Warhammer to Harnmaster Conversion FAQ

What is this?
It's an attempt to convery WFRP to be playable using the Harnmaster 3 rule system.

Why?
A number of reasons. Essentially, I really like 1) the unique WFRP setting and 2) the detailed Harnmaster rules. There are some things about the WFRP rule system that I'm not thrilled by- in both the first and second edition. Meanwhile, I'm much more familiar with the WFRP setting than I am with Harnworld; while I like Harnmaster's rules, I'm much more interested in the late Medieval/early Renaissance setting of WFRP- not to mention the joys of Chaos.  Honestly, at this point it mostly seems to have been an elaborate thought experiment.

WFRP Harnmaster Conversion Rules

Character Creation

1. Generate Attributes.
2. Select one of the four races- Human, Elf, Halfling or Dwarf.
3. Modify attributes using racial modifier.
4. Open automatic skills at either the default OML.
5. Open racial skills.
6. Generate or choose occupation using WFRP pg. 22.
7. Open occupational skills or improve previously opened skills.
8. Record starting trappings and occupational trappings; record starting wealth and (optional) buy additional weapons and armor.
9. Roll for Fate Points as normal.
   

Miniature Memory Lane

By chance tonight I stumbled across The Stuff of Legends, a site that collects info and photos for old fantasy and sci-fi miniatures. It was quite a trip down memory lane- first and foremost because I stumbled across it while looking for some info about the old Lone Wolf series, the books that first got me into gaming as a ten year-old. Stuff of Legends had photos of the old Lone Wolf miniatures created by Citadel.

That got me poking through the extensive index of old Citadel minis, reminding me of my early days playing WFRP. You can see- particularly in the Citadel C-series miniatures- how the Warhammer world started to distinguish itself from the other 'kill Orcs, collect loot' Tolkien knock-off games that D&D endlessly spawned in the early eighties.

You can spot some of that trademark GW humor in the names of some of the minis- a Rogue Trader Space Marine biker named Vincent Blackshadow, a busty wizardess named Samantha Phox (it was the 80's, after all), a thief named Rownald Biggs...

You can also see some vanished oldies from the Warhammer world. Behold, newbies, the long-vanished Fimir, the little-known Chaos Goblins, the distinctly un-PC Pygmies, the much-loved and much-hated Gnomes, and even some pre-lizardman Slann, with some suspiciously eunuch-like retainers.

Among the 'Fantasy Specials', you'll even find one range of minis that GW and Citadel would no doubt gladly forget- the (NSFW) 'Torture Chamber' series of softcore bondage porn miniatures. Nothing like tiny, painstakingly painted naked women to liven up a long evening in Mom's basement. And to think, TSR got all in a tizzy over Palace of the Silver Princess...

Green Ronin's Freelancer Benefit

Now through GenCon, purchases from Green Ronin's online store will go to help GR pay off some of the many freelancers who have done work for the company during the past few years. Much like poor Palladium (which seems to be bouncing back nicely- press release here), Green Ronin was the victim of some skimming- this time, on the part of its fulfillment house. GR has been paying down its debts, but, as is often the case, the priority has had to be people who can threaten to turn off the lights or grind the printing presses to a halt. Nice of Green Ronin to make an effort to give their freelancers their due- freelancers by and large get the short end of the stick in any time of economic hardship.

Check the Green Ronin site for more details.

Dragonlance Movie in the Offing

In a move sure to inspire strange mixtures of anticipation, nostalgia, and aprehension among older gamers everywhere, the production of an animated Dragonlance movie has been confirmed, after being hinted at by DL creators Weis and Hickman for quite some time. Check out the news here.

Filesharing and the RPG Biz

The news that Wizards of the Coast is planning to throw nearly their entire D&D catalogue into eBook format (discussed earlier) got me thinking again about the topic of filesharing/P2P/piracy/what have you.

So far, the publishing world has not gone into hysterics over the P2P problem the way that the RIAA and MPAA have with music and movies. One reason why this is the case... is that there is still no paper-slayer hardware device. iPods, CD & DVD burners, RCA & S-video output jacks on computers, and high-quality computer speaker rigs have meant that the transition of the family (or more likely, dorm room) computer into a media center has been a quick and easy one.

