11 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:It is easier and more profitable to sell 100,000 copies of 6 products than 500,000 copies of one product even if both sets of product have all the same information.
That seems like a fairly unbelievable statement without qualifying anything, but you're entitled to that opinion. That said, I think 100k copies of anything in the L5R line is probably a tall order already. The 5th edition D&D PHB sold about 800k copies over 4 years.
4 hours ago, nameless ronin said:If I wasn't clear in my previous post: then I think they'll sell poorly regardless. Unlike a crunchy compilation book.
This isn't Star Wars. L5R is a wonderful IP, but it's never going to have that kind of appeal. If 10% (just ballparking a number) of the SW RPG players and GMs buy adventure books, that makes those an ok investment of time and resources. If 10% of the L5R RPG players do the same, that's a lot less interesting. Better to work on stuff that might interest a larger percentage of the player base - adventures will never get that much interest, whether FFG throws some crunch in or not. Illegal copies are too easy to get nowadays.
Crunchy compilation books tend to be one of the poorer selling books. Since they only sell to people interested in said subject matter. Which is why FFG does not do them.
2 minutes ago, Daeglan said:Crunchy compilation books tend to be one of the poorer selling books. Since they only sell to people interested in said subject matter. Which is why FFG does not do them.
By that logic, what's the point of throwing some minor clan stuff in an adventure? Wouldn't that only appeal to people interested in that subject matter?
2 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:By that logic, what's the point of throwing some minor clan stuff in an adventure? Wouldn't that only appeal to people interested in that subject matter?
That is not likely to be what FFG does. What is more likely is they will do Clan Books with each clan book having the appropriate minor clans. IE badger and Dragonfly would be in the Dragon book. Dragon book will have details on the Dragon Lands, Dragon additional schools. Dragon Titles, Dragon Equipment.
Adventures will likely have useful NPCs, Location info relevant to the adventure, and appropriate equipment.
I can also see Ring books as being another type of book. Which would be very similar to 4E Ring books.
4 minutes ago, Daeglan said:That is not likely to be what FFG does. What is more likely is they will do Clan Books with each clan book having the appropriate minor clans. IE badger and Dragonfly would be in the Dragon book. Dragon book will have details on the Dragon Lands, Dragon additional schools. Dragon Titles, Dragon Equipment.
Adventures will likely have useful NPCs, Location info relevant to the adventure, and appropriate equipment.
I can also see Ring books as being another type of book. Which would be very similar to 4E Ring books.
Which would be fine. It's the suggestion they might do a series of adventures and have those be the only source of info on minor clans that is utterly unappealing.
Which is an unlikely method.
I cant wait for more information on the minor clans myself, Mantis at one point WAS infact a minor clan before somehow getting to Great Clan status in L5R 4E.
As for adventure books only, it would depend entirely on the adventure, Topaz Championship adventure was a good read honestly I enjoyed it quite a bit myself. So it would really depend on the adventure in question. If they had one adventure book for each of the Great Clans, with additional Clan info {say their views on other clans and the minor clans like in 4E had} Then maybe it could work out and keep people intered in the game
I mean, out of a lot of FFG's "formats" of sourcebooks, I think the best way to handle Minor Clans would be "locational" ones. Ex, a Northern Rokugan book would describe specifically the Dragon and Phoenix Lands, their major settlements, the Yobanjin in the north, and also include stuff like the Dragonfly and Badger clan and their lands because that's where they live. You wouldn't necessarily just talk about the Dragon lands though, FFG usually aims more broad than that.
I say this somewhat as a long time SWRPG GM, but people are overblowing the Star Wars adventures a bit. Some have included what are strictly new player-format options (a new species, a force power tree you unlock in the adventure, etc) but mostly they just contain various new mechanics which benefit the adventure but could also be included elsewhere - like ship/vehicle stats, unique little encounter mechanics, equipment or unique treasures, etc. L5R will probably be similar, some will be like Dark Tide ("Hey you're gonna hang out with the Tortoise a lot, here's their deal") but others could easily just be "and here's a little way to run a naval mass combat, or here's a relic item the adventure is about, or here is a new title for a specific group in this adventure, etc.
Edited by UnitOmega21 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:By that logic, what's the point of throwing some minor clan stuff in an adventure? Wouldn't that only appeal to people interested in that subject matter?
Let's look backwards in time, to another excellent setting with low market penetration, but plenty of books: Justifiers (Star Childe Publications, early 90's).
They had two purely mechanical sourcebooks. One was the Cyber/Medtech book, the other the aboriginals book.
The rest were all 1 part player options, 1 part a world sourcebook, and 1 part an adventure set in said sourcebook. And they were about even size, with player options being slightly smaller. These sold well enough to justify more (no -pun intended) - those who wanted the mechanical options bought them. Those who wanted the adventures bought them. And the sourcebook elements kept it from being sold off when done with the canned adventure.
