Ryan Dancey speaks - the Most Successful Year for Fantasy RPGaming ever. However...

[Kichwas]

WoW has advantages over D&D in many respects, for certain. I could play WoW in the middle of Alaska at 2 am for starters. That's the big benefit.

The other benefit is that if I'm a social outcast, people will continue to accept me in WoW, even if I weigh 800 pounds, and have to scrub myself with a washcloth at the end of a stick.

WoW is also not flooded with certain elements that are present in DnD that serve to discourage women and non-whites from enjoying the experience.

It presents the same basic fantasy tropes, but without the elements of racial supremacy justified in the biology and inherent soulfullness of the races and gender biases seen in art and (in prior editions) game effecting biological differences. While there are plenty of 'sexy women' in WoW's art images, they are not drawn from a submissive or disempowered POV.

You can disagree with this criticisms until the cows come home, but they've been out there and getting tossed at DnD for 30 years by women and non-whites, and the denial to even look at and address them is often more of a bar for these groups than the actual presense or lack of actual presense of the factors themselves.



This allows to tap into a huge audience of people, what I would say is the majority, that have an interest in fantasy but have found DnD to be too 'fringe element'.


It is however, unlikely that WoW's popularity will feed back to even the table top version of the WoW RPG (put out by WW), simply because after 30 years, DnD and by extension are too far on the fringe of social acceptability. In addition too many in the tabletop community are locked in the past on notions of racial and gender consciousness, so that even were Blizzard to market the table top game on its own servers, players might be somewhat shocked at what they found when they showed up in the tabletop community to game.


Though beyond that, there is the larger issue of the time management and social contacts needed for tabletop play, and in a society today that works to remove the public space in favor of the private. With the shift from downtowns to malls, city parks to private suburban clubs, away from public schools and letting children play in the street, and from dense familiar urban communities to housing projects for the poor and exclusive gated communities for the better off --- Modern Americans lack the social connectivity for the sort of face to face contact that could ever make even a non racialized, non genderized table top gaming experience viable.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

WoW is also not flooded with certain elements that are present in DnD that serve to discourage women and non-whites from enjoying the experience.

It presents the same basic fantasy tropes, but without the elements of racial supremacy justified in the biology and inherent soulfullness of the races and gender biases seen in art and (in prior editions) game effecting biological differences. While there are plenty of 'sexy women' in WoW's art images, they are not drawn from a submissive or disempowered POV.

Could you explain this a bit more? What do you mean about the elements of racial supremacy?

 

[Mercule]

Could you explain this a bit more? What do you mean about the elements of racial supremacy?

The only thing I can come up with are the gully dwarves digging ditches. :shrug:

 

[RyanD]

First, while Ryan is dancing around the topic of fantasy gaming denigration/deterioration, he isn't talking about the "death" of TRPGs (crap, I already hate that acronym). He's talking about the death of his paycheck. Guys like Ryan don't see gaming as a hobby, but as a franchise; something to make money from.

First, as someone who knows me, I'll ask you not to make generalizations about my interests in gaming - especially not pejorative ones. I am and have been a "hobby gamer" long before I was a businessperson. My interest in RPGs is based on a foundation laid when I was 12 years old and played D&D as a sixth-grader. I believe that I'll be playing RPGs until they put me in the ground.

Second, my paycheck comes primarily from helping new companies to enter the field and bring new games to the table. So my personal financial interests are very much aligned with the average fan - I want to find new great products and get them to market successfully - which means you'll have new great products to play. I have no reason to suspect my paycheck is in any danger, because my business is much larger than RPGs. In fact, I have not made a dime in personal income from RPGs since the day I left Wizards of the Coast. D&D and the TRPG category as a whole could vaporize tomorrow, and from a money perspective, it wouldn't impact me one bit.

This hobby turned into an industry somewhere in the last 20 years and trying to make it obey the laws of supply & demand, economic viability, and mens rea mea culpa juris prudence is short-sighted and greedy;

Coming from a former game-publisher employee, I find that statement rather ironic.

Making money from publishing games is no more or less greedy than making money from commercializing any other recreational pursuit - cooking, snowboarding, scrapbooking, etc. Most people I have met in this industry are far more interested in making a great game then they are at making great money - if they were, they wouldn't be in the gaming industry, where salaries are low, risks are high, and jackpots few.

D&D has been a commercially viable product as long as you've been alive. That tells me that there's something renewable, something resiliant in the product that can withstand management incompetence, neglect, misunderstood customers, and misguided development. Clearly, a rational person would have to conclude that pursuing that business is far from short sighted.

What Ryan is also failing to see is the fantasy and superheroes are hot, "right now."

Then all things fantasy should be hot too. Including TRPGs. Which they are demonstrably not. I fail to see this correlation. Are you suggesting that WoW is successful because Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have raised the public conciousness? How to do you square that with the millions of copies of Warcraft and Diablo Blizzard sold prior to the rise of Potter and the restoration of LotR? Do you think that 5 million people are paying their monthly fees because they're caught up in a fad - and that they have no real interest in fantasy, no desire to adventure in their own stories, to be in control of characters expressing their own will and dialog, and that when the "fad" cools they'll move on to something else?

