Nightshade

You'd have to make sure they could be different answers; I started with RQ1, but my prefered flavor is hybridized RQ3/RQ:AIG.

What I'm suggesting is that it can't be much more popular and maintain its particular character, because honestly, I suspect much of what its fans like is exactly why its not more popular; because the features many of its fans prefer are things other RPGers don't. There's certainly some room for more exposure, material to support other sorts of campaigns than the predominantly fantasy and horror offerings its known for and the like, but I'm honestly convinced what many fans of the system consider virtues, many others consider flaws, and you're not going to keep the game as you know it and please them. Its far too easy to not remember that not everyone doesn't play one's favorite systems because they don't know it, but because what it brings to the table isn't what they want.

A's explained it fairly well, but let me try by analogy: Let's say that you have a market for something. The market is for Things. Things have certain qualities, particularly color, size and brightness. Let's say the majority of the market likes Big Things. But you still have a pretty good market for Small Things. So you market a Small Thing that comes in versions ranging from Dim Red to Medium Yellow. Now how well will this sell? You already know its not going to sell to people who want Big Things. But even among those who like Small Things, you've eliminated those who like Bright Things, or anyone who wants a Blue Thing. So by that time you're not just selling to those minority who want Small Things, but to a much smaller minority. (Now, you do have the issue that the variables may not be entirely independent; perhaps more people who like Small Things like Dim Things too, so you're getting a bit more of your market than it might appear. But the bottom line is that its not just the Big Thing fans you're excluding, but some percentage of the Small Thing fans, too, and at some point that just makes for a small market).

Well, that's sometimes a problem with some people too; there's been a tendency for some people to scoff at the game elements of RPGs for some years now; they essentially consider mechanics just something not to get in the way, and as such tend to turn up their nose at something that has a stronger game element.

Well, it would be easy to argue that RQ3 especially had more bookkeeping for routine characters than AD&D did for routine characters; you had magic points, experience checks, fatigue points, locational hits and so on. A typical D&D character had hit points and spells used; experience was kept, but only had to be paid attention to at the end of the game. Strike ranks were also more complicated than the vanilla D&D initiative, though not more than some of the optional versions. So arguably there were more moving parts in play for most players. The difference was the moving parts were generally fairly intuitive, but if you're already familiar with D&D that's not a big difference.

I don't think there's "only" demand for cinematic systems, but I do think that's what the majority of the market wants, and once you exclude that part of the market, you're picking among the parts that aren't cinematic but have other preferences that BRP is not serving. As such you're looking at progressively smaller slices of the pie as you look at the people who want build point systems, don't like linear resolution system, and so on, and so forth.

Sure, but I think that's an example of what I refered to as "working against the design". The expanded Superworld method helped considerably too, but it was pretty different from every other hit point method the game had ever used.

I actually first played it at DunDraCon with Steve Perrin many a year ago right when it was coming out. I was getting a bit jaded with original 3-book D&D (yes, I'm that old a fart) at the time, and it ended up sweeping our gaming group like a storm; we had a big sort of interconnected non-Gloranthan RQ group for several years before politics ripped it apart.

To be fair, they don't necessarily want to do that; what they do want to do is to be able to reliably do the sort of Errol Flynn high-adventure hijinks you often see in adventure movies and not expect that sooner or later it'll get you killed. And the problem is that you can either have that in a game, or have a game where you have to worry about the lesser opponents. Its not really possible to really have both (though you can have a core of a game that does the latter and supports the former through a vigorous hero point style mechanism; Fate Points aren't really adequate to the job as written, though). But the real point I'm making to some extent is that the reason BRP isn't more popular is that it isn't the kind of game a lot of people want. So in the end, what do you want: the kind of game BRP is, or popularity? Because to some extent its a trade-off between the two.

But for a lot of people, that's an acceptable trade-off. Its just the fine line where something gets so simple that the overhead on running it actually becomes harder, because it gives you too little guidance about how to handle a new situation.

But that's important. A game has to support that, and most versions of BRP don't; there's too much ability for minor opponents to be too threatening, there's too much ability for cinematic action to go critically badly, and there's not enough buffer against things just going seriously wrong. You could potentially add on optional rules to produce more of a cinematic result, but its to some extent working against a lot of the basic design.

That doesn't matter much if there's simply little demand for it. You and I can want whatever we want, but if the market isn't big enough to matter, it isn't, no matter what we want.

It was a noticable swing over time for those who gamed in the 80's, where there was a brief period when crunchy, simulationist games were on the upswing. But that's long gone.

