Dysfunctional and Co-Dependent

A sad element of the RPG industry is the codependent, self-destructive relationship between D&D players and the game's publisher, whether that's TSR or Wizards of the Coast.

This unhappy bond doesn't afflict smaller publishers. It's a waste product of turning D&D into big business.

It stems in part from the dirty little secret of D&D: once you've bought the basic rules and a book of monsters, you don't need anything else. You can play D&D for the rest of your life without ever spending another shekel.

Small publishers don't stumble over this. The writer/designer with a day job who devoted countless evenings and weekends to pushing out an RPG that enjoys slow but steady rulebook sales doesn't depend on sales volume to pay the bills. The garage operation with one or two full-timers and a handful of freelancers can survive on just two or three high-quality releases a year.
Now make that RPG wildly successful. The rulebook sells 100,000 copies and fans are clamoring for more. They're excited, they love the product, and they long to empty their pockets in the pursuit of extending and expanding their fun. Someone with a sales and marketing degree determines that if a new product was published every two months, or even every month, enough people would buy it to make money on it.

To produce that much material, the publisher needs a full-time staff of ten designers, developers, and editors, plus people to do graphic design, coordinate art, set type, arrange for printing, shipping, and storage, and to actually sell all those books to the distributors and retail shops that will put them into customers' hands.

All of those people, plus the offices they occupy, the supplies they use, and the computers they work on need to be paid for. Every month. Pay in July and you need to pay all over again in August. And September, October, November, December, January … and so on, for as long as you keep on meeting that customer demand for more.

But there's a problem. The game, the one fans love so much that they bought 100,000 copies and clamored for more—odds are high that it was self-contained. That's the way RPGs are packaged. If an RPG isn't complete as-is, then you can't really play it, and fans won't love it and clamor for more.

Well, that's a conundrum. Fans want more material for the game, but the game is already complete. What can you sell them?

Adventures? Published adventures are great for the game. They teach DMs how to spin exciting, interactive stories, and talented DMs are the best tool for pulling in new players and expanding the market. Plus, adventures don't monkey with the game's rules in unpredictable, undesirable ways. But only DMs buy adventures, and there's only one DM for every five or six players. Besides, most DMs don't buy adventures anyway. They just write their own. The chance to flex their imagination and creativity is what drew them to the game in the first place.

Campaign settings? They sell better than adventures, individually. But people need only one or two prefab settings. Clearly you can't publish a new one every month.

Monster books? DMs have an insatiable appetite for new monsters, so it's hard to go wrong with these. But like adventures, they sell mainly to DMs, and DMs alone won't generate enough sales to justify that big writing and production staff.

Expanded character options? Ahh, now we're onto something. Players clamor for new classes, races, powers, spells, and feats even more than DMs hunger for new monsters. Here's a product category that can meet the customers' demand for more and bring real money into the company's coffers.

It's vital to note that "real money" doesn't mean "we're all getting wealthy" money. It means "we're covering the overhead and earning a living" money. For a company with 20+ employees, that's a big deal.

At this point, everyone should be happy. Players are getting the steady flow of new stuff that they crave, and the company is moving enough inventory to pay the bills. Unfortunately, this arrangement is like mining for gold beneath your house. Eventually the house will collapse into the mine and you'll be left with no place to live.

The products that would produce a vibrant, healthy game—adventures to coach new DMs and spotlight the best of what your RPG makes possible, plus occasional monster books and campaign settings/variants to keep things fresh—are the ones that won't sell in sufficient quantity to pay the bills. What's worse, because those products speak only to DMs, they leave players unsatisified, and unsatisfied players take their money somewhere else.

But the products that meet the company's sales requirements—spells, races, classes, feats, powers—all place an ever-increasing burden on the game's rules. They demand more time and resources to develop as their interactions with existing material become more complex. Even with more development resources, eventually mistakes become inevitable. They demand higher and higher levels of system mastery from players, who need to juggle all those options in their heads. The number of fully invested players steadily declines through the natural attrition of school, relocation, and changing social lives, while new players are quickly overwhelmed and discouraged by the blizzard of options they must wade through just to get started.

In short, the types of things that players want are bad for the game. They'd be fine if published in moderation, but moderation is a luxury only small companies can afford. Big companies have big monthly bills. The types of supplements that would be healthy for the game, players won't buy in sufficient quantity to keep the company or the game alive at the corporate level. To keep the engine running, the company must publish what customers want, and thereby cut its own throat.

Thus we have the life cycle of corporate D&D: a set of clean, elegant rules is published; those rules are expanded with a steadily growing library of supplements; for a while the new additions make things better, but; eventually the complexity of all that supplemental material becomes too much for players and the game's developers to manage or even understand, so; the publisher wipes the table clean and starts the cycle over at zero with a new edition.

This has happened three times in D&D's past, and we're in the process of the fourth. If D&D Next is successful—and I certainly hope it's huge—the cycle will happen again in another five to ten years.

I can see one way out, and that's online. Whatever you might think its current flaws might be, D&D Insider or something like it holds the key to creating a D&D that is both commercially successful and long-lasting. I expect that notion will stir some lively debate—in the future. It's outside the scope of this particular conversation, so the debate will have to wait a bit, but I will come back around to it.

Tomorrow I hope to write a bit about effects vs. meanings. But now, I'd love to read what others think about customer/publisher dysfunction.