thread: 2012-03-27 : Indie POV pt 3: A Small Pep Talk
On 2012-04-12, Moreno wrote:
David, personally I agree about that description of Dogs in the Vineyard. As I said, I was excited to play it when I first heard about it. And I didn't even post at the Forge at the time. I had no idea who this "lumpley games" guy was, and I was GMing CoC at the time in the most illusionist way imaginable.
But these days I am sometimes behind a convention table trying to sell indie rpgs (not too often, I am not a very good seller so I usually am at the demo table playing games), and I see the face that a lot of people do at the mere mention of the word "western" (and it's even worse with "religion").
Sadly, the western genre is not "popular" anymore, its place in popular culture was taken by the action movies in the '80s (my explanation for this is that western got too intelligent, problematic and full of human issues. While what Hollywood need is mindless violence, and identifiable enemies to blow up with no second thoughts)
For what I have seen (maybe the situation is different in the USA), the people gets much more excited about the system. If you get them on a table rolling dice and they see how the conflict works, you get a sale a lot of times. But it's difficult to get people at the table if you talk too much about the premise ("it's one of the best selling indie games in the world" works much better) and the usual question after that in forums is "could I use this to play Jedi or D&D?"
And now I have revealed my secret agenda in asking that question to Vincent: I want to know how to become a better seller of DitV books! :-)
