The RPG hobby is in the midst of a significant supply-demand mismatch. With high switching costs and higher still depth of play, most hobbyists stick with one or a couple games and tend to funnel their dollars towards known quantities with existing fanbases and deeper supplement libraries. Meanwhile, there is the appearance that designing a game takes only incrementally more effort than simply running an existing one, something reinforced by the over 130,000 products on DriveThruRPG (most of them selling fewer than 50 copies). Designers struggle to differentiate in this environment, which makes the strategy of hitching your proverbial wagon to an existing property as popular as it ever has been.

‘Licensed game’ has negative connotations from go, and a lot of these don’t come from RPGs specifically. In the video game world, licensed games were historically throwaway products which only recently started to be taken seriously. In board games there is a wide range of licensing quality; Game of Thrones Risk likely took some real design effort to recast the classic game onto the Westeros map, but other examples, like the zillion different mutations of Monopoly, are advertising drivel. The real thing that makes RPG licensing different than other games is market size; in such a niche hobby, licensing agreements end up coming about through designer ‘pull’ more often than for wider appeal items which are often invented by marketing team ‘push’. The trouble with licensed RPGs is that even when the game comes from an earnest and honest desire to play in the world of the licensed IP, there are a few significant boundaries to the game actually being good that would not exist if the designers were starting from a blank page.

The form of licensed games

RPGs are a unique medium, and there’s little correlation between how much designers want to license a given property and how well it works at an RPG table. If you’re lucky, your movie or series had 3-5 main characters of differing abilities who went on adventures based on their own circumstances. This is why there is a Firefly RPG, and why there should be a Burn Notice RPG (in my humble opinion). This is also why the Genesys games, all based on board games from Fantasy Flight Games, sometimes feel a little weird with their character direction. Embers of the Imperium has a tacked-on setting conceit, and Secrets of the Crucible essentially casts you as playing Keyforge cards, which still rubs me the wrong way even if the alternatives were worse. That all said, RPG design has moved past the worst presumptions for licensed games. Indiana Jones spawned one of the worst-received licensed RPGs, in no small part due to a lack of character creation system (clearly everyone would play characters from the movie). Even if we aren’t screwing up that badly anymore, making a licensed RPG good still takes a fair amount of work.

The biggest fundamental issue for a licensed RPG is that an RPG is typically designed to allow for a wide breadth of characters, encounters, and stories, while most licensed properties are a narrow slice of worldbuilding and character development. There are exceptions to this, and as it turns out the exceptions make great RPGs: Star Trek, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Doctor Who are four particular examples of long-running properties with expansive lore which have been translated into RPGs very well (at least once, Star Trek has its share of bad ones too). For most properties, though, an RPG designer is going to have to figure out how to broaden the game’s appeal beyond playing through a movie or show (which, in case it wasn’t obvious, is wholly insufficient for a salable product). Star Wars provides an example of doing this very well through the first Star Wars roleplaying game, released by West End Games. In 1987, Star Wars wasn’t a media juggernaut like today; there were three films, a few tie-in novels, action figures and toys, and a few questionable TV properties mostly centering on Ewoks. When West End Games began work on the RPG, they ended up, well, making stuff up to fill in the gaps in the setting. Luckily for them (and for the series as a whole) they did a pretty great job making stuff up and are at least partially responsible for the success of the Expanded Universe from that point on (Timothy Zahn, for one, gives the Star Wars RPG a lot of credit for supporting his Thrawn trilogy).

Not every designer is willing (or able, depending on the licensor) to push the setting out as much as West End Games did for Star Wars; sometimes this can be done well and other times less so. Free League has done some more constrained licensed titles; Blade Runner in particular resists doing a lot of serious worldbuilding and mostly focuses on Los Angeles (and more specifically the LAPD), the setting of the two movies. This works for the most part because the game fits into an existing playstyle mold (investigation), and because the provided conceit is broad enough that players don’t need to worry about the impact of the series protagonists in most campaigns. This stands in contrast to something like the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game by Eden Studios. While there’s nothing mechanically wrong with the Buffy RPG, which used a version of Eden’s Unisystem, the character-driven nature of the series combined with the game’s decision to narrow in on high school archetypes for all character choices made campaigns using the game feel like they were mirroring the events of the TV show. It is entirely possible that the game (which in its Angel form won an Origins award, it was in no way a bad game) would have been built out and developed with further supplement support, but unfortunately Eden Studios lost the Buffy license from Fox in 2006, only four years after the game’s first release. This is a perfect way to transition into discussing the other trouble with licensed RPGs: the licensor.

