Dragon Con: A Sight of the Schism in action

[BryonD]

This.

Most gamers are not enthusiasts. They play or have played in maybe one game, with one system, and perhaps own the player book for that system.

Again, surround yourself with the hardcore and that's all you're going to see.

I completely agree.

Of course, I repeated several times that 4E appeals to "casual" gamers much more than it does to enthusiasts.

 

[Contrarian]

This sort of dismissal surprises me. When I see people post that what happens on messageboards is not representative and what happens at conventions and gamedays is not representative and what happens at gamestores is not representative and then theorize that there are vast numbers of people who there is no way to poll and no way to be sure even exist in any substantial number with a specific viewpoint, I have to be skeptical. I mean, if you want to believe it, more power to you, but it doesn't even rise to the level of insufficient data. The fact of the matter is that people on messageboards, at convention and gmedays, and in gamestores are precisely representative of what they play and think. They just happen to be people who you can actually count and poll.

He're my ultimate "casual gamer" anecdote/factoid:

It's about 15 years ago. Gen Con is still in Milwaukee. I'm at a seminar that was scheduled to be "the Gamma World design teams gives you GM advice" but turned out to be "the GAmma World design team announces that Gamma World is cancelled again. So it turns into a post-mortem/what-might-have-been type of discussion.

One of the TSR editors, explaining how enthusiastic Gamma World players are, mentions that Gamma World actually had the best "second purchase rate" of any TSR line, but overall sales weren't enought to keep the line going. So, of course, somebody has to ask what a "second purchase rate" is. It's TSR's sales-derived guestimate of how many gamers who bought the core product in a game line went out and bought a second product.

Gamma World's "best in the company" second-purchase rate? Fifty percent.

Let that sink if for a minute. If 50% was the best number at TSR, that means, for all of its other lines, including AD&D, less than half of TSR's "customers" ever bought a second product. There's a huge number of people out there who never bought anything except a Players Handbook. Those are casual gamers (which includes drop-outs, admittedly), and I'm pretty sure they don't spend much time at Gen Con, or hanging out on discussion boards. There isn't much to discuss when you only own one rulebook.

(Me, I'm a science guy. If I had a billion dollars, I'd go ahead and commission a random-sample study of Americans to ask what games they play, and settle all these questions about who the casual gamers are, and how big the Generation of Lost Editions is. I don't have a billion dollars, unfortunately.

More realistically, I'd like to have access to sales figures so I could compare accessory sales to core product sales. I'm never going to get those, either, but at least I know the numbers exist somewhere.)

Face it, man. We're the hardcore. We represent the core target audience of the hobby (because I assume we're all "second, third, fourth, etc purchase" people), but we're not really like the majority of gamers.

 

[Wicht]

Of course, the enthusiasts are also the biggest spenders. Those guys who are still in the same basement using the same books they used 20 years ago and who don't pay attention to the market, have no practical effect on the market. One can argue that the rift doesn't matter because its only the real core enthusiast who care. But you know what? Its us core enthusiast who determine which games the rest of our gaming friends are going to play. We're the ones running games, testing rules, writing adventures, etc. So if the core enthusiasts are split it does matter to the market because those who peel away to other games will take the non-enthusiast with them.

Not to mention that even if on-line posters, shoppers, enthusiasts are only a small sample of gamers at large, I would not be surprised to find that they are a fairly representative sample of the tastes of the larger population. That is to say, if I'm marketing a brand and I take a small sample of ten people and try my product out on them,... if all ten hate it, its pretty silly to tell oneself "what do ten people know - there are after all 6 billion other people in the world who probably feel differently."

 

[Mistwell]

Not to mention that even if on-line posters, shoppers, enthusiasts are only a small sample of gamers at large, I would not be surprised to find that they are a fairly representative sample of the tastes of the larger population.

I would. The first part of your sentence defines a subgroup behaving drastically differently within the hobby than the majority of that hobby. It therefore follows that it WOULD be surprising if they were fairly representative of the tastes of the larger population of that hobby.

Particularly on this topic, where I honestly think a large number of D&D players are still playing home brewed variants of what was once 1E. I do not think your online poster/shopper of 3e or 4e or Pathfinder is in any way representative of a player in a home brew 1E-type game, for example.

