape-shit because D&D3 deliberately included “traps” for new players.

The methods of selective quoting vary, but they all basically look something like this:

“Toughness [is] not the best choice of feat.”

OMG! WHY WOULD THEY INCLUDE A SUCKY FEAT LIKE THAT?

There are two problems with this.

First, the full quote is actually, “Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it’s not the best choice of feat.” And then the essay goes on to further clarify its meaning: “To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It’s also handy when you know you’re playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don’t want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).”

In other words, Toughness is a special purpose tool. When used properly, it’s a useful tool. When used improperly, it’s a wasted feat slot. The designers felt like people should be smart enough to figure that out for themselves, but the point of Cook’s essay is that it probably would have been better to include more usage guidelines.

Which ties into the second problem. The larger fallacy here is the belief that you can allow for meaningful choice in any kind of complex system without having some choices be inferior to other choices. This is something I discuss with more detail in “The Many Types of Balance“, but the short version is that in order to achieve this faux-ideal of “every single choice is just as good as every other choice, no matter what combination of choices you make” you need to severely limit either (a) the flexibility of character creation, (b) the scope of gameplay, or (c) both. As a goal, it’s not only without value, but it will significantly cripple your game design. It’s like demanding that a2-a3 and the King’s Gambit both be equally valid openings in Chess.

So the next time you see someone misquoting Cooks “Ivory Tower of Game Design”, do us all a favor and link them here. Maybe it’s not too late to nip this bit of false truth in the bud.

You know the story I never need to read again? It’s the one where some vigilante comes to Gotham City and says, “I’m going to use guns and kill criminals. ‘Cause I’m a bad-ass and I’ve got the guts to do what Batman can’t.” And then, ya know, something goes wrong: A kid or a cop gets caught in the crossfire. It turns out the “criminal” was actually innocent. Commissioner Gordon won’t stand for it. Batman says, “Stop being a dick.” Whatever.

Throw in a quote about “staring into the abyss” if you want to get really “edgy” about it.

(And, no, changing it to a flaming sword doesn’t make it “fresh and exciting”. Cut it out.)

This story has been D.O.A. for awhile now, but the recent Battle for the Cowl mega-plot in the Batman comics uses this plot (I kid you not) three different times.

What really cements the creative bankruptcy involved here, however, is that Battle for the Cowl exists specifically because Batman is missing. And Batman is missing specifically because he broke his own rule and fired a gun. Which means that there was actually an opportunity here to take this tired, weary story and breathe a little fresh, legitimate life into it by using it to explore and comment on the decision that Batman had made.

Unfortunately, all three of the writers involved were too busy beating this dead horse to notice the opportunity that was passing them by.