More D&D eBooks on the way

As reported here on GamingReport.com (it got a mention on Slashdot, too), DriveThruRPG.com has announced that Wizards of the Coast is going forward with a scheme that will eventually see almost all of the D&D library available in eBook form.

There are several interesting ramifications of a decision like this. The first thing that pops to mind for most folks is one word: ...

Piracy. It's one of the more controversial aspects of the plan to a lot of people, and doubtless part of the argument that was going on behind closed doors at WoTC. The new D&D eBooks will feature some of the same watermarking and protection technology used with the current batch of official D&D PDFs. Of course, anyone who has ever poked their head the least bit into the wild and wonderful world of file sharing knows that all of the titles that DriveThruRPG is going to be adding to its offerings are already available on the Internet through BitTorrent sites and other P2P sharing systems.

That gives consumers an interesting choice. Players and DMs who want to support WoTC's eBook scheme can now pay the same price as buying a hard copy of their books for a PDF that has fewer features than the PDF that they could get for free off of their favorite file sharing service. It's hard to say who is going to bight; while I'm sure that there are a lot of folks who would like to have electronic copies of their books in addition to their hardbacks, I doubt many of those folks want to pony up the full price of a book for the privilege. Meanwhile, the size of the market for electronic-only books seems to vary according to who you ask; some gamers are ready to go laptop-only starting yesterday, while others are pointing at their laden bookshelves and screaming "from my cold dead hands!".

Mixed into all of this is more bad news for the small hobbyist shops of the world. Rest assured, retailers don't like it when their "partners" in the publishing biz decide to cut them out of the equation. WoTC's eBook publishing scheme- which can no longer really be called an experiment- means that the nickel-and-dime counting division at WoTC has decided that the potential gains from online-only eBook sales more than offset the consequences of the bruised relationship with retailers. Wizards has the small hobbyist shop market in the worst possible position: D&D & D20 are much too big for any sane RPG retailer to ignore and kick out of the shop, meaning that retailers have little means at their disposal to show WoTC that they don't like being cut out of the equation.

Tiddlywiki: The GM's Friend

While poking through the Treasure Tables GMing Wiki, I stumbled across this little gem: a 'program' (sort of!) called Tiddlywiki that gives you a quick and easy way to create what is essentially a low-tech Wiki that you can contain in a single file.

Cutting through the technical jargon, the bottom line on Tiddlywiki is this: it's a really nifty high-tech HTML file that uses some cute tricks with JavaScript and CSS to turn itself into a document that allows you to quickly create little bits of named text content, and then quickly link between them. Editing, linking, and formatting are all a snap, and the result is a single HTML file that can easily be thrown onto a thumb drive or onto Gmail to make a totally portable Wiki.

What has this to do with gaming, you ask?

If you're a GM for any RPG, you make notes. As games get longer and longer, and particularly if you're interested in creating an immersive and complex world, keeping track of all the little details that get thrown into a game can quickly overwhelm your memory. What was the name of that inn by the docks where the PCs got into a barroom brawl? What's the name of that shady shop owner who can quickly get ahold of 'special orders'- and did he have a hunchback, or was it a lazy eye? Keeping track of details like this can be even harder with online/play by post games, where weeks or months may pass between visits to a particular location or interactions with a specific PC. Not to mention the fact that you want to jot down notes about plot points, have quick access to the stats for PCs and major NPCs, and try to remember all of the various relationships between characters and organizations that exist in your world.

Tiddlywiki isn't a perfect solution for this problem, but it is a damn fine one. After an evening of playing with Tiddlywiki, I had converted my notes for my WFRP campaign from a flat text file (that I was always flipping back and forth through) into a Tiddlywiki document that included:

• Day-by-day summaries of previous action in the campaign
• Stats and background information for all the PC's, as well as a number of NPC's
• Notes about important locations
• Plans for the future

Best of all, all of this information could quickly be linked together, and sorted into logical chunks without losing the ability to look at any piece of information quickly. Anything that referenced anything else (for instance, a mention of an NPC in a PC's background information) linked to the relevant info, meaning that anything that you needed could be pulled up with a single click. Instead of a flat file that I was flicking back and forth through, I had a file that mirrored the web of interactions and relationships between people, places, and things that actually existed in the campaign.

