Dave Seagraves wrote . . . About paying $250k for TFT, I'd rather just hire a ghost writer to rewrite all the TFT products in my own words. Much cheaper, perfectly legal, and we can make it all public domain. (And /THAT/ will get HT out of the woodwork! Hee hee hee. :^)
From: GypsyComet@aol.com Been tried. Didn't work. WarpWar existed in toto on the net for some time and I don't think it ever got a rise from HT, and then there's Mega Duel (Crunchy Frog, IIRC), which is a fair chunk of TFT with the serial numbers filed off.
GypsyComet,I thought WarpWar was still on the net. Anyway, I agree with what you say. Everyone has seen free RPG's on the net. None of them seem to have risen to any level of dominance. I think SJ's own words can speak to that. I don't remember if it was in his book "Game Design and Theory" or if I'm remembering it from an interview, but he said something to this effect. That the TFT system was being sold for $5 a book while the other games were about $15 a book. He said that the metagamming stuff never really did capture a large portion of the market share, didn't really cause the games to sell faster, and that he learned a valuable lesson from that. People get what they pay for. If they get a $2.50 pocket book game then they treat it like a $2.50 game. In contrast I'm sure everyone is aware of how much the G.U.R.P.S. books cost.
In conclusion, this is about as far as I think I can take this thread and keep it related to TFT, HT, and SJ. I'm going to stop now. Otherwise it will wind up being a discussion on marketing and buisness. I felt O.K. including this much because it relates directly to what I have heard of SJ's experiences.
David Michael Grouchy II
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