new gamers from the ranks of WoW types

joethelawyer

Banned
Banned
I have a story about new gamers that may be a good representation of the new gamer market wotc is trying to attract, or it may be representative of absolutely nothing. in any case, it may spark some interesting discussion.

the landlord's son is 21. he has been a video game junkie since age 4, according to him. he is the type that spent millions of hours on dark age of camelot, evercrack, world of warcraft, and final fantasy.

he saw my bookshelf of D&D stuff, and was interested. for the record, i am 38, been playing since 1984, and have a lot of stuff collected. the kid said he always heard of D&D, just never played it. so our group of old guys let him into a few sessions (we play 3.0), and he really enjoyed it. the part he said he liked the most was the total freedom to do anything, which he couldn't, of course, get from a video game world. i think he also liked the beer and potato chips guys hanging around busting chops social aspect of it too. my brother, at whose house we always play, has a keg of sam adams on tap at all times.

i found it really interesting that even though he played every video game derivation of dnd, he never thought to go back to the roots of it and try it out. i asked him how come why he never tried it out when he was younger, and he said that not to many people played. those that did very usually real geeks, he said, the social outcast types who couldn't afford a computer. he said that basically every person he ever knew who played dnd was from an economically poor background. His assumption was that the only reason they played dnd was because they couldn't play anything else. also, most importantly, he said it wasn't worth being considered that much of a loser/outcast to try out something, even though he figured he would like it and was interested in it.

funny, when i was a kid the computer geeks were more geeky than the dnd geeks. i happened to be in both categories, thus completely defeating any chance of my getting action from the opposite sex in high school. it seems that with the technology that kids are brought up with today, there is no bad social stigma attached to being a video gamer. pen and paper gamers are sill ostracized though. it seems it is easier to let your geek flag fly in a more socially acceptable way like WoW.

anyway, that made me think about wotc's obvious strategy with 4e and dnd insider. i still think the best way for new gamers to get into pnp games is to have some friends sit down with them and show them what its all about, which i think is probably how most of us got into it. if gaming has such a social stigma though, i doubt that you will get many converts.

again, one person is surely not representative of the whole group, but i do think it is representative of a good sized chunk of it.

i am interested in what people think of the chances of wotc bringing in new blood from the WoW crowd who are in high school or a bit older, who have never played DnD before, and who know no one who does who can introduce them to the game---in other words someone like my landlord's kid was, until he met me. in other words the WoW playing kid walking through waldenbooks who sees 4e on the shelf. what are the chances he will buy it without a social support system already accepting of it and willing to play with him?

joe
 
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Farmer42

First Post
A good half of the people I play with played WoW before PnP RPGs, myself included. As someone who has moved from D&D (I started with 3.x, and love 4E) into other systems like GURPs and HERO 9My favorite,) I feel farily qualified to say that we aren't the simplistic, idiot kids looking for instant gratification that we often get pegged as by parts of the PnP community. And it isn't really a stigma, per se. I remember growing, even before I started to play MMOs, reading in Nintendo power the jokes they made about playing AD&D, and wondering what it was like to play a game that didn't have a begining or end or save points.
 

StreamOfTheSky

Adventurer
Ok, reading about your friend, and the fact it was 3E he tried and liked for its ultimate "freedom" -- I have to ask. Has this person tried 4E yet? What does he think of the new direction, where while there is still plenty of freedom (especially for roleplaying which would take a concerted effort to limit by rules ina pen and paper game), they've also moved towards cutting away many of the freedoms 3E offered, like multiclassing as much as you want even if it was a REALLY bad idea, or the vast array of special combat maneuvers anyone could try eithout needing a feat or power to do so?

I'm not trying to flame 4E (for once, heh), it's just that I always hear people say that this new addition will help to attract WoW type gamers to the hobby, with no idea why exaqctly, since i don't play these games. So I find my interest piqued here, if there's perhaps an example of a MMO veteran and afficianado, looking upon D&D's transition with a tinge of regret/sadness over how the one thing that made the game stand out for him was being compromised. If he likes it better, I guess I can just move on, but it'd be refreshing to hear some rebukes of the conventional wisdom.
 

Asmor

First Post
I'm most interested in his comment that it seemed like only poor kids played D&D. I've never heard of anything like that. Is this common elsewhere?
 

Brazenwood

First Post
12 year old son

My Son is a total video game junkie, plays x-box for hours on end, and as a self-employed parent that needs a free babysitter, plus I'm a gamer, I support it, but growing up I let him play in our weekly role-playing games (aged 20-60), and he always loved it even if he couldn't stay focused the whole time and shunned the having to improv act part of RPGs. Now he's 12 and, we just tried 4E and he absolutely loves it. He's reading the PHB from cover to cover, making like two or three characters a day, he is totally hooked, and would much rather play 4E than his x-box by far, even if it's just 37 year old dad and him running all five characters through the Kobold Hall. I mean he loves it so much that he wants to run through it again with new characters to see if they could barely survive the White Dragon at the end! I told him I was going to create a character background design system, and he got so excited that he sat in the chair beside me all night typing it up on the computer till 8 AM the next morning, and when I was wiped out and couldn't see the screen anymore, he thought I was crazy for wanting to retire at last, and he got busy rolling up character histories and detailed backgrounds for all his characters, plus he made a new character! So these kids who are hooked on video games I think would rather play Dnd if they are intriduced to it in an exciting way.
 

hazel monday

First Post
Asmor said:
I'm most interested in his comment that it seemed like only poor kids played D&D. I've never heard of anything like that. Is this common elsewhere?


Pretty common where I grew up. Only poor folks, tramps, and thugs played D&D.Most of us were so poor, we lived in squats, ate raw ramen noodles and played with used 1st ed. AD&D books that had been passed down through generations of gutter punk gamers. Really, it was pretty hard core. I didn't know a single person who played D&D that could be classified as a "nerd".
Then I grew up, got some computer access, and found out what the world at large thought about those who played D&D. I was like "What the...? That doesn't match up with my experience at all."
 

jdrakeh

Front Range Warlock
Weird. I've found that investing in large-ish P&P game lines (e.g., D&D 3x, WoD, GURPS 3e, Hero FRED, etc) has always cost me considerably more than building a custom desktop computer.
 

wedgeski

Adventurer
The 'poor economic background' thing is interesting. If I think back to my school days, not only is it a fair comment, but it is true of practically every gaming clique I was part of.
 

wedgeski said:
The 'poor economic background' thing is interesting. If I think back to my school days, not only is it a fair comment, but it is true of practically every gaming clique I was part of.
I was neither poor nor rich as a kid. I don't think the other guys in my old group were either. Currently, I am not so sure. I think one of my players (working for the state/military) probably earns well, but the other 3 less so. I don't earn that bad, either... So I can't really claim I see a pattern.
 

Steely Dan

Banned
Banned
I just saw a commercial over here (UK) the other day for WoW, and the spokesman/actor they got was the guy who played Mini-Me.

Every other word he said was "mage".
 

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