jim pinto said:
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".