Don't you think it would be more reasonable to suggest that there has always been a huge market of potential roleplayers who have found the TRPG environment unsuitable due to complexity, or lack of instruction, or "geek" taint, and that now they have a tool that meets a fundamental creative need - a tool that they know will only get better and better as time, technology, and resources are applied to the form - and will not only continue to use this tool for the rest of their lives (as many D&D players used D&D), but will keep bringing new friends into the shared world to join the fun?

Here is the fundamental question that you, and others in this thread are missing.

Who will we game with?

Network games, like TRPGs, are strong and resiliant as long as they face no external competition. The concept of the network externality explains why large games stay large, and popular over long periods of time, despite technical inferiority, changes in fashion, changes in demography, and other factors that should impact them but don't. However, the network externality is susceptible to outside influences in the form of a larger network of greater value and utility.

If WoW is the leading edge of a network of higher value and utility, then TRPGs are doomed - even if some hard core keeps playing them until they're dust - because attrition will whittle their numbers to a critical threshold figure that creates enough holes in the network that many people who might want to continue to play will be unable to play due to a lack of people to play with. It will not be sufficient merely to have the desire to play - it will require an accident of geography to allow a game to happen.

The easily available solutions to this problem all involve using the internet to foster communication and close gaps of geography - two problems that MMORPGs solve far, far better than TRPGs ever will.

Every game group is populated by people who are there on the margins - they aren't hard core dedicated players, they're just in the game for fun and community. Those people are the most likely to gravitate to a WoW-type experience. And when they're having their creative itch scratched, they're less likely to rejoin or sustain a TRPG game group. A TRPG can be quite fun with 5 players, but often very un-fun with 3 players. (please accept that I know that someone out there loves his/her 3 player group - we're speaking in generalities, not in ancedotal exceptions.)

Poke enough 1-2 player holes in enough game groups, and suddenly you have a big population of disenfranchised TRPG players - people who can't play because they can't find a game. And there's a feedback loop there too - some players are "partially committed" - they'll make some effort to play, but if the group disintegrates, they're not going to bust their asses trying to put it back together or recruit new players. When those people start dropping out, bigger holes appear - and more people get disenfranchised. Repeat.

So what stops this cycle?

I see only three options:

* Someone comes up with a way to show that the TRPG experience has value and utility that can't be replaced in an MMORPG, and markets that feature effectively to 12-15 year olds, as well as the existing TRPG population, and allows the TRPG player network to exist safely in parallel with the MMORPG network.

* The TRPG field evolves into a new format with a new genre and targets a new group of players - a new niche market for some reason safe from predation by the fantasy MMORPG titans.

* MMORPGs do turn out to be a fad, and their business models collapse, leaving a residue of some unknown number of new "RPG" players seeking a way to continue to engage in their hobby even after the games that brought them to the concept have been shut off, and the TRPG player network co-opts them.

All I know for certain is that something has to change, and start changing fast, or the network for TRPGs risks hitting that critical threshold of "holes".

 

[DaveMage]

Gaming isn't going away. Profits are.

Interesting analysis....

Indeed, as a D&D/d20 consumer, I'm certainly at a point where my needs are already met.

 

[Mercule]

Ah. That makes much more sense than I was getting out of your original essay.

I have a feeling that the solution will lie with simplified systems and/or play aids. Things like spell cards, summoned monster cards, etc. That, and some press. GenCon is something that you have to want to go to beforehand.

The FLGS seems to be dying out and may not be the best vehicle for this sort of thing. Even extant FLGS seem to be in the category of "preaching to the choir" (perception, only). I know the local B&N has "comic nights", etc. Pursuing the chains to do something similar for TRPGs may be more viable than standing with the FLGS. In all honesty, trying to use FLGS to save the TRPG hobby may be akin to using a leaky lifeboat.

Regardless of what the answer ends up being, it must involve keeping the "T" in "TRPG". If we give that up, then we aren't trying to save the same hobby. I don't mind computers as an aid, but all the players need to be in the same room.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Quality is entirely subject to opinion. If you're going to poo-poo improvisation as being of subjective benefit, then you may as well throw in the towel for this discussion. No one is claiming that improvisation is universally a good thing. Some GMs are not best left to their own devices. A bad GM results in a bad game, just like bad programers result in a bad CRPG. If you want to compare the cream of the CRPG crop (WoW, BG, et al.), then you need to be comparing them to the cream of the TRPG crop, and that includes GMs who are able to improvise well.

I think it is fair to compare the top CRPGs to the average TRPGs. That is the choice that most actual PLAYERs face. Top quality CRPGs are available to them all simply by spending the money to pick up Baldur's Gate II or World of Warcraft (or Neverwinter Nights and then spend the effort to pick up good modules like Adam Miller's Shadowlords and Dreamcatcher campaigns or the first two mods of the paladin trilogy (Twilight and Midnight)). There is no reason for someone interested in the CRPG experience to pick an "average" CRPG. On the other hand, the typical player will only be able to find a typical gaming group. If the typical player found an unusually good gaming group, he would be an unusual player rather than a typical one. The question then is how good the "typical" DM/gaming group is.