The money question

There’s no question that designing a licensed game can be cashflow positive; support in the form of marketing and art assets can make a huge difference in both design costs and sales. That said, it’s not exactly a gravy train, and it would be quite rare for a licensor to support the actual budget of the game’s design (which is why plenty of licensed RPGs still need to run Kickstarters). What’s more, the designer may be paying a royalty to the licensor for using the IP in the first place, and the licensor has inordinate power to turn the spigot off pretty much whenever they choose, meaning that licensed games tend to carry with them a lot of liability that could outweigh the benefits of increased audience exposure.

The large comics companies, for one relevant example, have had tumultuous relationships with their attempted RPGs. Marvel and TSR saw success with Marvel Superheroes in the 1980s, and TSR (and Wizards, briefly) held the license until 2003. Marvel attempted publishing their own RPG in that year but stopped supporting it after only a year. More infamously, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying was released by Margaret Weis Productions in 2012, but despite winning two Origins Awards it was shuttered in 2013 for not meeting sales goals. DC had a number of RPG licenses in the 1980s, but their own negligence as a licensor was made clear when they licensed their IP to Green Ronin, who wrote DC Adventures in 2010. What happened there was that DC released ‘The New 52’ in 2011, effectively rebooting every single major comics line and leaving Green Ronin with completely deprecated IP.

DC and Marvel are high-profile examples of licensor shenanigans, but they aren’t the only ones. It’s still not entirely clear why Cubicle 7, publishers of The One Ring, lost the RPG license for the Tolkien properties to Free League. Although Star Wars has had several great RPG adaptations, a curious and archaic clause in their license has prevented Fantasy Flight/Edge from making PDF versions of the games and their supplements, as ‘electronic games’ are licensed separately and efforts to disentangle this either haven’t succeeded or haven’t been bothered with. There are of course plenty of conflicts when it comes to licensing within the games sphere. When Fantasy Flight started encroaching on Games Workshop’s minis business, GW took the Warhammer and 40k licenses away from them. When it comes to licensing and licensors, the game is distinctly a product first, and that may be the root cause of most problems that arise with licensing.

Licensed RPGs come out of the existing IP and the vision of the designer, yes, but also from the budget, timetable, creative limitations, and sales targets of the licensor. This is why most licensed games are built on existing mechanics, feature characters and settings from the original IP heavily (whether that would benefit the game or not), and in many cases don’t make it past the core rulebook or maybe one supplement. The most successful examples of licensed RPGs come from the confluence of two big businesses; Modiphius and Asmodee make money in the licensed RPG space because they can afford to support the bureaucratic aspect of the product as well as the creative.

This does mean that sometimes the failures sting. Marvel Heroic was good, and it’s hard to say whether the game was actually underperforming or Marvel just had no real understanding of how small the RPG hobby is. There are some really intriguing licensed games from the 80s that couldn’t happen today, like Palladium’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness. And, honestly, the most recent crop of licensed games to go through Kickstarter, like Cowboy Bebop and the upcoming Adventure Time RPG, have me hoping they’ll be good, but preparing for when they’re bad (full disclosure: I will be reviewing Cowboy Bebop soon). Although there’s certainly upside, I’m of the opinion that it is simply harder to design a successful licensed game.

I’m still willing to go to bat for the concept, though. Playing as your favorite characters is an imagination play subset we all experienced as kids, and as such there’s a throughline to wanting to game in your favorite settings, too. The problem here, as everywhere else, is money; these popular settings seemingly sprout lawyers and marketing departments as they become successful. The trouble with licensed RPGs, then, is that even with all this money floating around, and all the oversight (and sneering) that comes with it, the game designers don’t really seem to get all that much more.

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