Are we looking at an RPG Renassiance (moved to Tabletop Gaming)

[delericho]

Disclaimer: Everything I'm about to say is probably wrong.

Are we about to see a Renaissance? Yes and No.

Commercially, it's a solid "no". D&D 5e will sell about as well as 4e, will last a few years, and then Hasbro will pull the plug the next time they have a sales blip and feel the need to "concentrate on their core brands". Kickstarter is a fad - as the failed projects quickly rack up, patrons will start to gravitate to those companies who can be relied on to produce, those being (almost entirely) the same suspects as before. So, it will be just another revenue stream for Reaper, and Monte, and a few others, but will cease to fund small-press publushers.

I have no idea how Paizo will do over the next several years. They're the company most likely to screw up my predictions.

But without D&D around, many of the surviving FLGS will close up, which in turn will leave the mid-tier game producers with no great outlet for their products. Online sales are fine, once people know they want your stuff, but you need something to drum up that initial enthusiasm.

So, as a business, RPGs are essentially toast.

But...

What we will see instead is lots of fan-efforts filling the void. We already see some of this with the OSR, and we'll see more in support of 4e (FourthParty, etc), more blogs, more sharing of material, and the like. Additionally, sites such as Meetup will make it increasingly easier to find groups, which means that while the products may not be there, the interest still is.

And while computer RPGs have a great deal of convenience to them, people will still want excuses to meet with their friends, have a few beers, and pass a few hours.

In short, I don't see the RPG hobby going anywhere.

Now, just to reiterate: everything I have just written is probably wrong.

 

[gyor]

For the record I was including quality CRPGs in the renassiance, hence why I listed Project Eternity.

And it was a reference not to huge commerial success, but to the quality of the products themselves and innovation. Its been a very along time since thier was anything worth getting excited about, but now thier so much.

And I disagree about Kickstarter, while thier are failures, thier are successes too, even for small publishers and each success will inspire others to try, after all its so low risk.

Kickstarter is the future, the way to make sure you have minuim baseline of support for your prodoct and the cash to do it.

 

[delericho]

For the record I was including quality CRPGs in the renassiance, hence why I listed Project Eternity.

CRPGs don't really need a renaissance - video games are huge, will remain huge, and role-playing remains a popular category. Still, it's good that there are, and will be, good games out there.

And it was a reference not to huge commerial success, but to the quality of the products themselves and innovation. Its been a very along time since thier was anything worth getting excited about, but now thier so much.

That's fair enough. And you're right - there is a lot of innovation out there.

That said, I tend to get a lot more excited about the games I'm running and playing, rather than any new product that's out there, not least because I have enough material already to last me forever. In fact, 2011 was probably my best year for gaming, ever, despite buying almost no newly-publised material.

And I disagree about Kickstarter, while thier are failures, thier are successes too, even for small publishers and each success will inspire others to try, after all its so low risk.

It's low-risk for the publishers, sure, but not for the customers. Kickstarter is new and exciting, with lots of money being thrown at ideas that wouldn't get anywhere normally. But, unfortunately, it's exactly like the d20 craze of a few years ago - there's a flurry of excitement, there's a glut of products, and there's going to be a crash.

Kickstarter is the future, the way to make sure you have minuim baseline of support for your prodoct and the cash to do it.

I'm almost certain that 50% or more of all Kickstarters will fail to produce anything. They'll miss their funding goals or, probably worse, they'll meet their goals and then discover that their ability to come up with the idea far outstrips their ability to deliver.

Of the rest, there will be three categories: there will be a significant minority that deliver what was promised, but where it will actually prove to be rather disappointing (significant weaknesses, or inflated expectations, or similar); there will be a significant minority that deliver what was promised and it will be good (with the likes of Reaper, Monte Cook, and the like falling squarely in this bracket); and there will be a tiny minority that are resounding successes and deliver far more than was promised, or far better than was expected.

And what you'll see, as a result, is that patrons become much more picky about what they support. They'll only support those companies with a proven record of success, or those offerings that have a clear well-scoped goal (I've already written this product, but need a budget for artwork, publishing, and/or marketing...). And so, you'll see the rise of a small number of new companies that are the Kickstarter "success stories" (as we saw Green Ronin, Mongoose, and Necromancer/Frog God from d20), and a whole lot of broken dreams.

I may be wrong. I would actually like to be wrong. But I'd be a lot happier with that bet than I would in supporting virtually any Kickstarter out there (unless I already know the name of the people involved).

 

[Scribble]

Maybe I'm just bitter though because I haven't been able to get a D&D game going in over a year since I moved to a new city. I can understand people not wanting to come after a few sessions because I suck as a DM, but not getting people to show up once after a score of players have expressed interest is really frustrating.

Hit up Google+ There are a LOT of games happening there over the Google+ hangout system. (And a couple of apps designed specifically for gaming.)

 

[Desdichado]

No, the golden age of RPGs is dead and gone. The silver age of RPGs is dead and gone. We miiiighhhttt drag ourselves out of the Dark Age of RPGs and into some sort of Modern Age of RPGs, but this hobby will never again reach the highpoint it had in the 1980s.

The last phrase I agree with. It is not evidence of us being in some kind of "dark age" though. My gaming is great. Never been better. The options available to gamers have never been better, or more diverse, or more customizable to individual gamers. In the era of pdf publishing, kickstarters and the OGL, we've never had more options in front of us to choose from.