It's a formula FFG has followed with Star Wars - but with the adventure being 3/5 of the book. New ships, templates, and sometimes abilities are hidden inside.
6 minutes ago, AK_Aramis said:early 90's
Peer-to-peer filesharing was not a thing until 1999. Makes a big difference for things people want but not necessarily want to pay (full price) for.
Edited by nameless ronin54 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:Peer-to-peer filesharing was not a thing until 1999. Makes a big difference for things people want but not necessarily want to pay (full price) for.
Not as big a problem as people think. As long as you provide a legal means of buying the digital format. A big mistake many publishers make is treating customers as theives and thinking pirates were lost customers. Pirates arent customers and customers tend to be fairly honest.
6 hours ago, nameless ronin said:That seems like a fairly unbelievable statement without qualifying anything, but you're entitled to that opinion. That said, I think 100k copies of anything in the L5R line is probably a tall order already. The 5th edition D&D PHB sold about 800k copies over 4 years.
Its an illustration of the problem. A potential customer base is unlikely to be fully penetrated by a single product. Not every customer will buy every product of a line.
If you have a potential customer base of 100,000, you are unlikely to sell a single secondary product to all of them, at best you can expect half to do so if you are very lucky so a print run of 50k might sell out. On the other hand if you split that single product into 5 pieces and do 10k print runs of each product you will only need to reach 10% of the customer base with each product for each to sell out as some will buy all five products, some will buy only one of them, others buy between 2 and 4 and there will still be a substantial portion that will not purchase any.
A small number of broader appeal products with large print runs are not always better than a larger number of niche products with smaller print runs.
3 hours ago, nameless ronin said:By that logic, what's the point of throwing some minor clan stuff in an adventure? Wouldn't that only appeal to people interested in that subject matter?
Yes, which expands the number of potential purchasers of the product that they can reliably expect the product can make the sales goal for it to be profitable.
Edited by Ultimatecalibur2 hours ago, nameless ronin said:Peer-to-peer filesharing was not a thing until 1999. Makes a big difference for things people want but not necessarily want to pay (full price) for.
Actually, it was a thing, just not as widespread, and very much not a publicly easy to use. And was focused upon applications, not text, until the mid 90's.
"Sneaker-Net" - the process of "Let me borrow your install CD" - was prevalent in the late 70's and later. My first few disks of apple II games were all pirate hacks, which someone had downlaoded via modem from a hacker BBS, and then shared by disk-to-disk copying. I was 8 to 10, and didn't have a clue (nor a care) about IP rights back then.
BBS's got a start in the early 80's — back in the days of 1200 Baud modems (150 Bytes per secont maximum transfer! WOO, that was FAST!). Someone with files to share would get a second line, and a BBS package, and put them up. Direct peer-to-peer was also done - private message on the BBS, and a time and phone number. Dial up, one hosts, the other dials in. It got much faster when modems shifted to 2400 baud with compression upped the speed to about 400 bytes per second. And then 33.6 kbps and 56.6 kbps, both with error correcting compression...
I encountered a retype of D&D Basic Set on a BBS in about 1990. I had friends downloading pirate scans from Playboy and Hustler from various BBSs.
What Napster did was make it simple to do. And BitTorrent made multi-hosted easy, and also made it harder to track who the origin was. And The Onion Router makes the tracking harder still, by being multiple layers of encrypted data and VPN tunnels with anonymizing.
23 minutes ago, Ultimatecalibur said:Its an illustration of the problem. A potential customer base is unlikely to be fully penetrated by a single product. Not every customer will buy every product of a line.
If you have a potential customer base of 100,000, you are unlikely to sell a single secondary product to all of them, at best you can expect half to do so if you are very lucky so a print run of 50k might sell out. On the other hand if you split that single product into 5 pieces and do 10k print runs of each product you will only need to reach 10% of the customer base with each product for each to sell out as some will buy all five products, some will buy only one of them, others buy between 2 and 4 and there will still be a substantial portion that will not purchase any.
A small number of broader appeal products with large print runs are not always better than a larger number of niche products with smaller print runs.
...
Yes, which expands the number of potential purchasers of the product that they can reliably expect the product can make the sales goal for it to be profitable.
But, sticking with the minor clans as an example, every separate minor clan in a compilation will then also expand the number of potential purchasers. And buyers who might only buy half of the individual clan supplements are likely to buy the entire compilation if that's what's on offer - at this point, it's the profit margins on each that will determine the best approach.
11 minutes ago, AK_Aramis said:What Napster did was make it simple to do.
And by being simple, also widespread . Which is where I draw the line for it being a thing. Before, you could find some stuff if you knew where to look. Some, not all. Nowadays, you can find pretty much everything and you barely have to look for it.