With a little more fiddling, I had turned my copy of Twiddlywiki into a personal WFRP Wiki, containing some of my house rules and homebrew material, ideas and NPCs for a future campaign I've been thinking about, and a number of extra bits and pieces that I've either written myself or downloaded off the web and found to be useful. Most of the effort in incorporating this material was just copying and pasting text over, adding a couple labels, and then making links where I thought they were helpful. It's made it much easier to find what I'm looking for, and I daresay even made it easier to develop new materials; instead of having to keep a half-dozen files open, I can just pop between Tiddlywiki 'twiddlers' when I need to refer to other info.

At any rate, if you're looking for a convenient way to keep track of a lot of campaign information, Tiddlywiki is a great choice. It has nowhere near the overhead of more conventional Wiki solutions (no web server, no database server, no real configuration work to speak of), but still allows some customization (in the form of JavaScript macros and presentation tweaks using CSS). Play with Tiddlywiki and see for yourself.

The Long Drought

It's obviously been a long time since I updated anything here. The long and the short of it is that I have 1) been somewhat busy, and 2) lost access to my laptop for several weeks due to a slight motherboard problem. Rest assured that both problems are now essentially under control, and there should be some updates in the next few days and hours here.

Mount & Blade

So at some point, I said I wasn't going to write about video games in this space, but I'm going to make an exception for Mount & Blade, a game that was pointed out to me by someone on the Black Industries forums. Mount and Blade is the best combination of RPG and combat action that I've played in a long, long time. It's being developed independently, and it gives you an idea of the sorts of games that we might be playing right now if developers were allowed to focus on gameplay and depth, rather than just pushing the envelope on the capacities of hardware graphics acceleration.

The combat sequences are particularly notable. Combat is... is fast paced, at times confusing, and quite deadly. There's something quite satisfying about charging full speed into a pack of footman and striking one down with a single swipe from your sword. Or smacking a galloping knight with an arrow, and watching as he briefly hangs from the stirrups as his horse charges off without him.

Possibly best of all, Mount & Blade is free for the first six levels of character development. After that, you just pay ~18 bucks to the developer if you want to play the full version. The fees fund the ongoing development of the game, so it's well worth it in my opinion.

So much for my free time.

Mini-reviews at Slashdot

Mini-reviews, mostly of some of the recent WOTC books, are up today at Slashdot, as well; as the usual barracking in the comments section.

Barony of the Damned Review

Good review of the new WFRP adventure, Barony of the Damned, up here on the Warpstone forums. I'd have to say that the book is sounding better than I expected; I had just been thinking about unleashing some Ghoul-ishness on my players at some point in the near future, and it seems that our flesh eating brethren play a large role in this new Brettonian adventure.

There seems to be a little confusion regarding this book; Amazon has it listed as part I of a series, as you'll see if you click the link above. This could just be some wackiness on Amazon's part; they also have Black Industries billed as Black Industires which, unless I'm much mistaken, was the name of an Goodyear dealership during the Harrapan empire.

On the other hand, keeping with the theme of damned baronies and BI's 'sourcebook + adventure' combinations, combined with the information about 2007's products, I wonder if there isn't a 'running theme' in the works. A Sylvania book could certainly make up volume II; if they're true to form, that would make volume III what exactly? Something set in the often-overrun city of Praag in Kislev, to go along with the rumored Kislev sourcebook? I'm not sure that there's an established region of Kislev that would go with the Barony of the Damned moniker, but the city descriptions from v1 included some fairly grim tidings regarding that particular location. We've also got the region around the Zombie/Blighted Marshes in Tillia, home of Skavenblight and who knows what other horrors.

Yes, there's truly something for every tourist in the Old World.

Help Save Palladium Games

Bad news from Michigan- Palladium owner Kevin Siembieda just published this open letter indicating that due to the hardships that they've faced over the past year or so (including some large-scale theft and embezzlement on the part of a trusted employee, as well as the failure of the Nokia N-Gage platform to bring the first Rifts video game to the masses), Palladium is facing the possibility of closing its doors in the next few months unless things turn around.

