Mike Shea

Can you get anybody to play it with you?

And if you can do that, then it's a successful RPG.

So that's pretty low too.

Cause you know, if an RPG has two people or one person that plays it, that means it's still alive.

And that means that that game is successful.

So why do I think this topic matters, right?

Why are we talking about what makes an RPG successful?

I think it matters for a few reasons.

One is, again, kind of getting to this RPG punditry as its own hobby.

You hear a lot of like, this RPG is going to kill that RPG, or this RPG is dead, or this one doesn't count.

Or there's a lot of sort of, and somebody brought this up, of like tribalism and fiefdoms when it comes to TTRPGs, where people throw around words like what's successful, what isn't successful.

There's definitions of like, well, it has to be commercially successful.

And I'm like, well, how do you determine that?

Like, we don't have the books on most of the companies that make these games.

How do we know if something is successful unless the company says it is, right?

I hear arguments all the time of that fourth edition was a dismal failure and fourth edition was a smashing success.

I have had people tell me both of those things, right?

So we can't even decide on games that came out 15 years ago on whether or not it was a success or not because different people have definitions of what they consider to be a success.

So I think it's helpful.

I think the topic is helpful because, again, it's not going to solve communication among us.