Is the RPG hobby dying? [RPG Blog Carnival]

[Thornir Alekeg]

Somebody should make an RPG titled "RPGs: The End Times Are Here" set in a grim near future where the RPG industry is backrupt because of emerging virtual reality/holodeck technology. Characters are all grognards and must figure out what to do with their time as players leave campaign after campaign to get lost in VR. Not even boardgames are immune to this tread.

What will they do? Band together for one last ditch effort at a D&D campaign? Or will they start their own gaming company to fight the rising tide?

Rise up from the steam tunnels and fight! Destroy the server farms enslaving the minds of the young! Replace the textbooks with core rulebooks! Replace Mondays (they're pretty useless anyway) with RoleDay where everyone must play the part of somebody they are not in real life. Rise up and together we can save the world of gaming!

 

[Beginning of the End]

OD&D recommends prepping six dungeon levels (as a minimum) before play begins.

Sure. But once you have that in hand you can bring in new players on-the-fly and run dozens of sessions with little or no additional prep.

My point is that you need to get away from the concept of putting together a group of 5-6 players who are expected to all get together on a regular basis for a dozen or two dozen or an indefinite number of sessions.

There's nothing wrong with those types of campaigns existing. But that level of commitment is obviously off-putting to new players.

I'm speaking from immediate experience here. I've been playing in a campaign run by a guy using the Caverns of Thracia as a megadungeon. There's been a persistent continuity across a couple dozen sessions, but because each session is a separate excursion into the dungeon there's no need for the same group of people to re-assemble at every session.

Juggling schedules? Not a problem at all. The DM posts a date on Facebook, invites a dozen-plus people, and whoever can show up for that session shows up and we play.

Inviting new players? Incredibly easy. They're not making a commitment beyond a single night of playing games with friends; and we're not left hanging if they decide it's not for them. We've introduced lots of new players to RPGs since we've started playing, and quite a few of them have stuck around for second helpings.

DM's prep time? Apparently he read the module in about 3 hours and started running it. Minimal or no prep between sessions. Certainly designing a complex like the Caverns of Thracia would take some time, but that's why a good introductory game would include a ready-to-play scenario.

Imagine if Monopoly expected or required you to get together a group of 6 players who would need to meet regularly on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule for 20+ sessions. I can virtually guarantee you that Monopoly would be a much less popular game.

I'm looking around to find similar easy-to-organize, easy-to-invite formats for other games. Shadowrun looks tempting: Although it would require a lot more prep (since it lacks OD&D's procedural methods of content renewal), if the player body were all understood to belong to a single organization of 'runners that got contracts which just happened to be fulfilled by whoever showed up that evening to play, you'd get some of the same social network effects.

 

[Umbran]

I'm looking around to find similar easy-to-organize, easy-to-invite formats for other games. Shadowrun looks tempting: Although it would require a lot more prep (since it lacks OD&D's procedural methods of content renewal), if the player body were all understood to belong to a single organization of 'runners that got contracts which just happened to be fulfilled by whoever showed up that evening to play, you'd get some of the same social network effects.

Shadowrun is dirt easy for this - you don't need them to be in an organization. "Fixer" contacts, in large part, play the role of temp recruiters. The corp needs a team to run the shadows - they call fixers, fixers find bodies.

The one problem you'll have in Shadowrun is that it is not reasonable for companies to like changing the team mid-stream. Certain kinds of intrigue plots common to good shadowruns usually take a couple of sessions to play through, and they can be a challenge if you're going to notably change the group composition from one session to another.

 

[eyebeams]

I assume we have now done the following in this thread:

1) Taken the idea of a hobby in decline to its most exaggerated, strawmanish extent so that we can claim that it will never die, even though there is a set of outcomes greater than 0 gamers and 0 games that is still awful.

2) Something-something THERE'S NO INDUSTRY HOBBIE SUMPREM!!!111!!

3) Made promotional statements for some clique in the hobby under a thin pretense of addressing the issue.

Let's get past this. First, tabletop RPGs as we know them will never go completely extinct, but may reach a minimum level that makes it extremely difficult for hobbyists to find each other or maintain a creative culture.

Second, the tabletop RPG hobby is permeated with commercialism and consumerist values at all levels. Hobbyists have internalized the language and values of social marketing to a stronger degree than many, many other communities. This is *because* the merchants are small scale. Elements like IP licensing, which were previously ignored in favour of fair use, can be seen in the smallest scale of fan endeavours.

Third, if any particular clique was capable of reversing trends in the hobby it would have happened. The "indie" community has had a decade to establish a breakout hit, and has largely found its successes in games that emulate much of the commercial and play systems of "mainstream" games. The part of the OSR that cares is selling a solution that would have worked even earlier, since that brand of D&D is decades old.

