Shipyard Locked
How long do I have?
- Joined
- Apr 25, 2017
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I'll admit I was deeply disappointed in the 2nd edition of 7th Sea, the most successful tabletop RPG kickstarter at the time. I bought the book (post-kickstarter) and thought about it long and hard before deciding to sit on it for a while. I figured the huge community that certainly had to exist for this thing would eventually persuade me out of my resistance.
But it has been more than a year, and I look around and see a shockingly minuscule community for the product of that gigantic kickstarter and very little actual play. Consider some evidence:
As of today's date, Enworld's Hot Roleplaying Games chart doesn't even list it as a topic of conversation. People are still talking about BESM and Earthdawn, but not 7th Sea?:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php
The Orr Report of who's playing what on roll20 doesn't list 7th Sea as a distinct category. Way down the list there is a parenthetical mention of its 1st edition under the umbrella of AEG games (not 2nd edition's parent, and I suspect that category is at least 90% L5R players anyway). This is a list that still includes separate entries for games like The Dark Eye and the Dragon Age RPG:
http://blog.roll20.net/post/159952619415/the-orr-group-industry-report-q1-2017
Here's the main 7th Sea 2nd ed reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/7thSea/
Compare it to the main Deadlands reddit (a game that has been mostly dormant for 5 to 10 years depending on what you think of the kickstarted products from a few years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/Deadlands/
Both have a pretty low number of members, but Deadlands still has a hundred and twenty more (672 vs 792 at the time of posting).
More anecdotally, I've run into very little commentary online, and a lot of it comes off as very 'polite'. Polite in the sense that you feel negative opinions are being held back or minced for some reason. A lot of it also just comes off as straight up skeptical.
Overall, this has the whiff of late stage White Wolf products about it: People briefly gush about owning this book for whatever reason, but very few people are actually playing it.
If someone has other sources to shoot me down with they are welcome to do so, but note that I'm not focusing on sales, I'm focusing on actual play.
So, given what was expected of it, can we admit the second edition has been something of a flop? If so, what went wrong?
But it has been more than a year, and I look around and see a shockingly minuscule community for the product of that gigantic kickstarter and very little actual play. Consider some evidence:
As of today's date, Enworld's Hot Roleplaying Games chart doesn't even list it as a topic of conversation. People are still talking about BESM and Earthdawn, but not 7th Sea?:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php
The Orr Report of who's playing what on roll20 doesn't list 7th Sea as a distinct category. Way down the list there is a parenthetical mention of its 1st edition under the umbrella of AEG games (not 2nd edition's parent, and I suspect that category is at least 90% L5R players anyway). This is a list that still includes separate entries for games like The Dark Eye and the Dragon Age RPG:
http://blog.roll20.net/post/159952619415/the-orr-group-industry-report-q1-2017
Here's the main 7th Sea 2nd ed reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/7thSea/
Compare it to the main Deadlands reddit (a game that has been mostly dormant for 5 to 10 years depending on what you think of the kickstarted products from a few years ago): https://www.reddit.com/r/Deadlands/
Both have a pretty low number of members, but Deadlands still has a hundred and twenty more (672 vs 792 at the time of posting).
More anecdotally, I've run into very little commentary online, and a lot of it comes off as very 'polite'. Polite in the sense that you feel negative opinions are being held back or minced for some reason. A lot of it also just comes off as straight up skeptical.
Overall, this has the whiff of late stage White Wolf products about it: People briefly gush about owning this book for whatever reason, but very few people are actually playing it.
If someone has other sources to shoot me down with they are welcome to do so, but note that I'm not focusing on sales, I'm focusing on actual play.
So, given what was expected of it, can we admit the second edition has been something of a flop? If so, what went wrong?