The Business: Licensed Tabletop RPGs Were Always A Bad Idea

In the tabletop RPG world, one of the longest-lasting errors is the practice of making a licensed product from a more popular media IP--Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dallas (yes, the TV series), Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.--as a tabletop RPG.

Every company that has done this has sooner or later had to surrender their license. The reasons vary, but the results do not: existing inventory (for traditionally printed and distributed products) is sold in a fire sale and the remainder destroyed thereafter, while digital products (including Print On Demand) cease availability immediately upon expiration.

Sometimes this is negligible due to poor sales and other user metrics, such that hardly anyone notices that the licensed game is gone. However, when the game gets and maintains an audience--West End's version of Star Wars, for example--this becomes an issue that gets bothersome fast. Used product and fire sale acquisitions soon clog used product shelves and online listings, resale value rise over time as supply of original runs disappear (just try to find a copy of Lancer's Rockers these days), and that's before we talk about the changes technology wrought.

Today with the ease of converting legacy products into digital products (that can then be remade into physical via POD) savvy players can not only keep favored licensed lines alive long after the licenses expired, but make new products in their vein.

"But Call of Cthulhu!"

It's the outlier. Until Chaosium finally lost its last SAN point and went full retard, COC was the only licensed RPG that hasn't run into revocation issues and played more or less the same since the 1980s. (Version 5.X remains good; that's the big blue hardcover.) Almost every other example either failed, or got too expensive to keep up and thus shuts down.

And I'm here to tell you something no one wants to hear: None of them ever needed to exist in the first place.

The smarter way to go about this, which no one in the business wanted to hear for the longest time--and many still don't--is this: you file the fucking serial numbers off, make your own branding and trade dress, but ensure that marketing communicates that this hits all the same notes.

You don't make Voltron, you make "Cosmo Tiger Force".

Everyone that buys it will play it as Voltron, and you go out of your way to not see them play it so, but that's what is done.

"No one's ever done that before!"

Oh really?

It was done in the 1970s, well before 1994's Mekton Zeta. Mekton Zeta remains legally available worldwide; good luck finding legally licensed stuff that (a) isn't shit or (b) out of print (and thus must be pirated to be acquired digitally; this is something to consider as online surveilance advances). It does Macross and Gundam out of the box with ease, other Real Robot stuff with nearly the same ease, and Super Robots with some additional difficulty. It's one of a handful of tabletop RPGs that even tried, and the only one most folks readily recall. (Dream Pod 9 did this with Jovian Chronicles via their build-kit supplement, and competently-designed superhero RPGs do this out of the box.)

You see this with superheroes also. Licensed DC/Marvel stuff comes and goes, but HERO's Champions remains and can easily handle all forms of (super)heroic characters with some rule choices. No need to worry about being sued into the dirt when you never even try to infringe on more popular IPs, but instead make the tools that lets your buyers do it themselves.

And it's why the money--as much as there is any at all--goes with original work that allows users to recreate what they want from more popular IP without the business costs that licensing requires.

And you don't need a big staff, or be based in a Bugman Hive city, or even operate in a Western country to make this work.

You need some chops at technical writing, some chops at probability and statistics, and it'd be good to have some desktop publishing skills but it's not required; as with illustrations, that can be hired out on a freelance basis.

And no, you don't need to get on Kickstarter/Indiegogo/whatever. Full color? Nope. Hardcover? Nope. Again, follow Gonnerman's example: simple, clean, clear, concise and readily available free on PDF and cheap on Amazon in print.

This, however, is a "Can you?" post. "Should you?" is a different question, which I will answer tomorrow.