| Mandisa |
I tried finding an existing thread where this might fit, but it's all tangled up...
Regardless of what new system rules the designers and playtesters come up with, I truly feel like the base marketing/business approach is going awry here, or at least not adapting well.
Clearly 4th edition caused issues among people familiar with D&D already, but maybe an even bigger issue was that it didn't bring in a flood-tide of people who haven't played pen and paper RPGs at all. Many existing players, myself included, taught some new people how to play D&D using 4th edition (or using 3.5 or Pathfinder), but that's still an organic growth process. You can only run so many groups at a time.
I clearly remember kids back in elementary school & (J) high school playing RPGs on looseleaf in the cafeteria (usually assumed to be D&D, even if it was homebrewed into something completely different). They had maybe 1 rulebook in their bag, or maybe just a module and some jotted-down notes. My kid brother's notebooks were more full of D&D (and his Final Fantasy/D&D hybrid) than actual school notes for most of 6-8th grade. D&D was set up as something kids could do on the cheap, without electronics, without parental involvement (maybe a drive to the gaming/comic store?), and with the tools they already had at hand. A more "grown-up" version of make-believe.
And for folks with more resources? My DH got into D&D by way of the Gold Box games and the early Salvatore & Dragonlance books. Friends swapping (and yes, copying) games became a gaming group, and later a LAN-party group in the days of Neverwinter Nights. There was even the cartoon. And for the budding writers, you had the letters/submissions to Dragon & Dungeon. You could literally find D&D in every form of media entertainment, all feeding people into the game to become new players (or even better, DMs).
3.5 had the OGL, and it kinda(*) had NWN2 and DDO, and the Realms at least still had novels. LFR was good for some, but gaming shops were starting to close up or get smaller/further away, and not everyone can afford to go to conventions (or likes con-style gaming). 4e closed ranks even further, with way fewer novels, no video games (the FB game is cute, but feels incomplete w/o playing with friends), no video projects beyond the initial YouTube promos, and serious curtailment of updated/original settings. (Rolling your own adventure/campaign is fine, but rolling your own world is much harder, let alone finding ppl interested enough to play in it.)
Established PnP gamers have lots of systems, past & present, mainstream & indie, to choose from, which is great, and people should play what they like, as they like. Clearly though, you only find out about things like Pathfinder, or GURPS, or Cthulhu after a friend tells you or you know to seek it out from some other source.
However you personally play/feel, very few new-to-PnP people are being actively roped into the hobby, esp. kids/teens, and I think that's way more important to the sustained growth of PnP RPGs (as an industry and as a group of gamers) than rules systems. And I don't hear much of anything from Wizards or from the fans about how to address that fundamental issue.
(* I say kinda, because you could never play more than a few races/classes, and they all focused on a very small slice of the spectrum of D&D settings and adventure-types.)
| Terquem |
That's a very good point.
If I understand you, you are saying that it is only partly about how the game is played (mechanically) and partly about the game experience (social interaction) but that you are also saying it has a factor of “involvement” that transcends the cost, in dollars, that a player puts into their hobby.
It might possibly be compared to the guy who ties his own flies. He just doesn’t sit in a bubble and tie flies, and then fish. No the true sportsman interacts with his hobby on a very intimate level. A level that places him as not just a participant, but also as a sort of iconic figure who is simultaneously supporting, and helping to make grow, his own hobby.
This is the way it was for me in 1977. I had only two “rule” books, but a half dozen note books filled with ideas about how my game should work. And I interacted with other gamers, even ones who did not play in my game, to get an idea of what everyone was doing. I felt like I “was” the hobby, not just a consumer of hobby products.
But the internet is the paradigm that changes all of this. Because it is going to be difficult to use this tool, the internet, to both sell the product, and bring the hobby enthusiast into the community to the degree that he or she feels like they “are” the hobby, or NOT!
It is my opinion that this is where Paizo has succeeded. Their community has an overwhelming sense of “connectednes"’ to the hobby that cannot be overlooked. This community “IS” the hobby of Dungeons and Dragons, no matter what the rules they are playing by are called. And it is this factor that must be examined and incorporated into the next edition of the “Brand” if it is ever going to feel like it once did, for me.
| Scott Betts |
The last two editions (3e and 4e) have seen a trend of featuring major initiatives that have dramatically altered the tabletop roleplaying industry and that had nothing to do with the rules.
