How would systems like Palladium RIFTS fit into this premise? It seems to thrive on inertia even in a shrinking market.
[WotC's recent insanity] I think I've Figured It Out
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
How would systems like Palladium RIFTS fit into this premise? It seems to thrive on inertia even in a shrinking market.
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
I think one of the hurdles any company has with a RPG is the difficulty of balancing between its casual and invested players. Invested players will bring in more money by collecting more - though often over time, whilst casual player bring in the money from being numerous, if short-lived.
The problem is, to get players invested there needs to be a staggering number of options to keep things fresh. Generally, supplements feed this want. On the other hand, casual players want to dive in without a huge expense in up-front time; a staggering pile of options to choose from tends to drive such folks away.
In a sense of speaking, to be successful you have to then create a game that presents a wide variety of options, but a low amount of set-up. However, ever since AD&D, those people who want detail and options have been getting their way, culminating in 3.5E. 4E has taken a step back from this, but it's still a rule lawyer's wet dream (and I have other issues with the game, but that's for another thread).
In the end, I think I'd like to see D&D go back to a Basic/Advanced division of the game. The casual players can have the version that suits them, and the "D&D 4 life" players can have theirs.
The problem is, to get players invested there needs to be a staggering number of options to keep things fresh. Generally, supplements feed this want. On the other hand, casual players want to dive in without a huge expense in up-front time; a staggering pile of options to choose from tends to drive such folks away.
In a sense of speaking, to be successful you have to then create a game that presents a wide variety of options, but a low amount of set-up. However, ever since AD&D, those people who want detail and options have been getting their way, culminating in 3.5E. 4E has taken a step back from this, but it's still a rule lawyer's wet dream (and I have other issues with the game, but that's for another thread).
In the end, I think I'd like to see D&D go back to a Basic/Advanced division of the game. The casual players can have the version that suits them, and the "D&D 4 life" players can have theirs.
I don't know whether Palladium is thriving, but its own market might not be shrinking rapidly or at all. It keeps on selling, not just new books to old players but also old books to new players. At least, that's what it does at my FLGS.ggroy said:
Wizards and White Wolf do that, too. WotC at least does not seem to want to keep doing it as much.
Flying Buffalo has been in business since before TSR and GDW started, IIRC, and last I checked McEwan was still selling Star Guard.
Longevity and number of customers are not the same as profits to big business. Take the airlines (please).
(Value received by customers or even employees is also not profits.)
How many Rifts® books are there to buy? How many if we add the other lines in the Palladium Megaverse®:
After the Bomb®
Beyond the Supernatural TM
Chaos Earth TM
Dead Reign TM
Heroes Unlimited TM
Palladium Fantasy RPG®
Nightbane®
Ninjas & Superspies TM
Robotech®
Mechanoids®
Recon®
Splicers®
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re
I think WotC is also looking at what influences their possible future market and designing games that fit what the market is accustomed to.
When the original D&D came out, it hit with readers and artistic types like artists who loved comics and artists like Boris Vallejo. Almost everyone I played with in my youth that loved D&D was either an avid reader of fantasy or an artist. They loved the interesting artwork in D&D as well as the imaginative storytelling and the exposure to different types of mythology. It was their chance to play some character they had read about, seen in a movie, or in a picture on a cover. There was no easy to access internet, no MMORPGs, and even fantasy movies were fairly new and rare.
You can see why D&D was an blew up with that beginning group. They were a bunch of people that had little more than their imagination to fuel their love of fantasy. They were an underserved market.
But this new generation WotC is trying to reach is mostly video gamers. Sure they probably read now and then, but nowhere near as much as earlier generations of D&D enthusiasts. They are getting their fantasy fix from video games.
That is the younger generations influence when it comes to fantasy. So it is no wonder that WotC took the game in a different direction. You cater to your audience. But it should be no surprise that it is very difficult to sell a game targeting gamers influenced by video games to an older crowd influenced by books.
This is not an insult, it's simple honesty backed up by plenty of social data. The younger D&D generation does not read as much as the older D&D generation. So you want the game to be simpler for story and rules complexity. If there is too much to read, could be a huge barrier for younger gamers.
Which is why I think the ultimate goal of WotC and Hasbro is to leverage D&D into an MMORPG. Done well it could rival all other MMORPGs. No one has yet done it well using the available material. But it's only a matter of time until someone smart with the money purchases D&D and takes it to the virtual world to stay.
I think WotC is also looking at what influences their possible future market and designing games that fit what the market is accustomed to.