However, it is probably not fair to lump single player CRPGs and MMORPGs together. From what I can tell, games like World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot offer an inherently different experience than Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, etc. The massively multiplayer games have to accomodate a large player base and offer them a stable and persistent world. If Drizzt101, Spastastic, and 133tOmega fail to hold back the orcish hordes at blackrock pass, the other players won't all wake up and discover that the town they have been using as their base has been burned to the ground and the orcs are pushing on towards the kingdom's capitol. As far as I can tell, MMORPGs are rather like a Star Trek episode in that respect. When it's done, everything has to be put back more or less where it was. PC stats, equipment and reputations can change but there won't be substantial change in the game world because of PC actions. Nor will their be substantial influence over the direction of the game world. A few players may gain influence over portions of the online community in guilds, etc, but that option is only open to a few players and it takes as much work and skill to accomplish as attaining real life influence in a hobby organization does (because that's basically what it is). In a single-player CRPG or a TRPG, on the other hand, it is quite possible for PCs' success or failure to dramatically affect the setting and for PCs to gain influence over the setting by attaining power and position.

I think that TRPGs have a significant edge over most CRPGs in that last regard. (And MMORPGs don't compare to either in this regard as their massively multiplayer nature prevents meaningful impact on the game world other than success ensuring that the "reset" button is pushed). Other than the standard "utter failure" and "complete success" scenarios, I think the best CRPGs are probably equivalent to the lower tier TRPGs in that regard. In Fallout, Fallout II, and Baldur's Gate II, you could impact a variety of aspects of the setting. You got the summary of all the changes at the end of the game. But there was no option to woo Nalia in BG II. You had your pick of Jaheira, Aerie, and Viconia. You could convert Sarevok to Chaotic Good if you worked really hard at it, but it didn't impact the ending description at all. Without pursuing the romance option, you couldn't exert any influence over Viconia. Interesting characters like the fallen paladin Reginald (IIRC) from the paladin quest simply disappeared--there was no possibility to arrange for his atonement and resitution. In Fallout, your impact on, for instance, the New California Republic was limited to whether or not you completed one or two quests. Any more subtle impact on it was impossible. Even a moderately skilled DM can respond more precisely to a PC's actions. (The programmers are at a significant disadvantage because they have to imagine the several most likely interactions and apply a consequence to each of them--a DM only has to worry about what actually happens in the game and can hear and see the tone and subleties in it so he can get a vastly superior response with less skill than the programmer can).

 

[JamesDJarvis]

Ryan Dancey:
2005 was the best year in the history of the fantasy roleplaying game concept. In 2005, 4 million people paid more than $480,000,000 to play World of Warcraft. That figure is five times the total revenue generated by the tabletop roleplaying game segment >of all companies, of all time, combined<.

$480,000,000 in one year is huge but i find it baffling to say that the entire rpg industry has made only 1/5 of this in 30 years. If the there has been an average of 1.5 million rpg fans over the past 30 years and they have all spent $11.00 a year then the real rpg market has made more then $480,000,000 dollars (but certainly not in one year).

If the rpg industry has had 45,000 customers a year spending $30.00 a month it has made more then $480,000,000 dollars.

 

[Mercule]

I think it is fair to compare the top CRPGs to the average TRPGs. That is the choice that most actual PLAYERs face.

You have a point, and a good one, at that. What you quoted from me, though, was a response to some statements about the potential of the two mediums. In terms of potential, it isn't fair to compare the best of one set to the average of another, which is what was happening.

As a DM, I'll be the first to agree that being a good DM takes a substantial level of effort.

However, it is probably not fair to lump single player CRPGs and MMORPGs together.

Agreed, since I rather enjoy the former and find the latter to be inherently intolerable (and not because they "compete" with TRPGs).

 

[kigmatzomat]

Ryan Dancey:
2005 was the best year in the history of the fantasy roleplaying game concept. In 2005, 4 million people paid more than $480,000,000 to play World of Warcraft. That figure is five times the total revenue generated by the tabletop roleplaying game segment >of all companies, of all time, combined<.

$480 mil is pretty good but I doubt it eclipses all RPG revenue. WW alone earned $14 mil in 1996 and $10M in 1997. That means they probably earned more than $100 million in total. Add that to SJG ($2.8M in 2004 so probably ~$50M there), WotC (Which under Dancey earned >$50M/yr), the oft-forgotten Palladium, and more definitely show this to be an exaggeration.

And the thing to remember is that WoW cost quite a bit to make; like $60 million. They just broke 5 million players world-wide so their data center costs are far from insignificant (I've worked at data centers; ain't cheap.). I imagine they spend upwards of a hundred tho a month just on power, not counting admins, DBAs, or data. Then there are GMs and the constant maintenance that has to be done so the game stays fresh.

Blizzard is definitely earning money left and right (probably ~$2/month/user) but trust me, they are working for it.

If Ryan wants to see an RPG company make $480M, perhaps he should consider spending $60 million on the game. Maybe then we could get decent indexes, rules that have been completely play-tested, non-sucky art, and supplements that are more than "Revised" versions of existing material. I might spend $240/year on gaming materials then.