23 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:But, sticking with the minor clans as an example, every separate minor clan in a compilation will then also expand the number of potential purchasers. And buyers who might only buy half of the individual clan supplements are likely to buy the entire compilation if that's what's on offer - at this point, it's the profit margins on each that will determine the best approach.
Not really. It will reduce them. As most people prefer the major clans. Butnif you instead put them in a book like say the dragon clan book you increase the number of purchases.
30 minutes ago, Daeglan said:Not really. It will reduce them. As most people prefer the major clans. Butnif you instead put them in a book like say the dragon clan book you increase the number of purchases.
That makes no sense.
52 minutes ago, nameless ronin said:That makes no sense.
It makes a lot of sense. You assume everyone wants the minor clans. I dont see that. What i see is a few people are really enthused about the minor clans. Which means those not enthused about them likely wont buy a book like that. It has nothing they want. But if youake the book useful to players, gms, clan enthusiasts. Etc.
1 hour ago, Daeglan said:Not really. It will reduce them. As most people prefer the major clans. Butnif you instead put them in a book like say the dragon clan book you increase the number of purchases.
Some, like the Dragonfly, absolutely belong in their parent major clan's splatbook.
We know from FFG Star Wars that FFG likes having splatbooks with a mix of setting info, some player facing rules, some GM facing rules, and a bunch of thematic adventure seeds.
They also like hiding NPC & vehicle/ship templates inside adventures in EotE/AoR/F&D... and for F&D, additional force powers, too.
I don't expect that to change. I do expect only a couple standalone adventures, tho'...
Keep in mind, also: L5R is a sunk cost; as long as each book makes a profit, they have no license cost to add, so the lower scale of sales and profit margins still are no less money made. The more they can sell, the more the purchase price amortization goes down. FFG's Star Wars involves a license cost per unit... The amortization on the SW IP is probably a fixed cost per unit made, sold or not.
1 hour ago, Daeglan said:It makes a lot of sense. You assume everyone wants the minor clans. I dont see that. What i see is a few people are really enthused about the minor clans. Which means those not enthused about them likely wont buy a book like that. It has nothing they want. But if youake the book useful to players, gms, clan enthusiasts. Etc.
But the whole premisse we're discussing was to add minor clan info to items, like adventures, to make those more interesting to more players. If you assume minor clan info is worthless on its own, it also can't add value to other things. At that point it doesn't matter if you put the Dragonfly info in a Dragon book - that book will sell just as well without it.
And you still dont get it. The minor clans all by them selves wont do it. But minor clans plus equipment plus an adventure might.
But more likely minor clans will be in a clan book covering a region and major clan info.
I mean, I wouldn't say a book of all minor clans wouldn't sell, but it would have to be a very comprehensive book because on their own the minor clans don't use a lot of page space, the Mantis packet is a pdf with 11 total pages which includes cover, credit and opening fiction, and two pages are devoted to NPC types. Now, FFG's Star Wars Sourcebooks are usually like 100 pages, so you're gonna need to either be very deep in the fluff on the subject or you need like a dozen (min) Minor Clans to cover, and presumably can't re-use Tortoise or Mantis.
To be fair, Mantis PDF is sparse on the fluff itself about the clan, history and customs. Then again, that info might be in Emerald Empire.
There have been lots of different variations of sourcebooks in the past.. 2nd ed had by clan, 3rd ed had bushi/courtier/shugenja (Masters of War, Court and Magic, respecticaly, focusing on 3 great clans each) and 4th ed had the by Element stuff. 4th also had the Great Clans book, which expanded on the lore and crunch of all of the great clans, and it was pretty awesome (Crab section much love <3).
On the other hand, 4th ed also had a more comprehensive core in a way, including monks, minor clans and imperials.
Another idea might be to do minor clans but with an attached campaign... Tournament of the Favored perhaps, or something like it.
51 minutes ago, Horvagab said:On the other hand, 4th ed also had a more comprehensive core in a wa y, includ in g monks, minor clans and imperials.
Definitely ! The “advanced” rules section may have been a bit crammed, but it was perfectly possible to play monk/minor clan/a variety of ronin/imperials right from the core book. Oh and advanced schools too.
Now even the GC material is light - no Scorpion bushi !? Seriously...
I like a lot of things they did in this edition, but this is a sore point: having to wait for (and buy) a handful of supplements to have what should be right out of the box.
In certain ways, I do like the approach.
4th ed was Bushi/shungenja%courter/+1 for all great clans, while 5th ed is "every family gets something"
Getting Yogo wardmaster and Kaiu engineer in the core? I really really really love that.
This does mean that there are things that are traditionally been there but missing, with the Bayushi bushi being the most notable. I am hoping we'll see that soon enough... perhaps another DLC?