Topic: where are we going from here, and what is it we want to go anyway?

[Cory Magel]

Oops, Yeah, I guess I didn't clarify what I mean by "ICE" as people know it.  The way I explained it (i.e. the various company names) was not really well done.  ICE was truly ICE in the 1st incarnation, Aurigas bought the rights to the original ICE's IP when it went belly up and licensed it to Mjolnir DBA (doing business as) "ICE" I believe?  Then Mjolnir lost that license and what I refered to as "ICE" is now Guild Companion Publications (which grew out of "The Guild Companion" e-zine).

Does "ICE" technically exist in any legal state what-so-ever now?  Is it just an old name or does Aurigas actually work under the ICE name somehow?

[Thom @ ICE]

ICE or Iron Crown Enterprises no longer exists as a commercial entity.  It hasn't since the bankruptcy.  The name ICE and Iron Crown Enterprises were part of the ICE IP that were purchased by Aurigas Aldebaron.  Aurigas uses the ICE name and logo to identify ICE brand gaming products. These are owned by Aurigas, much the same way as Rolemaster is.

[GrumpyOldFart]

But the bottom line is still that if new ICE products still exist 20 years from now, it'll be because the freelancers and the fans (in general, the membership of this forum) wrote and bought those products.

The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.

- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Well yes, those 'someones' are too us.

[ironmaul]

Like Cory said a few posts back and IMO is that, ICE needs either a board game or card game or both to be competitive with other game companies. I feel that a broader target audience needs to be focused on not just rpg'ers, otherwise it's going to be a long sink or swim. Not to sound like a Richard but when I look back at the amount of illustration hours I've sunk into ICE products it's mind blowing, sooner or later fan work will need to be replaced by professional workers if it intends to be competitive. I'd like to see ICE flourish but I can't see it happening anytime soon while most of the team work day jobs.

[jdale]

Card games were really big for a while, but aside from the initial surge of interest, have they really been profitable aside from Magic? WotC is still making money off cards but I don't think other successful companies like Paizo have needed them or found them particularly useful. Board games even less so.

D&D has done well because it has well established mindshare. Paizo did well because they took advantage of WotC's missteps with D&D 4.0. White Wolf did well because they appealed to a completely different style of play (and player) -- although this is risky business, after all D&D 4.0's big misstep was also trying to appeal to a different style of play (tabletop MMORPG I guess). (White Wolf also was very good about producing a large number of setting books and embedding character creation material in every one of them.)

I like RM but I don't know that it's positioned to grow out of its niche. The current strategy, I think, is a good one for maintaining that niche, which is a realistic goal, but unless something unexpected happens (e.g. Shadow World the novel leads to Shadow World the Movie) I don't see that changing. HARP occupies a different niche, so that's good for the company as a whole, and maybe it's even a niche with better growth potential.

[Cory Magel]

I just don't know what to think about RMU as an overall effort.  I don't think I'm the typical RM user/fan, I think a lot of us here aren't.  So I question if we can really answer the question as to if RMU will be a success.  Honestly, until something comes out that did not under the RM2 and RMSS umbrellas, there's no reason for my group to buy it aside from loyalty... and should a customer be loyal to something they won't use.  It's kinda a tough one for me, especially being someone who worked on some of RM.

RM and HARPs best strategy may be what it was originally... take the disillusioned DnD players from them.

[GrumpyOldFart]

It's kinda a tough one for me, especially being someone who worked on some of RM.

RM and HARPs best strategy may be what it was originally... take the disillusioned DnD players from them.

I'm coming at this from the point of view of someone who's doing bits around the edges for HARP. And to be honest, my first response to this is, "Oh no, does that mean I have to play DnD enough to understand why they're disillusioned and what to do about it?"

[Cory Magel]

I don't really think so.  HARP is fine for a toned down version of RM, but an improvement over DnD.  I don't think there's anything wrong with it in that respect (I just like the extra detail provided in RM).  Besides, I suspect a lot of the DnD crowds beef is that WotC (post Hasbro buyout) cranked out too many versions of DnD too fast.  From a short-term bottom line standpoint that makes sense to do cause you get a huge buy-in... but it will make your customer base angry once they decide you're just milking them.

As for RM, they want to grow the customer base.  I, personally, do not see RMU doing that as it stands right now.  IMO, currently it's no less intimidating than previous RM's to the non-RM user.  More so in some ways.  Unless they pull back on the perceived complexity I fear RM's reputation with its critics isn't going to improve.  Hopefully either the second round of revisions will improve things or, better yet, I'll just be proved wrong completely regardless.

Also, many of us here who know our, likely customized, respective RM2 or RMSS variants well may not see any point to switching if RMU doesn't present a large improvement in what we (and 'we' all have differing opinions of this) think are their deficiencies.  There are things I don't like that I could simply change back (which leaves me wondering: Why change) but there are others that have long term impact which I'm not willing to fix myself.  So, I'd stick with RMSS.  But am I representative of the typical RM fan-base?  I'm comfortable writing my own material, I don't need more rulebooks unless they have something new not released under the RM2 or RMSS umbrellas - and I'll only buy those if they're easily (for me) backward convertible.  How normal is that among the overall RM customer base?

HARP is probably the better one to try gaining a new customer base with... essentially "RM Lite" (I know, there was a RM-Lite - but why try to do that again when you can just use HARP?).