If you would like to see Palladium games keep going, Kevin has asked supporters to order this print from the Palladium store. They'll be numbered and signed by Kevin Siembieda, and everyone who orders will have their name included in a future Palladium product. More importantly, if Palladium received 4-5 thousand orders, they'll have the cash to overcome their recent troubles and keep the doors open.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Palladium is a unique player in the RPG market. More so than any of the other gaming companies that I've dealt with or bought from over the past years, what Palladium does seems like a real labor of love for Kevin and the other Palladium writers and employees. Take a look at Kevin's open letter, and see what you can do to help out one of the last of the great old ones in the RPG industry.

Palladium Memory Lane

I milled around a Barnes & Noble last weekend poking through a copy of Rifts Ultimate Edition that had shown up on the shelves at some point. I never played a huge amount of Rifts per se, but I got my start in the RPG world as a 5th grader playing Erick Wujcik's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, and later Heroes Unlimited.

Rifts and the other Palladium RPGs don't seem to have changed very much over the years. They still, in my mind, encompass the best and worst of an earlier era of roleplaying games... On the 'best' front, I think that it is very hard to beat games like Rifts in terms of raw enthusiasm and imagination. Rifts is a total mish-mash of ideas that, honestly, belong in different games and even different game systems. It's the absolute triumph of the idea that if it's cool and it would be fun to play, there's a place for it somewhere. Ninjas? Vampires? Dragons? Psychics? Giant robots? Throw 'em all in there together. What do you mean it's not reasonable to put a psuedo-ancient Egyptian culture in a tropical rainforest and have them fight dinosaur riding spider-aliens? It's a game! It's cool! Once you've reconciled yourself to spending your afternoons pretending to be a dwarf or a Wookie, who are you to start nit picking about reality?

On the other hand, flipping through old Palladium books- and even quite a few of the current ones- gives you a good idea of some of the very useful developments that have taken place, as gamers and writers have learned more and more about the real nuts and bolts of running these games. Flipping through a lot of Palladium books is like being taught math by someone with ADD. You're hearing a lot of things, and you're sure they all relate somehow, but it's far from clear why your hearing anything in any particular place. Here's part of the character generation rules. Here's rules for drug addiction. Here's a section on skills. Here's vehicle combat. Here's alignment. Here's a section on character classes. Here's the introduction of a whole new rules system for performing magic and a list of 100 spells as part of a chapter on one particular character class. Here's 5 pregeneratred NPCs, and a list of major international conflicts circa 1989. Here's a highly detailed selection of hand guns. Here are the rules for flying a helicopter.

Palladium's rules were never really systematic in the way that something like d20 or Storyteller or the other modern universal systems are. Given the Rules As Written, there isn't a clear way to extend them to situations that you haven't encountered before. The standard for most systems is: take something from an attribute, and something from a skill score, and then roll some dice and compare that stuff with a number that represents the difficulty of what you're doing. Palladium worked on the 'look up an arbitrary percentile score for your skills' skill system, which never made a lot of clear sense. It's obvious that Kevin Siembieda and company have given a lot of thought to the individual elements of the game over the years; unfortunately, this isn't always apparent to the player, and instead we're just left wondering why someone who just learned to fish is better at fishing than someone who just learned to sew is at sewing, and why you get better at singing slightly faster than you get better at dancing, no matter what you're doing with your spare time. Not to mention that a first level character can easily have a 60% chance of defusing a bomb, and a 40% chance of successfully cooking lunch.

The depth of the character creation system was such that making even a 1st level character always seemed to be a multi-day undertaking. I was shocked when I made the jump to AD&D and could roll up a character in just a few minutes, and have him fully equipped and ready to play in an hour or so. I never GMed for a Palladium system game; I can't imagine the prep time that's involved.

But if it's fun, who cares? So cheers to Palladium for their 25 years of gaming, and for keeping firmly in mind that games being fun and cool are the reason to play them, something that some of us would do well to remember as we enter into heated forum arguments regarding the demographics of vampire infestations and the plausibility of self-sustaining Dwarf communities located miles beneath the surface of the earth. It's all a little goofy to begin with; better to accept it and enjoy it.