In 3e, this was the OGL.
In 4e, it was DDI.
I'll be curious to see what comes along with 5e.
| Mandisa |
Each gamer "is" the hobby, in microcosm. Yeah, I could get behind that idea. But the people who are "not yet" gamers are an important part of the hobby, too, and that's what I think is absent or at least not-quite-all-there, regardless of system. I never played D&D as a kid (lots of external social reasons there), but people talked about it around me, and my entire notion of it was wrapped up in its social aspect. So when a friend was talking about his 3.5 game, I piped up to join in, knowing no rules, but wanting in on the hanging-out-and-let's-pretend. (It also helped that I'd done a lot of LARPing in college, but that's a different gateway drug.)
I do agree that the Paizo folk have done an excellent job of fostering a sense of community, both in terms of the Dragon/Dungeon readership previously, and the internet forum community currently. But being part of a gaming conversation on the internet doesn't allow for "listening-in" from non-gamers like a conversation in a gaming, comics, or book shop (or the old Software, etc. stores :)
To take up your fishing analogy, a guy I've known well for many years in the context of anime recently told me he was an avid fisherman. I've talked at length with this guy on anime/manga, sci-fi TV/books/movies, obscure Japanese horror & monster flicks, politics, family, health, all kinds of stuff. But he goes fishing several times a year, for decades, and I had no clue. What if I was a would-be fisherman, just waiting for that nudge - with the right context or hook, we could've been happily fishing for all these years.
| Mandisa |
The last two editions (3e and 4e) have seen a trend of featuring major initiatives that have dramatically altered the tabletop roleplaying industry and that had nothing to do with the rules.
In 3e, this was the OGL.
In 4e, it was DDI.
I'll be curious to see what comes along with 5e.
The OGL and DDI were good for the business of D&D, in various ways, but they either didn't or didn't do enough to convert geeks-but-not-gamers into PnP gamers.
The OGL got a lot of 3PP into the industry, and got their material on shelves - in stores that already sold games (or comics), and at conventions for people who already went to game conventions. If you already went to those kinds of places regularly, it's a good bet you were already involved in PnP games (or maybe minis or wargames).
I do recall a few far-flung D20-compatible rulesets for cross-genre things like anime (Guardians of Order's BESM titles) or sci-fi/fantasy books (the Wheel of Time RPG). And I remember seeing books like that in chain bookstores outside of the games/comics shelf (if there was one), which gets the attention of folks who might be browsing elsewhere. I'm just not sure how many were encouraged to spread out from those types of one-off books with transitional materials of some kind. And it was sometimes (often?) difficult to find players for niche titles, especially before things like gamers-seeking-gamers forums or virtual tabletops.
I actually think more of that sort of licensed IP or cross-genre games should have been made, it's a good intro/gateway. Something like the OGL's "one system, many faces" approach could work, maybe with a simplified version of the core rules applied to different settings, rather than a hyper-customized version like I think GURPS tends to do.
As for DDI, I love it, use it, pay for it, no problem. But I was already playing D&D/PnP RPGs, and I think that basic qualification fits most, if not all DDI subscribers. Right near launch, they did have a big DDI/Character Builder push at the Wizards DR table at NY Comic Con, which is when I did the demo and subscribed, but the demo wasn't advertised - we just happened to go through the booth and get yanked.
I had hoped that a subscription model could sustain the business even as people buy fewer printed books. I think they shouldn't have scrapped PDF books completely - piracy continues regardless - and something akin to Paizo's line-by-line subscriptions and book+PDF purchases are a solid business model that should probably be emulated. But all that only applies once someone's already interested in what you have to sell. I certainly never saw ads for DDI in Barnes & Noble, or on TV or whatever.
Wizards initiatives that probably better fit what I'm talking about would be things like the board games (found in Toys R Us of all places), the Red Box (in concept, not execution), and maybe the Facebook game (again, though, it feels not-quite-ready without the ability to play with friends). Encounters could've helped, but they tied it to local gaming stores, which are few & far-between (and why Wednesdays??).
But they need to be more proactive about transitioning people from that stuff into the "full" game, and about drawing people (read: geeks) in from even more avenues. Any company can do this, it's just that Wizards presumably already has the capital and contacts.