Covering Ourselves

There's a disturbing trend in roleplaying game books of the last few years that shows little sign of abating. And I'm sure that, at least in a small way, I'm partially to blame.

Back at Wizards of the Coast, before the release of 3rd Edition, when the topic of covers for the core books came up, the idea of having the covers designed to look like "real books" was presented to us. I think we designers were skeptical, but I'd seen other things that the artist, Henry Higginbotham, had done, and they were great. So we went along with it -- although I honestly don't know how much say we really had in the first place. I suppose if we'd absolutely hated the idea with a passion, we might have changed some minds. I don't know. At any rate, it's immaterial. We didn't, and the 3rd Edition books came out with the covers they had. And I liked them.

I had no idea that we'd be starting a trend both inside Wizards and out.

What followed, of course, was a series of both Wizards of the Coast products and those of other companies (primarily d20) that also attempted the "faux-book" cover look. (To Wizards' credit, at least their covers were usually created as real, physical pieces that were then photographed for the cover. Most looked pretty good.)

Now obviously, a lot of d20 companies use these kinds of covers because they're inexpensive. It's cheaper to get a graphic designer to whip you up something in Photoshop than to pay an artist to produce a professional painting for a cover. That's a shame, but you do what you can, and you do what you have to. Other companies most likely chose this option to make their products look more like Wizards', and that's why I kind of wish we (Wizards) would have started things out differently. Or at least that Wizards had seized the opportunity to remedy things with the release of version 3.5. (Although the beautiful cover of the Draconomicon suggests that perhaps they are taking a different tack.)

I think, however, that in all of this we've lost what's really important about a cover.

When I started in the industry, I was told over and over again that covers were incredibly important for sales. While at TSR, I met people who were convinced that the cover of a book was more important than what was inside. And these people made more money than I did, to be sure, and were in positions of influence. Of course, obvious references to age-old maxims aside, these people probably felt that way because they couldn't understand all that kooky stuff inside the book, but they could appreciate a nice piece of art. These people told me that the cover was the single most important sales tool a book had. Whether that particular bit of hyperbole is accurate, the point is, a good, attractive cover helps sell the book.

But I'll even go a step beyond that. Covers are more than just a sales tool. They're an intricate part of the play experience the product provides. When I was young, I can remember sitting in my room and studying the covers of the 1st Edition Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide. Each depicted what seemed to be an adventure in progress. Each told a story, and they were stories one could imagine happening in a game. A bunch of adventurers have infiltrated an evil temple and killed all the lizard men in it. Now they are looting the place. A group of heroes has traveled to the City of Brass, and they now face a giant efreet. I thought about how I would design such an adventure. I thought about what I'd do as a player in that situation. I eagerly anticipated the next playing session. The adventure-encouraging covers actively motivated me to play the game.

When we worked on 3rd Edition, the designers had various goals. One goal for the game was to recruit new players (and thus customers). Of course, encouraging new players to try the game is the holy grail of the industry. There are lots of theories on how to do it best, but it's just not as easy as it might seem. One of the things I brought to the table involved customer retention. In my years of working with games other than D&D, I'd talked to thousands of gamers who had left D&D to play something else. I had a good idea of how to meet some of the needs of those types of gamers, and thus to retain them as D&D players/customers.

Look at it this way. If the average player plays the game for three years, and there are 100,000 active players buying lots of products, getting each one to play an extra year is almost the equivalent of recruiting 33,000 new gamers.

What makes this even better is that we determined that one of the best ways to recruit new gamers is to encourage existing gamers to keep playing. The best recruiters for new players are existing players, and there's no bigger incentive than the desire to play. If you're a gamer and you move to a new town, one of the first things you might do is to try to introduce your new friends to the hobby. Or you might teach your younger sister to play, or whatever.

The point here is, it's in everyone's best interest to keep people actively playing the game -- whether you're a gamer, a small publisher, or Wizards of the Coast. Especially if you're Wizards of the Coast, in fact, since they've got the most at stake.

And it's not just game rulebooks. Every Dragon Magazine cover since the dawn of 3rd Edition has had just a single, static figure (okay, once in a while we see two figures), standing pretty much stock still. The art's well-done, but I think the approach is a shame. (Those of you old timers, remember the Dragon covers of old? Remember the imaginative chess board covers by Dennis Beauvais? Remember the various epic battle scenes or strange vistas?) Even comics seem to have fallen into this strange trend. I've recently started reading Ultimate Spider-Man and every cover, with just a few exceptions, simply shows Spider-Man in a pose with little or no background or suggestion of the story inside. Show me any cover without the issue number, and I wouldn't be able to hazard a guess as to which issue it was.

Call this a rant if you will, but I'm so tired of this flavorless cover trend that I just had to say something. Even our own Malhavoc Press covers have flirted with this trend, I'll admit. While we don't do the faux-cover books (and never will), we've had a few covers that basically show a single figure without a lot of action. I guess that's okay occasionally, if the figure is really intriguing. Perhaps a better way to express my feeling is to say that, rather than always needing "action," a cover should always be "adventure-inspiring." In other words, it should make me want to play the game.

What I'd like to see return, industry-wide, are the beautifully painted, adventure-inspiring scenes by some of the top-notch industry artists -- Todd Lockwood, rk post, Brom, Sam Wood, and more.

But, rather than let this just be a negative column, I thought I'd point out a handful of my favorite covers on roleplaying game products over the years. Some of these are seen through the eyes of nostalgia, I'll admit, but most are just great works of art. They all convey the sense of adventure that I've been talking about:

Tome and Blood by Todd Lockwood	Vault of the Drow by Erol Otus
White Plume Mountain by Jeff Dee	The Isle of Dread by Jeff Dee
Dragons of Despair by Clyde Caldwell	Forge of Fury by Todd Lockwood
Dragon's Crown by Brom	Labyrinth of Madness by Jeff Easley
Dungeon Magazine #40 by Alan Pollack	Temple, Tower & Tomb by Paul Jaquays
A Darkness Gathering by Matt Wilson	Dragon Magazine #146 by Keith Parkinson
	Cover illustrations courtesy of Pen & Paper, Jeff Dee, Keith Parkinson, and Wizards of the Coast.
Back cover of The Ghost Tower of Inverness by Jeff Dee