First Impressions: Knights of the Grail

I got a chance to start looking through Knights of the Grail over the weekend, and on the whole my impressions have been good. While Brettonia does have a very different feel from the Empire, it still seems like the same 'world', albeit with a more conservative and repressive aristocracy. The sections on Brettonian society and the profiles of the individual duchies are the highlights of the book. The new careers and monsters are likely the weakest part. More detailed maps would have been nice, as well as a few more location names, but not a major gripe there. The section on Grail Knights is reviled by some WFRP old-timers as an unwelcome intrusion of high-fantasy power from the wargame, but it doesn't dominate the book, and there's plenty of leeway for GMs to decide how much importance it is going to have on their game.

One of the biggest changes from the v1 background material is that Brettonia feels like a much less urban society than the Empire. The result is that in some cases some of the major Brettonian cities have lost a bit of their flavor compared to v1 (the descriptions are much briefer), but on the other hand it makes for a very different and new gaming experience; the Empire has long been dominated by Nuln, Altdorf, and (especially) Middenheim. Having a game spend a little more time in the countryside, without throwing it straight into the wild wilderness, represents a new tack that may be interesting to explore.

Full review to follow, eventually.

A Look Inside Games Workshop

This thread on the Warseer forum offers an interesting look for us groundlings at the inner workings (or at least bits of them) of Games Workshop and the Black Library. MvS's views on what it's like on the ground for the employees of Games Workshop and their fleet of retail stores are particularly interesting in light of the recent glum news from the retail gaming industry as a whole. It also gives some insight into why things are the way they are at Black Industries, with regards to the schedule, certain... 'shortcomings' in some products, and the occasional crankiness from Official Reps.

In unrelated news... the problem of retail niche hobby shops (and retail game sales) was once again driven home to me today as I set out to (finally!) pick up Knights of the Grail. I called my nearby friendly local gaming store; they had just sold their last copy. I called their satellite store, 15 miles further south; I talked to someone who didn't think they had the book in stock, but might have been looking in the wrong section (I have the damnedest time explaining the difference between WFRP and the miniatures game over the phone: "It's a RPG. It's usually in with the D&D stuff". "Oh, so it's D&D?" "No, it's Warhammer, but not the mini..." "Well, I'm looking at all the Warhammer miniatures, and I don't see that book..." :click:).

I called a less friendly, but also local gaming store. No joy. I used the joys of the Internet to search the inventories of my local Borders. Nada. It was available to be ordered, in which case it would arrive in a couple weeks. Finally, I bit the bullet, gave up on having a new book to flip through this weekend, and ordered it off Amazon. And because I had a gift certificate (credit card perk!), I ordered Forges of Nuln too. And Spires of Altdorf as well. For less actual money spent than it would have cost me to drive two blocks to my FLGS and buy just Knights of the Grail.

I placed the order around noon today. All three books already shipped. They're already less than eight hours drive from my apartment.

I think my FLGS's days might be numbered.

Serenity (now?)

Started poking through the (relatively) new Serenity RPG last night... Still not sure what my feelings are about it. It's clearly geared towards drawing fans of Firefly into RPGs, rather than the other way around. Consequently, the stats are relatively basic; PCs, which are supposedly the biggest and baddest of characters in the game, typically have only a half dozen skills or so and two or three edges and flaws a piece (here called Assets and Complications).

Intentionally or not, Serenity seemed to remind me of another Joss Whedon/RPG crossover, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer RPG. Similarly streamlined stats, rules for varying levels of power in the game (typically on a 'crew wide') basis. Licensed RPGs, like licensed video games, have never had a lot of appeal for me. With a few exceptions (such as West Ends great d6 Star Wars line), they tend to feel a little sketchy. The licensee typically can't go to far beyond the background provided by the brand, and it often feels like the intent is to cash in a few bucks on a current trend.

On the other hand, there are some things about Serenity that I definitely like...For one thing, I like the idea of the ships in the game being characters themselves, with many of the same traits (like Assets and Complications) that regular characters have. It provides a neat way to customize ships, and makes them feel a bit like the creaky, temperamental hulks we know and love (like Serenity and the Millennium Falcon in a way that most vehicle customization schemes never really achieve.

