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9. I have heard that you and the rest of DGP never quit your day jobs; did you ever consider just going for it and making DGP a full time game company? This might have given enough time to complete more projects in a timely and correct manner.
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True, we worked regular day jobs *and* did DGP in the evenings and on weekends. It was grueling, to say the least.
I would have loved to make DGP a full time venture, and yes, that would have made the "two-jobs" element less onerous for sure.
However, it did not work economically, or I would have done it without hesitation. We started out in our day jobs as DGP got rolling doing okay with our salaries. Our day job salaries were low enough we could have replaced them fairly easily had DGP skyrocketed into a smashing success early on.
Instead it grew slowly. We didn't have lots of resources so we could only afford to advertise with dinky ads in Dragon, and even our GDW ads cost what they cost everyone else, although they were cheaper than Dragon so we could afford to make them bigger and more extensive (which made them cost about the same as the Dragon ads).
Over the next few years, we kept pouring any increase in income into improving our product quality, rather than lining our pockets.
Meanwhile, we got hefty raises in our day jobs (computer consulting for Gary and me). By the time DGP could perhaps start to pay us some income, our salaries had doubled in our day jobs, and kept increasing. DGP just could not grow like that.
And the late 1980s was the beginning of the end of the heyday for paper and pencil RPGs, so sales were soft, and our insistence that we focus on Traveller kept a lid on what we might have achieved.
But the fact that GDW and even mighty TSR all have gone the way of the dinosaur indicates that the printed word RPG industry has dwindled considerably from it's heyday. I figured following the route of computer gaming would have been the way to grow to the point things could support us. Printing books is one thing, but to do a computer game takes some real big bucks up front ... and I didn't want to go there since I had enough of computer programming at work in my day job.
It's interesting to me that one of the real success stories in the Traveller licensee arena is FASA. They started out publishing some stuff for Traveller, but quickly moved beyond that into other game titles. Then in the late 80s Jordan Weisman began to take FASA off into computer technology with battledroids.
Today, FASA is a subsidiary of Microsoft and is writing games for PCs and the X-Box. DGP would have needed to do the same to make a go of it.
Sorry guys, but the Traveller market, even it its heyday, wasn't more than maybe 10,000 diehard gamers. I'm talking people who bought products now, not anyone who ever played the game.
If any product we produced ever sold half that, it was considered a runaway success! Many of our products sold far fewer copies. Once you factor in production costs (writers, artists, pasteup), printing costs (huge for small product runs under 5,000 copies), license fees to GDW, and the fact that most sales go through distributors at more than half off the cover price ...
In other words, sales never could sustain the growth we needed to go full time. So we produced for the game until we simply burned ourselves out physically and financially.
If the written word RPG market was the size it was in it's heyday and we had the internet as a publishing medium, things might have been completely different. But now days, even with PDFs over the internet, I bet the numbers are quite a bit smaller than 10,000 avid Traveller gamers.
The advantage is PDFs over the web don't require near the capital outlay putting a product into print takes, and you can cut out the middle man and keep more of the profits yourself, so the volumes can be smaller.
But my guess is they are too small to support a computer consultant who is used to making $50+ per hour and has all the business he can handle.
And that became the issue, along with never seeing my family. Did I throw all this money at DGP in hopes it might become self supporting in a dwindling industry, or did I just throw in the towel and go back to a normal life making really good money as a computer consultant, with all the work I could handle.
One was a big gamble, the other a sure thing. And I took the sure thing.
</font>[/QUOTE]And now to the question: did you take the idea of the "old timer" from Adventure 1: Kinunir where the characters meet the grizzled old-timer who used to serve aboard the Allamu? And who still has his maintenance key?? 