To sum up: We are not an immortal grassroots counterculture already possessed of the will to reignite our hobby, but bereft of the sense to pay attention to some brilliant scheme.

We *are* a branch of a greater roleplaying hobby that extends into computer games and self-started online social networks, that can use tools and lessons from them to experiment, and hovers above an important threshold, below which many enthusiasts may lose what they value. We *do* have complex relationships with an industry so that it's difficult to say where the noncommercial ends and the commercial begins.

We should stop seeking comfort in familiar patter, and before we dismiss new ideas out of hand, we should seriously examine how they might support or threaten the things we love about tabletop RPGs. I think there's good stuff in this thread about how people use technologies to get things done. That's an excellent start. We need more on technology to organize games and make play smoother, and I have to admit that I for one have dropped the ball on talking about it in the now -- I love to speculate.

But I think the biggest threat comes from ourselves. Beyond particular behaviours, I've noticed one awful thing: The default assumption about RPG play is that without expert advice, a special theory or even a particular product, it's a failure mode. To put it more simply: Lots of people now talk like the basic way of playing RPGs is badly, and not amatuer theatre bad (which is fun), but find out your sitting next to a Nazi on the bus bad (which isn't!).

We should start assuming that gaming leads to good times. People like that. We should start thinking of setbacks with more cheerfulness, and of play as something robust enough to survive differences of opinions or various social and technical blunders.

People like good times, even when it comes from screwing up.

 

[UniversalMonster]

Agreeing with everything eyebeams just said there.

I guess as a side note, I game now more than I ever did in my entire life, possibly because I've figured out that online fandom has so little to do with gaming.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Decline =/= dying.

Lots of things suffer losses and returns of public interest. 3e brought interest in D&D back. 5e may do it for the "Official D&D" again. Or not. (Shrug)

Supporting WotC =/= supporting the RPG hobby.

Interest in "Official D&D" may be waning, but interest in other games is increasing, AFAICT, IME, and IMHO. Morrus has said that EN World traffic is increasing. I have no trouble whatsoever finding players. YMMV.

Would it be nice if D&D was doing really well? Sure it would. But if interest in D&D is ebbing, then the market has spoken. Go back to what worked. If interest in D&D is stable, or increasing, then what's the problem?



RC

 

[TarionzCousin]

RPGs are not a cult....

*looks up from sacrificing a chicken*

But... I want to be in a cult. What am I going to do with these dark robes and weird squiggly dagger now?

 

[DragonLancer]

I don't think the hobby is dying but it is suffering. It is suffering from a lack of new blood. Gone are the days where roleplaying would find a new audience among high school and university students. Now, they are more interested in online gaming whether it be XBox Live or an MMORPG like WoW rather than sitting at a table in a social situation.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I don't think the hobby is dying but it is suffering. It is suffering from a lack of new blood. Gone are the days where roleplaying would find a new audience among high school and university students. Now, they are more interested in online gaming whether it be XBox Live or an MMORPG like WoW rather than sitting at a table in a social situation.

The majority of the RCFG playtesters are university students, and includes one high school student. All have played 3e, some have played 4e. That sector is still stronger than you might think.


RC

 

[Hussar]

I don't think the hobby is dying but it is suffering. It is suffering from a lack of new blood. Gone are the days where roleplaying would find a new audience among high school and university students. Now, they are more interested in online gaming whether it be XBox Live or an MMORPG like WoW rather than sitting at a table in a social situation.

Yeah, I gotta go with RC on this one. Of the gamers that I see in Maptool or OpenRPG, the overwhelming majority are late teens, early 20's.

My current lineup is actually surprisingly old with three (and possibly four, I'm not sure how old one is) over thirty and two under 25. My Sunday group was all early 20's and high school. My group that went through the World's Largest Dungeon was all under 25 - of the twenty or so people who sat at the table - other than me.

I realize this is anecdotal and all, but, I've seen a LOT of gamers over the past five or six years with online games, and they've all been hovering around the 17-25 range.

I should dig out the last print Dragon I've got where Paizo polled its readership. I know that in about 2006 or so (Not quite sure of the exact date) their readership was about 22 years old. Which was actually younger from when they did a similar poll a few years previously.

I'm really not convinced that there is this huge greying of the gaming population. What I do believe, in my gut anyway, is that those of us who started back in the 80's, and have stuck with the hobby, are fairly numerous and very visible because of the numbers.

In other words, it's not that the average age of gamers is going up, it's just that the high end of the bell curve has a lot more people in it.