The second neat idea in Serenity is the Plot Point system. Plot Points work like the ubiquitous luck/fortune/character/karma points that a lot of systems have, but with a twist. In addition to providing a mechanical bonus, like a bonus to a die roll or a reroll, Plot Points can be used to let players tweak the game by introducing minor wrinkles in the plot. For the price of a single Plot Point, the owner of a bar might turn out to be an old acquaintance when a character is broke. For a few Plot Points, you might manage to pull some additional, desperately needed resources out of your back pocket. For a big heap of the things, improbably circumstances will align to save your sorry ass from certain death. It's a neat idea; similar to Fate Points from WFRP, but with wider application. I've never been too thrilled with how Fortune Points work in v2, so I might just 'borrow' the idea at some point.

The Rebirth of the Weird West?

During a period of time when my enthusiasm for RPGs had lapsed a bit, Pinnacle Entertainment's Deadlands was one of the very select group of new games that drew my attention. It was, to put it gently, an original concept; sort of Wild Wild West meets Dawn of the Dead, with some of the feel of an over-arching plot that the old World of Darkness achieved, but without the WOD need to take itself as seriously as cancer. Lots of games have original concepts, but Deadlands had a system to back it up that was interesting, fit the feel of the game, and was reasonably playable. The d20 Deadlands conversion never did it for me, as a result; d20 was just too generic and too rigid to fit with what had been a very thematic and flexible system.

Now I hear that after months and months of rumors and delays, Deadlands is returning to the world of the living... Great White Games, the successor to PEG Inc., is bringing Deadlands back, this time using a variation of the Deadlands-influenced Savage Worlds system. The new Deadlands will be the first real incentive I've had to take a look at the SW system. I'm normally a little wary of multi-world generic systems; to me, every d20 game feels mostly like D&D in funny outfits, and GURPS.... well, I've been working on making a GURPS character for the past several years, and I'm hopeful that sometime soon I'll have some progress to report (in all fairness, the incredible detail of GURPS is great.... for playing other games, or if you're interested in putting in the time and effort to design your own RPG. I've got a whole list of things from GURPS High Tech and GURPS Low Tech that I want to pilfer for my WFRP games...).

There are a couple of things about the resurrection of Deadlands that has me wondering. For one, Great White is saying that the core rulebook is going to be all you need to play the entire game- that there won't be a bunch of supplements with extra edges and flaws or expanded rules and spells, etc. I'm not sure if they mean that other Savage Worlds products will be the means by which expansions to Deadlands enter the market, or if they really mean to not add anything to the line other than the promised Plot Point expansions that push the settings timeline forward. But frankly, I've heard the old 'one book is all you need' line before; it usually translates to 'if you're willing to make your DM do a lot of work to build some additional background and setting for your game', or 'we're hoping you won't notice what's missing until you're too far in to do more than complain on a web forum somewhere'. WFRP1 came very close to meeting that exalted goal of 'one book only'; outside of that, most of the games that I have seen haven't lived up to that promise.

The other odd thing is that Great White is making a big push to sell through the old Deadlands material that they still have in stock. They're claiming that the old material still makes for great background reading, but that it won't be reprinted once Deadlands Reloaded hits the street. That seems a little odd to me. There was a great deal of information that was covered in the old Deadlands books- expansions to the major character types, lots of background on the organizations and settings of the Deadlands world, etc. This makes it difficult for me to assess what their promise not to reprint this material means. It seems to either mean that 1) there is going to be very anemic background material for Deadlands available outside the core book, or 2) the information is going to be reprinted, but in new books and a new form, or maybe 2) plus "we'd really like to sell through our old stock".

Great White has slipped several times on the publication date for Deadlands; it seems that its author is rather overcommited working for City of Heroes, for one thing. It just leaves me wondering how well supported the Deadlands line is going to be once it gets back into circulation.

The State and Future of Gaming

This entry by Gareth-Michael Skarka puts some concrete numbers from Comics & Games Retailer to the rather rickety state of the RPG industry. The numbers look, in a word, horrible. Clearly, the growth of MMORPGs and other factors are taking a big chunk out of the gaming world.

