I was thinking more the extreme nerdy fatbeard in his parents' basement image which, rightly or wrongly, got firmly attached to it.
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Why aren't RPGs poplular
- Thread starter Stormonu
- Start date
I was thinking more the extreme nerdy fatbeard in his parents' basement image which, rightly or wrongly, got firmly attached to it.
Well there was also Underworld, which was based on Vampire: The Masquerade, but they had to sue to get credit and compensation.
This is a part of it. I've been to GenCon and know that 99+% of the people in this hobby are perfectly normal folks. Its that fraction of a percent, the ones that have problems with hygene, personal space, and not acting like a child, that make people hesitate before gaming. Heck, *I* hesitate before gaming with new people sometimes! But that's not all of it.
Another big part IMO is the distribution model. RPG books are not books as far as retailers are concerned. With books, if you buy some and they don't sell, you return them. This is not possible with RPG books. They languish if they don't sell, sucking up space and making retailers hesitant to try new things.
I place some blame on the current model for traditional RPGs as well. They want to push books out to gamers. The way to sell lots of books is to market them to hardcore gamers, so we'll make games that appeal to hardcore gamers. Thus we get 4e (and 3e wasn't any better) with three books required for play and the assumption that each PC will buy at least one. New books rather than being aimed at GMs are aimed at players, to get them to get new powerups for their character, regardless of whether this makes the game more fun for the group as a whole. The other companies aren't much better, don't mistake this for a 'WotC sux' rant. The hardcore loves this, but the hardcore grows slowly if at all. And this makes games less accessable to new players, looking at mountains of books needed to play this game. The distributors are partly to blame here as well. The whole reason there's a PHB, DMG, and MM is because they wouldn't distribute a game line back then if it didn't have at least three books.
The hardcore also tends to make for long term games as well. Even if they aren't expected to buy books, dice, and spend time outside the game working on their character, the casual is expected to dedicate one night a week for the forseeable future. I think this is the biggest obstacle to getting new people interested. What if they don't like it? What if everyone expects them to come every time? What if there's a conflict?
The gaming companies need to get off the suppliment treadmill. The Indie games get around most of these problems. Many are written to be easy to start, have simple, direct rules, and are intended for short term play, if not one shots. Players play a favorite game for a couple of months, then decide to play something else. But the small-press nature of the beast means they are out of the distribution channel. Unless a store goes to a special effort, they won't realize that games like Dread, Mouse Guard, and Dogs in the Vineyard even exist.
Doug McCrae
Legend
Roleplaying games are massively popular, having gone mainstream some time ago in the form of crpgs. WoW had 11.5 million subscribers as of Dec 2008.
So what does WoW have that pen n' paper rpgs, such as D&D, don't?
1) Pretty graphics.
2) Easy to start playing right away.
(2) is key imo. You don't need to read 100s of pages of rules, you don't need to create a world like Tolkien did. Choose race, class and name, and that's all.
Now ofc a lot of people who play pnp rpgs *like* creating worlds in the manner of Tolkien, and they like 100s of pages of rules. Turns out that sort of person isn't very common. In fact they are a lot less common than people who like games and fantasy and all that kind of stuff but don't like the work that pnp rpgs attach.
So what does WoW have that pen n' paper rpgs, such as D&D, don't?
1) Pretty graphics.
2) Easy to start playing right away.
(2) is key imo. You don't need to read 100s of pages of rules, you don't need to create a world like Tolkien did. Choose race, class and name, and that's all.
Now ofc a lot of people who play pnp rpgs *like* creating worlds in the manner of Tolkien, and they like 100s of pages of rules. Turns out that sort of person isn't very common. In fact they are a lot less common than people who like games and fantasy and all that kind of stuff but don't like the work that pnp rpgs attach.
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It also requires:
1) having friends who are interested.
2) Reading and math.
3) Willing to be creative and imaginative.
That makes it unattractive to the average person.
Here's another thing that I think has cropped up in the last few years: SCHEDULING. Among gamers, it's incredibly hard to get everyone to have the same amount of time off every week/two weeks for several consecutive hours. Of the non-college attending adults I know, they can only manage one game a month.
1) having friends who are interested.
2) Reading and math.
3) Willing to be creative and imaginative.
That makes it unattractive to the average person.
Here's another thing that I think has cropped up in the last few years: SCHEDULING. Among gamers, it's incredibly hard to get everyone to have the same amount of time off every week/two weeks for several consecutive hours. Of the non-college attending adults I know, they can only manage one game a month.
My experience varies -- it's not necessary to play every week to be a dedicated player and consumer with a long-term game.
I'm running two campaigns, one on email, one live.
-- The email game never "meets" at all, and is slow moving (about one year per adventure, max 7 levels gained in the 10 years we're played).
-- The live game has met 13 times in 4 years.
I'd say about 1/3 of my players are DEDICATED D&Ders (buying a lot of materials, posting on EnWorld, running their own campaigns), while the rest are fairly casual but into it when playing.
None of us -- not even the guy who has attended GenCon multiple times -- are "hard core" in the sense you mean, of being Crunch Focused and wanting lots of new rules for new builds all the time. We're definitely more story oriented.
I wouldn't say they "need to", but I will say rules supplements don't gain gaming companies any of my money.
Nor do rules changes. I played AD&D from 1981-2001, and 3e thereafter. Twenty years per edition seems to work for me and my friends, and we can envision playing 3e forever, just as we thought we would be playing AD&D in the nursing home someday -- and looked forward to that!
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com
About two weeks ago, one of my players got a call from a friend while we were playing, and told him to come over. We handed him an NPC (a big paladin) and continued with the adventure. He asked to see pictures of a goblin and so on, but he clearly got it and had figured out movement, AOO's, etc. by the end of the afternoon. I think it helps that we were in the middle of a hack-'n-slash dungeon crawl, with an established party that knows the rules and some tactics and already knew why they were there from a plot perspective.
So he got to walk in where the explosions start and miss all the exposition.
So, D&D doesn't HAVE to have a huge learning curve to start playing, but by default, it does. And I've never started someone quite this way before.
We'll see if he attends next time/is into it, or not.
Even without attempting a frequent game, getting the guys together once every few months is tough. We all have jobs, most of us have kids, someone is always moving or on a business trip, whatever.
Much easier when we were all in high school or college, or on summer break!
Turn that part around by saying WOW is ridiculously convenient... You can play whenever you damn well feel like (except for patch/maintenance days), and you literally don't have to get out of bed to play. The only scheduling you have to do is for raids and arena (and even those you can PUG as long as you're tolerant of some degree of fail...).