Enthusiasts in general tend to vary from casual partakers of anything really. A chess enthusiast is looking for things that a casual chess player is not. The casual chess player may well want pretty pieces that can look good when sitting on a shelf, while the enthusiast may be looking for a more efficient timer device. And enthusiast stamp collector is looking for a rare stamp from 1806 while a casual stamp collector will pick up an extra sheet of star wars stamps when they come out. An enthusiast comic collector will want a high grade CGC Fantastic Four number 1, while a casual comic collector will want the newest issue of X-Men.

Casual hobbyists usually have different tastes and buying habits than hobby enthusiasts, for most hobbies. I do not think D&D is different.

 

[Rechan]

Is there anything that can be said about PF or 4e that won't get the response "There's no data to back that up" or "that proves nothing"?

Until cold hard numbers are provided about everything gaming related, then everything is subjective, based on opinion and anecdote. Can we move past this?

 

[Rechan]

Of course, the enthusiasts are also the biggest spenders. Those guys who are still in the same basement using the same books they used 20 years ago and who don't pay attention to the market, have no practical effect on the market. One can argue that the rift doesn't matter because its only the real core enthusiast who care. But you know what? Its us core enthusiast who determine which games the rest of our gaming friends are going to play. We're the ones running games, testing rules, writing adventures, etc. So if the core enthusiasts are split it does matter to the market because those who peel away to other games will take the non-enthusiast with them.

Not to mention that even if on-line posters, shoppers, enthusiasts are only a small sample of gamers at large, I would not be surprised to find that they are a fairly representative sample of the tastes of the larger population. That is to say, if I'm marketing a brand and I take a small sample of ten people and try my product out on them,... if all ten hate it, its pretty silly to tell oneself "what do ten people know - there are after all 6 billion other people in the world who probably feel differently."

I would replace your second paragraph with this:

Regardless of what the general population of gamers think, they that speak the loudest are the ones that are heard. IF the majority are so casual that they're not giving positive feedback, then the only feedback that is received is the negative.

 

[cangrejoide]

Can we just have one goddamn thread where Pathfinder is mentioned and a small group doesn't rush forward to assure us all that it's a big failure that most gamers will never hear about?

Seriously.

You do realize this thread was started by someone stating that 4E was a failure because there were no games for it at Dragoncon?


And seriously guys, its been more than a year..can we let this go?

Everyone plays whatever they want, doesnt matter if its 4E, PF or Fatal.

 

[gribble]

Another data point, which seems to marry well with most of the others:

Of the 9 local players that I game regularly with (including myself, and not counting my players which only play SW Saga and not D&D):
One has played about half a dozen sessions of 4e, disliked it intensely and prefers not to play it.
One prefers 4e and refuses to play 3e (then again, he's always been a "latest version of D&D only for me" kind of guy).
One has a strong preference for 3e/PF, but will play 4e.
The other 6 of us slightly prefer 3e/PF (or another system entirely) or 4e in an even split, but are happy to play whatever is on offer.

Of that group, there are probably 3 of us that I'd consider to be fairly active members of the online community. Curiously enough, all of us fall into the "slight preference but will play anything" category. As far as I know, I'm the only DDI subscriber.

 

[malraux]

Everyone plays whatever they want, doesnt matter if its Fatal.

No, Fatal is decidedly badwrongfun.

 

[Dragonblade]

Never heard of Dragon Con, but I went to PAX which probably had some 70,000+ attendees and probably exceeds Gen Con in terms of geek attendance and the only RPG gaming going on that I saw was 4e.

Well, I take that back. I did see 4 guys playing Burning Wheel with the creator in one of the side game rooms. But that was the only non-WotC RPG I saw in my entire time there.

The WotC Dungeon Master seminar at PAX had something crazy like 500 attendees and was packed. The PAX staff had to turn people away at the door.

Outside of the hardcore tabletop gaming subculture, very few people know anything about Pathfinder (or EN World for that matter). 4e D&D is clearly king. And I don't mean that to disparage Pathfinder which I have nothing against.