When the original D&D came out, it hit with readers and artistic types like artists who loved comics and artists like Boris Vallejo. Almost everyone I played with in my youth that loved D&D was either an avid reader of fantasy or an artist. They loved the interesting artwork in D&D as well as the imaginative storytelling and the exposure to different types of mythology. It was their chance to play some character they had read about, seen in a movie, or in a picture on a cover. There was no easy to access internet, no MMORPGs, and even fantasy movies were fairly new and rare.
You can see why D&D was an blew up with that beginning group. They were a bunch of people that had little more than their imagination to fuel their love of fantasy. They were an underserved market.
But this new generation WotC is trying to reach is mostly video gamers. Sure they probably read now and then, but nowhere near as much as earlier generations of D&D enthusiasts. They are getting their fantasy fix from video games.
That is the younger generations influence when it comes to fantasy. So it is no wonder that WotC took the game in a different direction. You cater to your audience. But it should be no surprise that it is very difficult to sell a game targeting gamers influenced by video games to an older crowd influenced by books.
This is not an insult, it's simple honesty backed up by plenty of social data. The younger D&D generation does not read as much as the older D&D generation. So you want the game to be simpler for story and rules complexity. If there is too much to read, could be a huge barrier for younger gamers.
Which is why I think the ultimate goal of WotC and Hasbro is to leverage D&D into an MMORPG. Done well it could rival all other MMORPGs. No one has yet done it well using the available material. But it's only a matter of time until someone smart with the money purchases D&D and takes it to the virtual world to stay.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Question though: how is the newest generation any different than previous generations in terms of being a video gamer generation? Earlier generations just grew up playing different consoles. If you grew up playing Atari, or NES, or SNES, Playstation, Xbox360, etc the video game influence is there, yet D&D has snagged people from each generation that grew up playing those different systems in their own time period of dominance. I don't really see anything different between then and now.
I grew up on NES and would have played SNES like mad if only my parents had bought me one for Xmas like I begged every year. I never really read any of the fantasy books that influenced the earlier D&D crowd, nor did I ever actually play 1e or 2e. Yet I'm a giant D&D nerd nonetheless, albeit from a later generation (and one that thinks 2e had some amazing moments that need to be remembered in terms of world design).
And given the video game influence that has been around a really, really long while now, I'm confused at the sudden desire (or even the need) to radically reinvent the game to cater to some putative video gamer generation that won't relate to D&D like every other generation before it has, each in their own ways, each eventually putting their own evolutionary mark upon the game as new authors add to the corpus of D&D material.
An obvious way of tackling this is to produce a whole lot of supplements that can be used individually, but do not attach themselves to the rule set like barnacles -- they provide no or at least very limited long term impact on game play and won't be viewed as necessary acquisitions by casual players.
Adventures fit this description, I think..
Mercurius
Legend
I don't think you're going back far enough, Shemeska. When you talk about "earlier generations playing different consoles" it sounds like you are talking about the 90s. But we have go back further and look at when D&D really boomed: the late 70s and early 80s, when video games were very primitive and largely relegated to arcades (like Flynn's!).
Now people started having personal computers in the 70s, and the Atari game console goes back to the mid-70s I think (Pong was 1975), but it wasn't until the late 80s that personal computers became common and not until the 90s that video gaming really took off, mainly due to technological advancements.
So to say that video games have been around forever is a huge simplification, especially when you consider the differences between video games now, fifteen years ago, and thirty years ago. Mrs. Pac Man wasn't quite the competition for a 12-year old's attention that World of Warcraft is.
Hey, this has inspired me to start a related thread on generations of RPG players, so stay tuned for more (I'll put the link in this thread).
BryonD
Hero
But it is a significant difference and I don't think getting someone to become "diehard" is remotely as easy as getting someone to simply become a player.
There are certainly exceptions, but in the great majority players are simply going to be casual or hardcore. You don't routinely convert casual players into hard core. Certainly not in numbers that impact the market overall.
If you simply want more players, you just target youth and work at it. You will get a lot of casuals and the regular mix of hardcore will be there as well.
But if you want to really grow your hardcore base, you need to make certain that your product appeals to people more inclined to be hard core players.
Argyle King
Legend
I'd have to disagree that it took until the 90s for video games to take off. The 80s introduced the NES console. It was the best selling console of its time. A very large portion of my childhood was spent stomping Goombas and getting angry at an annoying laughing dog.
On the contrary, I'd actually say that -for me- video games helped me to discover what rpgs were. My interests being what they were (mythology, Choose-Your-Own Adventure Books, etc,) I already had a fertile ground for the rpg seed to be planted. However, my first exposure to an actual rpg would be a game known as Dragon Warrior. Later, I also had the pleasure of playing the original Final Fantasy.
