Pынок/общество НРИ в России; RPG scene/market in Russia

[Chronicler]

Первый тираж Эры Водолея был 5000, через полтора(?) года допечатали ещё 2500.

Дмитрий, я дам ссылку на этот твой без сомнения всеобъемлющий пост Шейну Лэси Хенсли и Саймону Роджерсу? Или ты хочешь его как-то дополнить или изменить?

[Георлик]

Whoa! Greetings. Glad to see a new face, especially foreign one (well, not the one on your userpic though  )
I'm mostly agreeing with others, but I’d like to make a small remark.

• What do you consider as a problems/flaws (main problem/flaw?) at/with Russian fandom/rpg scene/market?

Actually, the problems of the community change with the community. Most tabletop gamers were introduced to rpg about 20 years ago. So the problem at that time was with the availability of materials and lack of solid translations. I thank those enthusiasts, who translated AD&D2 manuals, to this day- without them my life wouldn't be so bright. Our community was young and unorganized- so it was hard to find new players.
10 years passed. The internet grew into our life and first online communities were formed (for me it was Abandoned World). Then we found out that the understanding of the game, which was formed in years, differs greatly from group to group (though it never was the problem). That was the period with interesting discussions and great articles.
5 more years passed. Communities became solid, personal likes and dislikes stopped being an exciting topic for conversation, most of the gamers became married and got decent jobs. We became kinda inflexible and somewhat... elite-wannabe. We desperately needed new blood, and decided that something must be done! After series of experiments (like publishing DnD 3,5; or seriously discussing that Game Master should gain monetary profit for his effort) the community formed a new level of understanding- in what direction it should be developed. But it took years to reap the results of ideas that were sown.
The situation nowadays seems optimistic. This year was marked with new regular event (Ролекон), and by the look of it, the community became young again (I was so happy to see 13 years old kids at some table, I thought I might cry  Community became more friendly towards newcomers (yes, we were friendly before, but not enough it seems), not without the help of those who benefitted from the commercial success of publishing novice-friendly games (yes, Studio 101, I'm looking at you).

• In Poland we have constantly reoccuring fights between a few people who are followers of "storytelling" type of gaming and "by the book" players, "immersion" versus "rolling dices" etc., what about Russia, do you have some "schools", "techniques" of playing and its "followers", some specific "approaches" to RPG? or it is rather like - "it's just fun, hobby, play as you like, why to argue?"

Oh yeah, the fights. As I said earlier, we had a phase filled with heated debate. Now we are old and grey, so our blood is not boiling anymore. 
But still we do have that gap between immersionists, casual players and munchkins system optimizators. The most amusing thing is that we still can't decide who is who)
I, personally had an awesome conversation on last Rolecon (which has been held 18 December in Moscow) with MasterSet regarding the role of tabletop RPGs in life of common man. We had different views on the problem, but the conversation was quite pleasant.


So, we have raggle-taggle community of players now. Some of the old generation, some are younglings  but that doesn't matter in any way- our tastes and perferences were mostly formed by our surroundings, and i might gladly say, that the period when we couldn't get our hands on different systems (due to the inavalability our financial difficulties) are gone. All hail the inventors who brought us post, airplanes and internet 

[Dmitry Gerasimov]

@chronicler:

Спасибо за уточнение.

Давай, конечно. М.б., стоит сделать оговорку, что цифры тиражей взяты из разнообразных интернет-источников: всё-таки я во всех этих издательствах свечку не дер аудит не проводил.

[Арсений]

Собственно, одной из причин, по которым M&M окончательно бросили Эру, было то, что допечатка тиража (те самые 2500) была сделана без их ведома, и без авторских отчислений.

[Abash]

Hello, Konrad.

I'll try to answer some questions that didn't receive attention of other forumites.

What do you consider as a problems/flaws (main problem/flaw?) at/with Russian fandom/rpg scene/market?

The main problem of Russian RPG-market is that there is lack of country-wide community, capable of providing stable income to game developers. Guys from Studio 101 work hard to change the situation.

on that site I found also some other projects like
Уникум, Синтари, АРРРГХЪ!, ТриМ, maybe someone could write something more about them or other like these which comes to his mind? They are just fan made projects/ heartbreakers or maybe some of them had gained some popularity in the country?

As you can see no one can say a lot about Уникум (I don't know who wrote it and for what reason) and Синтари. Синтари is a team of authors-game masters from Novosibirsk with like 15+ experience of gaming and writing. They created 5 or 6 different games from humorous diesel-punk to social-revolution drama. Because of their location (Siberia) and little interest in PR of their games no one actually plays them nation-wide. Their site is http://rpg.nsk.ru/sintary/ (you should tweak with browser settings to get correct texts).

We have at least two more teams writing games in Russian: Eternal Order (Marquise de Sade inspired D&D) and Wolf Sun (Another version of supernatural agents fighting supernatural treats)

In Poland we have constantly reoccurring fights between a few people who are followers of "storytelling" type of gaming and "by the book" players, "immersion" versus "rolling dices" etc., what about Russia, do you have some "schools", "techniques" of playing and its "followers", some specific "approaches" to RPG? or it is rather like - "it's just fun, hobby, play as you like, why to argue?"

This "school vs. school" issue is an issue in Russian Live Action RPGames. Their community is larger and better connected, than Table-Top RPGs. As a rule of thumb I would say that there are 1 guy who can actually articulate that he belongs to some "school" of RPG at the internet forum; 10 guys from his group, who generally understand what he is talking about, but never go to forums; 100 of people who don't understand first eleven at all, but played once some sort of home brewed D&D-oWoD mutant, actually liked it, but never had a chance to 'go on" with this hobby.