The Golden Age of gaming is now.

Now, if only my group and I weren't so busy, we'd play more often than once a month or so...

 

[Stormonu]

I don't think we're looking at a renassiance, or even a resurgance. It's more like a diversification. I don't feel like there is a popularity explosion like back in the 80's, or a "come back to D&D" as big as the release of 3E - D&D felt really dead at the tail end of 2E - and not because of the bankrupty problems (I'd seen MtG and WoD do more damage to kill off interest).

Where the OGL brought a trend where just about everything tried to go d20 for a while, now it seems systems are graviating back towards using their own systems. I guess it makes it seem like there are more RPGs out there.

 

[GreyICE]

The last phrase I agree with. It is not evidence of us being in some kind of "dark age" though. My gaming is great. Never been better. The options available to gamers have never been better, or more diverse, or more customizable to individual gamers. In the era of pdf publishing, kickstarters and the OGL, we've never had more options in front of us to choose from.

The Golden Age of gaming is now.

Now, if only my group and I weren't so busy, we'd play more often than once a month or so...

Ah, you've captured why it's the Dark Age. It's not going anywhere. Diversity? Come on. The star of this generation of RPGs is a knockoff of a 12 year old game. We have:

New World of Darkness - now with 1/5th the excitement, 1/5th the horror, and 1/5th the despair of the Old World of Darkness. A pox to that.

4E D&D - Fractured the player base, partially abandoned by WotC while it was still current, never lived up to its digital promise.

Pathfinder - 3E was a new and exciting game 12 years ago. A can of spray paint does not a game make.

FATE - Oh look it's FUDGE. Came out in '92. Updated in 2003. We're new and current!

Savage Worlds - 2003. It's good. Not much bad to say about thais.


All anyone does nowadays is build MMOs. Seriously. Paizo hits it big, MMO. DDO. Oh look, we have a system for Firefly and World of Warcraft and Dresden Files and lord god why. We're living in one of the greatest lack of new, inspirational, and original settings ever.

Yes, we have a huge glut of material from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, all that we can use. The material only keeps piling up, yes.

But doing something new with it? Lord no. 13th age is the first damn thing I've seen in a while that actually makes me wonder if someone cares enough to make something different.

 

[pogre]

But doing something new with it? Lord no. 13th age is the first damn thing I've seen in a while that actually makes me wonder if someone cares enough to make something different.

What about WFRP 3E?

Not my cup of teas, but I think it is very different and innovative.

 

[Desdichado]

Ah, you've captured why it's the Dark Age. It's not going anywhere. Diversity? Come on. The star of this generation of RPGs is a knockoff of a 12 year old game.

lolwut? Is 12 years old supposed to be old? I seem to recall that that 12 year old game was itself a knock-off of a game that was 26 years old at the time, and had had very little change to it in all those years. And 12 years ago, we got the OGL and the SRD, the gift that keeps on giving. Which, maybe you're recall (or maybe not, but I certainly do) was always meant to be evergreen.

Saying that any game derived off of that is old and stale is just whack. Mutants & Masterminds is old and stale? It's widely regarded as the best superhero system before or since (at least until just recently, when it's finally had some decent competition.) Pathfinder is old and stale? It outsells D&D itself.

[skipped a bunch of smack-talking examples that demonstrated nothing]

All anyone does nowadays is build MMOs. Seriously. Paizo hits it big, MMO. DDO. Oh look, we have a system for Firefly and World of Warcraft and Dresden Files and lord god why. We're living in one of the greatest lack of new, inspirational, and original settings ever.

The designers of truly innovative games like--yes, some of the ones you discounted--FATE, Dread, 4e, Fiasco and more would beg to differ. And while the mechanics aren't necessarily innovative, the legal maneuver that led to the retroclones certainly was. And lack of new settings? With the OGL, we've had more settings in the last twelve years--by far--than we had for all of the 26 years before. And most of them were actually much more innovative than yet another Tolkien-lite setting, like we got several of during the 80s and 90s. And the business model of Kickstarters may yet turn out to be a boom/bust fad; we'll see, but at the moment, it's giving us all kinds of crazy stuff we could never have imagined before, and which nobody could possibly have made a business case to pursue before either.

Yes, we have a huge glut of material from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, all that we can use. The material only keeps piling up, yes.

I'm talking about stuff that's current, in print, and readily available.

But even so; who cares how old it is? You seem to have a fixation on stuff that only came out in the last year or two. If it's revised or remade, or in any way based on material that came before, you seem to completely discount it. I have no idea what that has to do with your claim that the Golden Age is long gone. Clearly to my mind, the Golden Age is when the most stuff is readily available, so there's a vast and great diversity of products to meet almost anyone's taste, easily accessible and available all at once.

Sure, D&D may have had better sales in 1983 than it does now. But as consumers and customers of gaming products, we've never, ever had it so good. We could never have even imagined it so good for most of the life of the industry, in fact.

But doing something new with it? Lord no. 13th age is the first damn thing I've seen in a while that actually makes me wonder if someone cares enough to make something different.

That seems an odd criteria on which to determine what a "Golden Age" is. By that criteria, the Golden Age isn't long gone... we never had one at all.

 

[GreyICE]

Pathfinder is old and stale? It outsells D&D itself.

Oh I see, this is called wishful thinking. Only way to explain this argument being used.

Very well, carry on. The world needs its idealistic youth.