The Culture: Sifting The Wheat From The Chaff In The Hobby's Brands

The hobby has a lot of products on the shelf. Almost none of them are Games in their own right. Almost all of them are adaptations--reskins and customizations--of one of the few Games that do exist. As these products attempt to tie in a publisher-created setting, or license an external property to be such, these are better referred to as "Brands".

The reason that Brands are separate from Games is because the Brand can, and does, exist separate and distinct from the Game it uses. The Brand becomes a property unto itself, and even those Brands that originated into the hobby follows the route of Hello Kitty into becoming a label representing a specific set of traits that the target audience identifies with.

Brand Managers know this. This is why the competent ones earn their massive paychecks by making certain that every single product that they slap that Brand upon represents what the Brand represents, while the incompetent and the malevolent alike- well, just look at the Devil Mouse to see how that turns out.

Therefore every competently-managed Brand adheres to a standard of its own, separate and distinct from all other Brands (and thus from any Game). Borrowing a term from the Hellmouth, I refer to this standard as a Setting Bible.

This is how, and why, Dungeons & Dragons is separate and distinct from Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Tekumel, the Realms, Ravenloft, Krynn, Rokugan, Kara-Tur, Maztica, Al-Qadim, Mystara, and every other published setting ever made.

It is also how, and why, so many not-D&Ds are themselves Brands of the Game- even if they are degraded, gimped, or otherwise Kyber Pass Copies of the original. Palladium's entire catalog is just the most obvious example.

Sometimes a Brand takes care to ensure that a Game to be used with it is sufficiently altered, customized, tailored to conform to the Bible and thus produce results that conform to the target audience's expectations. Far too often this is not the case.

Over this week, we'll get into the good and the bad of Brands in the hobby.

And when we get to the end of the week, I'll talk about the wall that all Brands can't avoid no matter how powerful they think they are- a wall that explains why competent Brand Managers do not engage this hobby unless their Brand aligns with it.