Let's forget about me though because I imagine I have/had some unique interests compared to the other members of my age group - both then and now. (then: my 'fantasty' was Grecco-Roman and Norse mythology. now: I can't stand to play WoW.)
I disagree with all of the doomsday prophecies about rpgs. Elements of roleplaying -in my opinion- are more present now than they were when I started. Just yesterday I bought the UBuild version of Monopoly. There are also UBuilds/Lego versions of Sorry, Battleship, and several other games. In addition, there are games based upon the same concept which seem very similar to rpg scenarios; one has a pyramid; there's one with a minotaur, and a few others.
So? At their heart, many of these games are challenging the imagination of the players. I also feel that they are fostering the creative spirit needed to DM; building your own dungeon is only a few steps away from crafting your own Monopoly board. I'd argue that it's even less of a distance away from crafting the labyrinth of a minotaur.
The odd thing is you turn over the box, and you find the name Hasbro planted there. Strange... Their traditional board games seem to be incorporating more and more elements of rpgs. Meanwhile, there are folks who argue that D&D *needs* to become less like an rpg to stay relevant among today's market.
Obviously, I disagree with that argument. As I've said many times, what I feel needs to happen is for people to be more open to teaching the hobby. Likewise, to be a better equipped teacher, I feel that there needs to be a community which is more knowledgable about more rpgs. I realize that with economic times being what they are it's difficult to afford the buy in to more than one system. However, I'm also aware that many games have free previews.
Why do I think this is healthy? It provides a more broad view, and what I think is a better educated position from which to teach the hobby to prospective players. Even if you hate those other games, having the knowledge that not every rpg produces the same experience is good knowledge to have.
There was a discussion going on somewhere in this growing behemoth of a thread about smart business being to focus on the market which is buying. I completely agree with that, but that's another reason why I feel it is healthy for the market and the hobby to be aware of more than one game. Different people want different things; different games provide different experiences...
Not only do I feel this allows for a broader range of people to possibly become interested in pen and paper rpgs by virtue of having a broader range of possible experiences; I also feel it will foster better products from the various companies by virtue of competition. If suddenly WoTC is losing customers to a different gaming company, they might want to take a look at what that other company is doing and ask why, and 'how can we improve our brand to get them back?' 'Is our vision of what a rpg should be hitting home with p&p gamers?'
I will submit that -to some extent- it is smart business to cater the brand toward trends of today. However, there also needs to be more of an acknowledgement that there are different reasons for why many people enjoy a tabletop game such as D&D, Pathfinder, GURPS, Savage Worlds; etc versus why people enjoy video games such as WoW, Dr. Mario, or Castle Crashers. The more you start to whittle away the elements which are part of those different reasons, the less incentive I have to turn off my XBox and roll some dice; when I feel as though I have a more rpg-like experience from the Dragon Age video game or Elder Scrolls: Skyrim than what I get from D&D 4E and D&D 4E.E or the Dragon Age tabletop game, there seems to be an issue.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
This was my arc, too. I basically came to D&D via console JRPGs. I first saw the terms HP and Level Up on a pixelated TV screen.
D&D is smart to cherry-pick from some of the best advancements in video game RPG's (4e's aggro management mechanic -- punch me or I'll do something nasty to you -- is peachy-keen, though I'd personally love to see some more variation on the theme). It's also smart to embrace flavor, design, and story material that modern fantasy has embraced (grabbing some anime tropes or some Harry Potterisms isn't a bad thing at all).
I still have a soft spot for video game RPG's (though MMO's are not my thing), and I will still play them frequently. However, though they led me to D&D, they scratch a different itch.
Video games will always be better and faster at math and visualization than D&D will be. They can even make inroads into social activities and scheduled events. D&D is not the place I go to if I want to kill monsters and take their stuff.
D&D is the place I go to when I want to tell the story. When I want to control the action. When I want to change the world with only the limitations of my imagination. When I want to play my character my way, not within the bounds specified by a programmer.
D&D can lend expandability, adaptability, customizability, and human interaction, to a much greater degree than any videogame ever could. This is why D&D still appeals to me. This is what the game does that is unique to PnP RPGs'. WoW can only dream of this.
Minis combat isn't what D&D does uniquely. Interactive, freeform storytelling is what it does uniquely. IMO, the game needs to focus on that. Combats and encounters and accessories must support that. It's not about killing goblins. It's about the reasons your character kills goblins and the effects of killing those goblins in your friend's world. It's personal, specific, and all the more potent for that.
But now I'm soapboxing, so....off to play more videogames.
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