"Silver Bayonet?" Topic

There have been no posts on this since April. I had rather expected this system to generate some real interest and traction.

Historicon only had 2 events with a Silver Bayonet dimension and one of them was a Pride and Prejudice mashup.

Has the bubble burst?

All bubbles burst. How long were you expecting that one to last?

You can buy "buzz." Publishers and movie and TV people do it all the time. But you can't buy sustained interest. That depends on the product. If your product is wargame rules (or figures) ask yourself whether this makes possible games which couldn't otherwise be fought, or whether it makes for better games. For me, staking vampires in the era of muzzle-loading weapons was proof someone had run out of ideas.

It did generate some nice miniatures though.

I just got a number of gangs and the rules for insanely cheap prices in the sale bin at my game shop. So that is a silver lining of the bubble burst. Game looks solid but very niche. It has been hard to convince people to play it but I plan on running a Halloween game using it this year. That might make some converts. I 3D printed terrain and Knucklebones miniatures has some great Napoleonic zombies to print as well as more gothic looking Napoleonic soldiers. I can recommend them very highly!

@Robert

Some things take some don't. I didn't think Frostgrave would become what it has. Not surprised Sails of Glory didn't. I figured SB had enough interesting elements to find a following.

@ Exeter. Many things are popular for reasons I will never understand. And every so often I can't understand why something didn't catch on--though that's more often true of books than miniatures.

But I think flexibility is a good general rule for miniatures. A good set of rules has an appeal. So does a setting or a group of scenarios or a range of miniatures. But when you say "these rules are intended for this very unusual setting, for which you'll need these very specific castings"--well, you've pretty much defined "niche market." Either you're the next Games Workshop, you become a smallish cult like Flintloque or your bubble bursts relatively soon.

I'm not hooked up with the Frostgrave players. I'd love to know how many use the setting, and how many simply find it a good fantasy miniatures skirmish set.

I like the Gothic black powder time frame, but it is a niche market. I watched a youtube video of the rules and it looked pretty ponderous and boring to me, but I like the concept. I would certainly play the game if someone ran one, but I have not sen any interest in my area. I would buy the figures before I bought the rules I think.

Exeter;

Like Robert says, all bubbles burst. In the few years past, the hot things here on TMP for their respective while was "Maurice", "Longstreet", "Frostgrave", "Congo", etc.

Now most of them are pretty quiet as the flash has gone out of them.

There are a lot of similar rulesets (the Undead in Flintloque for example), so I'm not surprised that after the initial fanfare it's gone a bit quiet.

And I wouldn't have been surprised if it became the new Frostgrave either.

You just never know.

I don't think you can judge a systems popularity based on post at one forum. SB has daily posts on FB from a variety of people. There are too many other venues to post at to make a judgement using one.

Yes, the FB group is going strong with daily postings. Forums are a much smaller slice of the market.

Expansions coming next year for Carpathia and Canada, mentioned here:
link

Actually, it kinda surprises me how much bubble there is. Very few things left for which you can't find miniatures and rules, but give something a few ads and some articles in the glossies, and people jump from project to project faster than they can paint and base, judging by what winds up for sale a few years later.

Someone should do a study to discover the median interval between the introduction of a revolutionary new miniature wargaming project and its peak occurrence on eBay or in flea markets, and how long the stuff sits around unpainted and not being played with before it's sold off. My guesses: peak sale of the revolutionary new product is 3-5 years after introduction, and it's been sitting around ignored for a year or two before that, so a bubble of two or three years.