jdrakeh
Front Range Warlock
New faces in the hobby are a good thing, because new faces mean that publishers might benefit from continuing to print new products and, thus, our hobby might live on for a while longer.
New Faces (Forked: Its the terminology that kills me...)
New faces in the hobby are a good thing, because new faces mean that publishers might benefit from continuing to print new products and, thus, our hobby might live on for a while longer.
Nifft
Penguin Herder
GreatLemur
Explorer
It's undeniably a good thing. But anybody who refers to a roleplaying game character as a "toon" in my presence will be asked not to. Unless they're playing Toon, of course.
Desdichado
Hero
Irrelevent. I'm talking about if the hobby died tomorrow.
My average postcount has plummetted the last couple of years, though.In any case, I'd probably have had a few more promotions without ENWorld distracting me at work all that time.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Honestly, if they're actually interested in playing D&D, not in just trying to force your D&D session into being a tabletop version of [insert game here], then I don't really see the problem.
People can be cured of lame terminology (and ENworlders have plenty of horrid terminology of their own), but finding people who are genuinely interested in participating in P&P RPGs isn't exactly common, generally speaking. Honestly, I think some of us saw the same thing in the 1990s, with people coming into RPGs from anime fandom and even perhaps from the Goth subculture and so on. They've not somehow "wrecked the hobby", nor will those coming from WoW. I mean, it's not like they're going to somehow make D&D "more WoW-like", are they?
If D&D gets buggered up, it's not going to be from below, by people joining, especially given how insular most gaming groups are (often with good reason), but rather from above. Even if WotC freaked out and released D&D 4.5E super-influenced by MMORPGs (which I don't think 4E is, personally, but that's another thread), and introducing all sorts of gross trash like mechanical reputation, and grinding and so on (which was all in the EQ d20 RPG iirc, though, ironically, NOT in the Warcraft one!), we'd always have other options.
People can be cured of lame terminology (and ENworlders have plenty of horrid terminology of their own), but finding people who are genuinely interested in participating in P&P RPGs isn't exactly common, generally speaking. Honestly, I think some of us saw the same thing in the 1990s, with people coming into RPGs from anime fandom and even perhaps from the Goth subculture and so on. They've not somehow "wrecked the hobby", nor will those coming from WoW. I mean, it's not like they're going to somehow make D&D "more WoW-like", are they?
If D&D gets buggered up, it's not going to be from below, by people joining, especially given how insular most gaming groups are (often with good reason), but rather from above. Even if WotC freaked out and released D&D 4.5E super-influenced by MMORPGs (which I don't think 4E is, personally, but that's another thread), and introducing all sorts of gross trash like mechanical reputation, and grinding and so on (which was all in the EQ d20 RPG iirc, though, ironically, NOT in the Warcraft one!), we'd always have other options.
Fifth Element
Legend
No, it's not irrelevant. Every 'tomorrow' is a future '10 years ago'.
What if you had said the same thing 10 years ago, and the hobby did die then (which was 'tomorrow' at the time). Do you think the past 10 years would have been as good?
New faces are a great thing. I love the enthusiasm.
Its the older, experienced players who do things like roll their eyes at someone else's character, or call a plotline cheesy, or try to play a personal metagame against the dungeon master, or ruin the mood by constantly signaling that they're too cool to enjoy the things the other players are finding fascinating, or have presuppositions that only particular fantasy archetypes are acceptable in D&D and anything influenced by popular culture is beneath them, or... well, I could go on for a while. Older, experienced players with the wrong attitude are a plague on the hobby and I hate them with the burning fires of a thousand suns that are, themselves, also on fire.
Bring on the new players. Their energy and clumsy enthusiasm is worth a million times more than jaded proficiency.
Its the older, experienced players who do things like roll their eyes at someone else's character, or call a plotline cheesy, or try to play a personal metagame against the dungeon master, or ruin the mood by constantly signaling that they're too cool to enjoy the things the other players are finding fascinating, or have presuppositions that only particular fantasy archetypes are acceptable in D&D and anything influenced by popular culture is beneath them, or... well, I could go on for a while. Older, experienced players with the wrong attitude are a plague on the hobby and I hate them with the burning fires of a thousand suns that are, themselves, also on fire.
Bring on the new players. Their energy and clumsy enthusiasm is worth a million times more than jaded proficiency.
Fifth Element
Legend
Well said, as per usual.
Scribble
First Post
The only way you can answer this though is with some kind of weird time travel thing where you changed the past 10 years but Hobo still remembered the current 10...
You can't miss soemthing you never knew existed in the first place.
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