Again over on RPG.Net I was reading the "Insular Game Design" thread and got thinking about this. One of the reasons I could not sell Earth Dawn when it first came out was that the ideas were just weird to most gamers. Look at some of the games out today and you have even stranger ideas.

So, I wonder, in order to have a mainstream game success do you need a setting that is easily digestable, easily understood or more bluntly, a refit of tread out ideas?

My opinion, you need something culturally significant and fun. For ODND it was LotR and Narnia, the seventies and a gestalt of these cultural elements that allowed for the initial spark. I am not sure what it would be today but I suspect it is not as obvious as "Reality TV RPG". Any ideas?

I wish I could remember where I saw a discussion about this, but someone said that part of the success of White Wolf was the cultural interest in Vampires and other spooky things that coincided with their games. Or rather they picked the right cultural trend to ride.

I'd say they did it again, to a lesser degree, with Exalted.

I think Mainstream success is dependent on syngergy with a cultural trend on the upswing. Nearly impossible to predict.

What do you mean sell? Did you own an LGS? Were you selling it to your group? Are you talking about the Fasa game or something you made yourself with a similar name?

Anyway, if you are talking about the FASA game- I'd have to disagree with your central premise in regards to that particular game. My guys went right for it- because it was like a cross between CoC and D&D- complete with an in game rational for dungeons. As a rule we thought "the Horrors" were a bit pedestrian, actually. Honestly, we were playing it within two or three days of my initial purchase.

Sorry, for about 6 years in the 1990s I owned two rather successful game stores. I sold them as I realized I truly and fundamentally hate retail.

Well, now, I wont argue this and am most interested in your experiences. Me, I could not sell folks on the game wholesale. I had a few guys pick it up mostly on the "Oh, FASA and its soooo different". The main point here is it would seem you need something for folks to relate to, or to understand. Make a setting so "innovative" that mainstream customers do not know what to make out of it then you can't have mainstream success. That limits your range considerably.

Oh, also, by "mainstream" I am talking "not gamer". This would relate to getting a game to have certain success in TRU and outside of game stores (so, Target, Walmart, and the like).

Okay- I mistook "mainstream" to mean mainstream gamers. I can't imagine trying to sell a game to the general public. I would think though that if people had read Tolkien or (at he time we're talking about) Jordan they would have the necessary background to get something like ED. I would think selling thme on RPGs in geenral would be the major hurdle. FWIW, which is nothing, I bought ED at Barnes and Noble.

Don't get me wrong, there is a whole bunch of other stuff that would go with this to actually have success in the mainstream market. I think a great deal of your "problems" with selling to the general public would drop off if you had a concept that is readily acceptable to them. Much like MZ said above, it needs to address the cultural focus of the day. In the 90s it was Vampires. Today?

The other side to to the customer part of this question would be designing a system that could be summed up in a booklet much like you find in Monopoly or Scrabble...food for a different thread though.

Well, I think Vampire is an extreeemly special case. I think that the people who were into vampires were more likely than your average joe to be open to such a thespy hobby. In the 70's 80's SF and Fantasy fans exhibited a similar tendency. I don't know that there is a corresponding group at present. Some mines only hold so much ore.

Understood. I do not know that they were "extremely rare" so much as an aspect of the culture that WOD exploited. That demographic had traits that helped. Much the same could be said of the ODND culture and the demographic it capitalized on at the time.

I suspect that there is something to do with hope and maybe sci-fi but I am not convinced. That is just a vague feeling from watching the movies that are out and the trends in tv...

I think it makes it easier to have a mainstream hit if it's palatable to a wider demographic. It's kinda of like movie sequels. There's an inbuilt audience for this kind of stuff. Wandering of the reservation means you travel alone....

Regards,
David R

For what it's worth, non-gamers of my acquaintance have tended to be most interested in games that do not touch standard RPG material; e.g. Nicotine Girls and It Was a Mutual Decision.