I belive that failing literacy levels could be responsible.
I blame TV, computer games and the rest of it.
Im In New Zealand and was raised with only three channels.
Channel one , two and OFF.
If you crack open a first ed DMG and Compare it to a 4th ed DMG you will see what Im talking about better than any rant can persuade.
Most of us are in our 30s I belive and were probably the tail end of the make break literacy point, and probably in the top 32 of kids as we grew up. If you grew up playing 1st ed you had to be able to do math period.
I think you are going to see more point and click games and more one way entertainment as the whole scene begins to fail around us.
There is a movie about this called Idiocracy.
5th edition will be printed on a Mega Jumbo slurpy container and will come with minitures made of ice.
Does this help ?
To Count Rugen:
You're absolutely right that this is off-topic, and the first response to your post illustrates why off-topic threads are, generally, a bad idea. That being said, I remember reading something in the last week or two to the effect that the RPG industry has not suffered any ill effects so far from the economic downturn. I don't remember exactly where I saw it, but it was probably ENworld, gnome stew, or kobold quarterly, as those are the only gaming sites I read with any regularity.
To the moderators:
I'm about to feed the troll, and then I suggest the following: let Murkmoldiev have one response (so he gets the last word), and then lock down this thread, because it's guaranteed degenerate into a flamewar sooner or later. I'll do my best to keep this post civil.
I belive that failing literacy levels could be responsible.
I blame TV, computer games and the rest of it.
Im In New Zealand and was raised with only three channels.
Channel one , two and OFF.If you crack open a first ed DMG and Compare it to a 4th ed DMG you will see what Im talking about better than any rant can persuade.
Most of us are in our 30s I belive and were probably the tail end of the make break literacy point, and probably in the top 32 of kids as we grew up. If you grew up playing 1st ed you had to be able to do math period.
I think you are going to see more point and click games and more one way entertainment as the whole scene begins to fail around us.
There is a movie about this called Idiocracy.
5th edition will be printed on a Mega Jumbo slurpy container and will come with minitures made of ice.
Does this help ?
For some reason, the whole time I was reading that, all I could think was: "Get off my lawn!"
I'm from the tail end of generation X (of which I assume you are also a member, based on your statement about being in "our" 30's), so I find your little diatribe extremely ironic. When we were young(er), our generation's popular culture--especially our music--was steeped with resentment at being judged by older generations. They looked at us and said, "the world is going to hell in a handbasket," and we dismissed them as reactionary old codgers. Up until now, I thought that they were wrong about us, but your post is making me rethink things. If, after railing against the way we were stereotyped and denigrated, we can turn around and fall into the same pattern of stereotyping and denigrating younger generations, then maybe we are a bunch of useless ruffians, after all.
Literacy rates are holding pretty steady throughout industrialized nations, and rising steadily in all but the most oppressed or war-torn parts of the third world. The only exception to this lies in some European countries where increasing numbers of immigrants from less-developed parts of the world drag down their literacy numbers somewhat. Kids are most definitely not getting less literate, or even less intelligent in general. Their tastes and preferences are different, but just because they don't like exactly what we like doesn't make them stupid. That's how older generations misjudged us, and it really fills me with disappointment to see someone in our generation making that same mistake.
If you look at this wondrous item submission from an eight-year-old, you will see what I'm talking about better than any rant can persuade. But I'm going to go ahead and rant anyway, because I need to vent my spleen after reading your ludicrous post.
I'll say this again, because it's the key point here: You see that they have different tastes from you, and come to the conclusion that they are stupid for not sharing your tastes. Taste is subjective. Just because you don't like 4E doesn't mean that people who like it are semi-literate or bad at math. I am, at best, ambivalent about 4E, but one of the things I like best about it is the fact that you don't have to do nearly as much math to play it. I'm currently working on a master's in engineering, so it's safe to say that I'm pretty good at math, but that doesn't mean I want my RPG to remind me of my homework. I'm grateful that Gary Gygax gave us D&D but his original rules system was a horrible kludge; people who are smart at math come up with the most elegant and simple system possible for accomplishing the task, and D&D has steadily marched up that slope since its inception. Only fools take pleasure in wrestling with overly complicated math.
I find your statement that we will see "more one way entertainment" especially hilarious. The best counter-example to this is the rise of MMORPGs: not one-way, not two-way, but n-way, where 'n' is several orders of magitude larger than any table-top RPG group. MMORPGs may not involve face-to-face interaction (which I think is a shame), but that comes back to a matter of taste, not intelligence. It's also true that they currently focus on hack-and-slash at the expense of roleplaying (which is why I don't play any), but there are community-based efforts out there which are much more focused on roleplaying. Computer games are not the death of RPGs, they simply add yet another medium to an already multidimensional hobby.
Whether or not the mods lock down this thread, I won't be posting any more responses here. You can question my parentage, denigrate my mother, or compare me to various parts of the human anatomy, and I won't care. I will say this, though: don't try to play any word games or set up any straw men, because nobody around here is stupid enough to fall for that crap. The intent behind your words was clear, so don't try to weasel your way out of them: either apologize, or stand up and tell everone why I'm wrong, but don't try to act like you didn't mean what you clearly said.
Chief Technical Officer
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In my research (I've been kicking around starting a garage game company for some time now), I've ascertained that the global table-top RPG market is between 20 and 50 million dollars, but that is prior to the current economic slump of course.
For one thing, if you ask 10 people in the industry to define what's included in "the global table-top RPG market," you'll probably get 10 different answers.
But even if you had an explicit defienition, publishers and distributors don't generally share their numbers, so I don't believe that any one person in the industry has access to enough information to allow an accurate valuation to be made. (Ryan Dancey could *probably* make the best estimate of anyone, but it'd still just be an educated guess.)
Take Paizo, for example. Of course, each of our hobby distributors knows exactly how much they sell of our products, but they can mostly only guess at how much any other hobby distributor sells. They might be reasonably correct in assuming that their own relative sales represent the hobby as a whole—that is, if they sell twice as much from Company A as they do from Company B, that will be *roughly* true for the other hobby distributors... but if either company A or B sells to the book trade or mass market, the relative proportions probably won't even be close to true there. They would also have near zero insight into how much we sell directly to our customers.