Regards,
Vladimir Abashkin

[leorik]

Уникум, Синтари, АРРРГХЪ!, ТриМ, maybe someone could write something more about them or other like these which comes to his mind? They are just fan made projects/ heartbreakers or maybe some of them had gained some popularity in the country?

Уникум is heavyweight S-oriented homebrew RP system. I wonder, why it mentioned on ru.rpg.wikia, cuz AFAIK, it's never been presented to general public and it's just a lot for very narrow group of players/masters, connected with the system author. Still, it is solid system and generally favorable for those, who prefers math on gaming(actually math, not a GURPS "math").

[vsh]

What about regular PBF? Is it somehow popular, maybe even more popular than tRPG, or just as other forms of online playing like via skype etc. it's just a necessity for people who cant play tRPG with friends, or cant play as often as they want to?

The most popular PBF site in Russian is dungeonmaster.ru. It has the largest community. I'd say that it hosts more than half of PBF games set in Russian. I don't have any real numbers to confirm my opinion, though.

[DireBunny]

2007 - АРРРГХЪ!1!! (sometimes interpreted as "Альтернативная русская ролевая редакция Господа Христа" - Alternative Russian Role-Playing Edition of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though other readings exist)

A note from one of the authors, if you please - just to clean up some misconceptions.

АРРРГХЪ! was a parody game inspired by the Russian "combat" science fiction of the 1990s (mostly by the works of Юрий Петухов, best characterized as an extremist wacko so bad that its good, and Василий Головачев - Russian mainstream sci-fi author). Asocial heroes fighting infernal/alien conspiracies, supernatural horror, and other weird stuff. There was an add-on (called Второй Ударъ - The Second Strike) that contained more setting information with somewhat deeper social sci-fi feel, although in many aspects it was a "secondary follow-up for a successful comedy".

If Эра Водолея could be called "Russian answer to the Bureau 13", АРРРГХЪ could be a "Russian answer to the Unknown Armies", or "Russian answer to the Hunter: The Reckoning", unless it was actually more of a pamphlet about the ideology crisis then a game. That's why it hit the nerve in the 2007, although the playability of the presented material is questionable (just as with other parody games) - here I totally agree with Dmitry.

The etymology of the rules is not that simple, with some other "commercial" and indie games used for inspiration (and "Violence" actually featured a full classic dice set), but who cares, anyway.

There are two "new editions". The "Дневник Просветлённого" (Diary of The Enlightened One) is a Savage Worlds conversion inspired by Studio 101 team endeavors for building a civilized TRPG market in Russia. It's more game-oriented (yes, it means less wicked weirdness and more thought in the gaming aspects). Another one is "in the works", but that's almost all I know about it.

[KFC]

Guys I wanted once again to thank you all for an awesome support and invaluable help, without You this article would never come to life.

I hope this year will be much better for whole Russian RPG community than 2011,
and I wish You lots of fun with our beloved hobby

[KFC]

Hi guys, its me again 
Some of you may remember me, 2 years ago I was doing some small research about Russian RPG scene here at rpg-world.
I'm still curious how are the things going, and what has changed since then.
2 years ago as far as I recall Studio 101 was publishing their first games - Fiasco and Savage Worlds Deluxe, and they planned to release Красная Земля and Волчье Солнце settings.
I wasn't researching much the topic for the last two years, I've seen only they've run an IndieGoGo campaign for Deadlands and Красная Земля was released. Its good to see that they are still at the market and they are publishing new RPGs like Gumshoe or Apocalypse World.
What I've seen the Rolecons are still running, the FAE was translated recently and there is a Dungeon World in works, but generally thats all of my knowledge.
If someone could write something more about what was going on for the last two years in your country I'd be very very grateful.
For example Katikris in this thread wrote that this year there was a "boom" of the printed RPG releases in Russia, it'd be nice to learn something more about it.Maybe some new publisher has appeared? How about RPG conventions, there's more, less of them? What about the hobby in general is there a feeling that there is more people attracted to the RPGs or maybe all the attention are getting another tabletop games - like boardgames?


Write anything what you want to share, in english or russian it doesn't really matter.


* And what about Polish market? To be honest the situation did not changed much since 2 years. We have still few publishers like 2 or 3 (Fajne RPG, Galmadrin, AMG) which publish like 1 or 2 titles per year, some of the authors are self-publishing their games without a help of the publishers, and sell them in the volumes around 100-300 books, the bigger titles like Call of Cthulhu or Deadlands sell in around 1000 books so the sales are not terrific. The RPG sites and forums on the net are the still the same, some of them are dead and there's not much traffic in there, new sites are not appearing, some people migrated to the Facebook and G+ groups, but the general perspectives are not quite good. One of our biggest RPG publishers Portal Games switched totally their focus to board games only, our two rpg magazines which published on the net have vanished last year. You can't earn the real money on the RPGs in our country it's 100% hobbyist activity and I don't think it will change in the following years, board games are still more and more popular but RPGs as I perceive get the same small level of attention and it's still a niche hobby.

[Snarls-at-Fleas]

Hi,


Yes there is a new publisher - SaF Gang Design. We finished Apocalypse World (we worked on it together with Studio 101) at last (pdf for now, but printed books will be available very early next year).
Right now we are working on Remember Tomorrow, 3:16 and Durance and have many other projects planned. You can find some details here. If you have any questions I'd be glad to answer them.