I'm not bashing Jason here, but simply explaining why I could be more enthused in some ways. Its why if I use BRP for something, I expect there's going to be considerable house ruling on my part, and that reduces some of the utility of having the material all in one place.

I'd be more prone to suggesting something I have in the past; that BRP is not particularly well suited for high-cinematic play, and that a good part of the market is there these days. For better or worse, from day one BRP has had a quasi-simulationist leaning, and that's not exactly a big market share any more.

Perhaps I've been misinformed here, but my understanding was that a statement of public domain doesn't actually protect against this; its just a (limited) defense against claims it isn't public domain. Shakespeare would be unlikely to be successfully used this way because its so well known, but I'm fairly certain people have tried it with other, less well known material with a light buffing of change on it. But IANAL and perhaps the discussions I've read have been confused or I've misunderstood some key element.

It wasn't irrelevant to the specific post I was responding to, which is why the folks on here haven't gotten that excited. New fans are another issue, but if people wonder why the old fans are sometimes only modestly interested, its because, really, for a lot of us little has changed. I haven't, for example, seen much in the way of new material even among the monographs that sparked my interest all that much.

All evidence I have is that these and most others functioned as a strange form of "loss leader"; they lead to interest in the core products. But its been a consistent answer that most scenarios and adventures don't sell well enough to justify their costs in and of themselves. As such, keeping enough of them out there to support GMs who don't do their own work is only possible if you keep your costs on them very low (supposedly one of the benefits of the D20 and OGL licenses was that WOTC was effectively able to farm this job out to third parties beyond a minimum amount of adventure support). Fair enough. I tend to be thinking more in terms of the old stand-alone printed adventures, which from all evidence really haven't ever done that well for much of anyone. I'm still dubious that the CoC big-book extended adventures are a model that's liable to work well consistently for anyone unless they can get the work done cheap.

Well, there is material in BRP that will make it a little easier to do a few things because I didn't own the sources they were derived from, and having it all in one spot is convenient. On the other hand, some of its pretty much useless, and honestly, I'm not sure Jason thought some of it through (the combination of the RQ derived primitive missile weapons and the CoC derived guns could, perhaps, be better; when looking at the ranges its kind of obvious something isn't quite right with that). So there's some point in the exercise, but its a mixed bag.

Because then you're in the potential situation where someone else can copyright the material, not just some of it, but theoretically all of it. A license prevents someone from doing that.

The second part of this is not supported by the experiences of any of the game companies I've interacted with. Adventures don't sell well.

The problem is that for some of us not much has changed. I'm playing in a BRP campaign now, but that's something that could have happened, with the same people, any time in the past twenty years. We didn't intrinsically stop running BRP games just because it wasn't an active system, we didn't stop teaching it to new people when we got fresh blood. On a purely personal level, nothing much has changed.

And I don't think it'd help with the people who found it not worth the trouble; they'd still have to stick with it long enough for the spells to compress. (As an aside, this was a problem a lot of people had about C&S years ago; putting together a mage and playing them was too much trouble. I can't speak for more recent editions).

And of course I've let myself be sidetracked. I'd never argue settings don't help a game line; what I do question is whether setting is the primary determinant. There seem to be three cases possible (and of course different people will land in different ones, but the issue of popularity will be which is the dominant case, not just that the others exist): 1. System First: people buy a game for its system, and the specific settings that come with it are secondary. In the above case a strong setting is desirable, but the game can survive without any given one. 2. Setting First: people buy the game for its setting first, and the system is secondary. There are certainly games this appears to be true of, but its usually pretty clear when talking to people about them that its not just the case that the system doesn't suit them (though that will be the case for some people too) but that the system involved isn't viewed as that good (TriTac's games come to mind). Presumably for people this is really true for, they'll follow the setting to whatever system its with (it can be argued that's how Gloranthaphiles have operated). If this is the dominant view, trying to attract people "to BRP" is pointless, because BRP isn't why they'd be playing anyway; it'd just be the necessary evil of system to support their favorite setting. 3. System and setting matter about equally: In this case people are very fond of particular settings, but only find them to work with some systems. This is the only case where a good setting seems to make or break BRPs success; where the setting helps drive interest in the system, but people aren't particularly likely to just port it to their system of choice.

There's been a conflict in the field on this for years. On one hand, some people dislike buying a big book containing a lot of material they'll never use; on the other, people really hate having to buy multiple books that contain much of the same material. I think the concensus has been that the former is the lesser of the two evils, but I don't think that means the the people who object to it have gone away.