From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>\
> But this leads to a question for you Ryan. In your estimation, where
did
> Earthdawn go wrong?
It wasn't D&D. Close but no cigar. Heck, it wasn't even Palladium Fantasy
Roleplay.
If they'd cloned D&D, and then added in their backstory, changed the races
and added a few new classes (and perhaps a diffferent kind of spellcasting),
I think they would have done much better.
As it was, they just didn't tap the network externality. It doesn't do much
good to come close to the externality and then go out of your way to hide
that fact. To get full benefit, you have to be as transparent as possible.
My other complaint with the line (remember, this is all comments on v1.0
stuff, as I lost track in '95 or so due to a little TCG venture I was
involved in) was that you have this great setup with a >reason<for
>dungeons< and lots of great monsters - and then you ignore all that setup
for supplements about elves who bleed, flying pirates, and a city that
nobody's ever heard of or really cared about.
Had I been helming the line, after fixing the tie to the externality, I
would have released a dozen "dungeons done right", showing how the Earthdawn
assumptions made for a more logically consistent, thus more compelling,
experience.
As with many things FASA has done in the past ten years, I think they got
seduced by the "storytelling" mantra loose in the publisher community, and
lost sight of why people buy RPGs in the first place.
> market, was unlikely as hell. Even so, the game sold roughly 15k - 20k in
the
> first few months of its release, which (I think) placed it among the best
> selling new RPGs of the year.
I think that's an indication of how willing the fans were to believe that
FASA was about to produce a better D&D than 2nd Edition. Initial core book
sales are a meaningless metric for an established company. What counts is
core book reorders six months later, and what percentage of the core books
sold to date translates into supplement sales. I'll bet that the Earthdawn
slope was a near vertical one - probably a lot like the Alternity slope.
Ryan
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