A lot of people seem to blame Wizards of the Coast and the d20 system for killing off a lot of companies in the RPG market... Wizards certainly has the strongest visibility in the RPG market, and enjoys penetration into the main-stream retail space that other publishers just can't match right now. I think as a result, Wizards has picked up more and more of the 'new gamer' market over the past several years, which has probably put the hurt on some other companies.

On the other hand, you could make the argument that really, Wizards is responsible for making the market as a whole larger than it previously was. TSR long had an edge in the 'new gamer' market that gave it a competitive advantage over the other systems. Dungeons & Dragons remains the single most recognizable name in gaming, and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, the d20 system and the OGL did a lot to lower the barrier to entry in the market for new publishers and new games. Potential writers no longer had to either convince an existing publisher to take a chance on them, or overcome consumers reluctance to learn a new, untried rules system. d20 meant that you could write your modules- whether it was a new setting, an expansion, an adventure, etc.- without worrying too much about the nuts and bolts of the rules. If your product made it to market, there was a large body of players and DMs that already knew and played by the same ruleset, and had a big hand up on learning or using your game. Even if your product couldn't stand on its own two feet, there was a good chance that if there was something worthwhile in it, people would be willing to buy it since it was so easy to incorporate things into other d20 games.

What I suspect happened is that this spawned a whole generation of hobbyists who thought they were going to be the next Gary Gygax, and tried to enter the traditional publishing market. The traditional publishing market, if you haven't heard, is hurting all over. Production costs are remaining high, demand and retail outlets have declined, and challenges from other media are threatening their consumer base and their bottom line. Add to that the fact that entering the publishing business involves managing issues of inventory and production that are capable of destroying even veteran players (TSR anyone?), and you have a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of new companies offering products in 1,000 different d20 lines simultaneously waded into the publishing business, unaware of what they were really getting into. It's little wonder that five years later, most of them are belly up in the tank.

The retail space has its own problems. Note that the figures that Skarka was quoting are primarily gathered by game retailers. RPGs are a perfect example of the sort of niche product that translates very well to Internet delivery- hence the 'long tail' discussion. The inevitable result is that as the number of gaming shops declines, more and more companies will go to direct sales and PDF distribution. And as more publishers make an end-run around retail distributors, more and more retailers are going to exit the business, either by going under or by deciding that it is no longer worth their time and money to be in the business of selling RPG products.

I try to support my local gaming stores on principle, but I can see a coming time when they just won't have a place in the market due to a combination of economics and redundancy. I've recently been thinking about buying the new Knights of the Grail supplement for WFRP. Now, do I buy that from Amazon for less than $20, or from a local retailer for $30+? What, really, other than instant gratification, am I getting from my local hobby shops? What are they getting from me? I do sometimes browse games in shops, and see things that I otherwise might not (though one place I shop occasionally shrink wraps all their games; very irritating), but is that really worth paying a premium for my games?

I think that gaming can survive losing the brick-and-mortar retail channel. I'm sure that retail could survive losing gaming (though it would be a hardship for some of the most dedicated retailers, which is a shame). Unless someone can come up with a more fruitful relationship for the two, they're going to have to.

On Finding Games

Noticing a couple threadlocks at the BI forum today got me wondering about their policy regarding looking for games and players on the boards- which is, by the way, "you can't". It seems like a silly rule. The nearest I've seen to an official explanation for this policy is Dave Allen's response in this thread.

Bad publicity? Really? That's the concern? That's the reason why the BI forums aren't a central hub for finding online and offline WFRP games? That seems a little bit strange.... The odds against a serious incident occuring seem to be very high- and the odds that it would be somehow 'blamed' on BI are even higher. Lots of companies provide this sort of service to support their game- for instance, take a look at the extensive efforts that Wizards goes to to make sure that people can find a D&D game: RPG Gamer Classifieds. A whole forum and multiple subforums, just for the purpose of advertising what is already one of the most popular and widely played RPGs in the world. WFRP is much less well known, and has a much more scattered player base. I've often wished that there were some way to find WFRP games- particularly play by post games- that was easier than just running out to every single gaming website on the net and searching for games individually at PlayByWeb, ENWorld, and a dozen others. Here's hoping that BI eventually sees the light on this one- or that an acceptable unofficial alternative comes along.