A Chat with Gallant Knight Games' Alan Bahr About Riches & Ruins
An all too rare Geekerati Video Interview.
Last year Wizards of the Coast made a huge misstep regarding the Open Gaming License as they began laying the foundation for their upcoming D&D rules update. It appeared to many that the company was trying to kill the license and this caused a huge backlash in the gaming community. One of the possible motivations behinds Wizards of the Coasts’ desire to “control the brand” was a belief that the brand was under monetized and that the company needed to take greater control of revenue streams related to the game. I wrote about this phenomenon last year in what is still to date my most read article.
As I argued in the article last February, Hasbro’s attempts to control the brand instead caused damage and may have cost the company money. I didn’t write this in that article, but I believe that the D&D movie would have done much better (and we’d be expecting a sequel soon) if the company hadn’t taken the actions that it did. It was not a good move for the company, but in many ways it was a good move for the table top hobby.
D&D has always been the big name in the hobby, even during the period of Pathfinder ascendancy D&D was the name the average person associated with the gaming hobby. I won’t go into a discussion of how Pathfinder is D&D with different branding or how Stephen Radney-MacFarland ( a key Pathfinder designer) was a major contributor to the design of 4th edition D&D and that Pathfinder 2nd Edition includes tons of 4e bits because of it. The edition war regarding 4th Edition actually shares a lot with the current 6th Edition conflict. Hasbro/WotC treated the fans poorly, even as they were trying to convince them to buy new product. Attacking your audience, and coopetitors (that’s a fusion of competitors and cooperators based on the concept of coopetition). The role playing game community relies heavily on coopetition, especially the big name in the hobby.
When the big brand stumbles, even the casual fan might begin to look elsewhere to spend their consumer dollars. Sure, dedicated tabletop gamers like me are constantly on the lookout for new and interesting games and I recommend a different RPG every week. I’m a gaming generalist who happens to love D&D, but most D&D players are content to play a well designed game with a big pool of potential party members. That contentment can be shaken from time to time, and it was last year. That disturbance led to the promotion of what was labelled by Professor Dungeon Master as Independent Gaming Month.
I participated in Independent Gaming Month last year by recommending seven non-D&D role playing games every week. I’ll be continuing that trend this year, though some games might repeat because they are awesome, and this week’s interview is about the first independent role playing game I’ll be recommending.
That game is Riches & Ruins and it’s designed by Alan Bahr of Gallant Knight Games. You can check out the game at DriveThruRPG and I highly recommend doing so. Alan Bahr is one of the most prolific independent game designers in the market today and his approach with Riches & Ruins is relatively unique.
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