Books & Boxed Sets, the future-past of the T2k hobby

[simonmark6]

I thought that there was a lot to applaud about the TW2013 rules, the ones you have already mentioned being amongst the best. Nothing in the book was a gamebreaker for me and what I considered weak (the story) was no worse than any other piece of speculative fiction: it would have been the first thing I'd have tweaked anyway.

Given the way I have to play now, I would have liked help on a way to make it more PbP friendly but that was something the designer's couldn't have predicted and I am sure that something would have been possible.

However, your assessment of why the game failed is sadly also correct: small scale operations based more on love of a concept than on business models are often doomed to failure, especially in today's economic climate.

It is a shame and I still appreciate the work that you and the others did on the books. The games star didn't shine for a long time but it did leave the Gaming World (mine at least) the richer from its albeit short existence.

As for ressurecting a print run of V1., I don't have the financial nounce to understand if it would work but my gut instinct is that it wouldn't really help invigorate the game.

Sure, there are about 500 people on this forum and an average contribution of $50 should enable a print run of V1, but how many copies would that produce? I'd guess at best a thousand and that would amount to 2 copies for every contributor. I don't see that re-invigorating the hobby or really moving it forward.

If anyone was to spend time and creative effort on trying to move the game forward, I would rather see us creating a Fanzine that draws on the multiple creative talents that we have on this site. I believe that this would allow us to not only create a body of work that people could use in their own games, but also fuel the creative process that would help keep the game alive rather than re-printing copies of games we already all have.

I'm basing this somewhat on previous experience: I have played for several Brass Bands that have thought it was a good idea to produce and sell our own CDs. We spent about $1500 to produce something that sounded good and print about 2000 discs. I've still got several hundred in my attic as have many other people.

Vanity publishing tends not to make money in my experience so something cheap but tangible where we share our love of the hobby with others would be a better alternative than throwing money at something that might not generate any benefits for the contributors.