The Business: Turn-Key Or Turf Out

A complete, competent, and comprehensive hobby game product is a turn-key product.

The prospective user buys it, cracks it open, and can immediately make full use of that product exactly as intended to play a full, complete, and distinct fantastic adventure game.

Most tabletop designers and publishers do not know what this looks like. Their videogame counterparts do. They get shit on hard if they don't deliver.

So what is one of the Failure Modes of tabletop hobby games? The DevKit.

This is not a complete game. It has rules. It has procedures. They (usually) work. What is lacking is the actual game: the specific fantastic adventure wargame scenario that a proper hobby game campaign must have to be a proper hobby game campaign.

Specific wargame scenarios have constraints; you cannot whatever the fuck you want, or do whatever you want. You have objectives to pursue, resources to manage, limitations to cope with, and other players to contend with who are trying to hit their Win Condition before you hit yours.

This is the flaw with well-known and respected titles like GURPS and HERO. These are devkits, not games, because what it takes to turn that kit into a playable game is no different than than buying a Gunpla kit and taking the time to turn those sprues of plastic into a giant robot model.

Here's what people have been in flat-out denial about for nearly 50 years despite all evidence: no one wants that shit.

Again, the term is "turn-key", which I'm taking from Real Estate (thank you Sis) because it nails the point to be made here:

Turn-key (adj): built, supplied, or installed complete and ready to operate

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is a Turn-key product. Neither GURPS nor HERO (or others like them) can be by definition; you always have to carefully sift through mirads of options to turn that bucket of parts into a machine that works as intended and put it into a playable milieu with a campaign scenario ready to jump off.

Don't believe me? One of the contributing factors to why the Top RPG List has remained so consistant over the decades is that (Near-)Turn-key Products are always on it. Cut check, get game, play immediately and get promised results. No time wasted on Approved Lists or Banned Lists or Rules Options or any of that shit. The game is as the manuals say it is- simple as. The play is what the rules say it is- simple as.

"But-"

No buts. No objections. If your product is not that easy to pick up and use, then prospects will get mad and bounce off in favor of alternatives that do- like comparable videogames. I hear one in particular nailed Fantastic Adventure Gaming very well recently, and it's not at all the only one that did so.

You are competing with videogames now. You don't get to disrespect prospects or veterans by making them waste time jumping through hoops to get to playing the fucking game- something I also see as still being a problem in general from the retards recording their play sessions and pretending it's fucking radio play.

Your prospective user--your prospective client--should go from product purchase to playing his first game by playing solo to get familiar with the game's rules, procedures, and controls. If that takes more than 15 minutes you fucked up; it should take five or less. Remember: you are competing for precious free time and attention- do NOTHING to make a prospect turn away from you.

Character Generation should be exactly three steps, with no more than three options on each step. In AD&D1e terms that's Roll Stats, Pick Race, Pick Class. Gear and sundry can be handled at leisure if away from the table. For Classic Traveller it's Roll Stats, Pick Service, Roll Career. For Call of Cthulhu it's Roll Stats, Pick Background, Pick Skills. You get the idea.

You can also see where past and present publishers and designers get it wrong- and suffer for it. (e.g. Palladium and its Stacks O'Skills, many of which are mandatory and the rest of trash).

If The World of Synnibarr could figure this out, you can. (Roll Stats, Pick Class, Roll Details) You designers and publishers out there have no excuse to not do so, and yet there's still whining about the hobby vs. alternatives.

Either you conform to the requirements to succeed or you make way for someone that will- and against videogames, you have a lot of advantages if you would bother to make proper use of them. So far only the Bros have done so.

I have no patience for you Boomers and similar sorts that think you're still in the marketplace of Yesteryear. You're not, and I look forward to hearing about many of you closing shop or turning into a hobby (like, again, Gunderman did with Basic Fantasy). You're not competing with TV. You're competing with STEAM.

It's Turn-key or Turfed Out.