D&D 5E (More) ruminations on the future of D&D

[Mercurius]

Have you stopped to think about the nature of that 'wall?' People outside the hobby /have/ heard of D&D. They've seen the actors in Big Bang Theory pretend to play it several times. In the past, being a nerdy/geeky thing was bad, but the past decade or so geek has been chic. MMOs losely based on D&D have had huge mass-market appeal. LotR movies have had huge mass appeal. Everything has been in place for D&D to really take off like it did in the 80s and then some - and has been for many years, going back to, like back to 2000.

And it hasn't. It hasn't even come close, no matter what WotC has tried to do to goose the franchise. They tried making it open source, and d20 did prettymuch eat the hobby alive for a while there, but it didn't bring in vast numbers of new players. They tried giving it an on-line component, but couldn't develop it. They tried improving it as a game - making it less arcane and more accessible - and the core fan-base rebelled and actively sabotaged it. Now they're just looking back and consolidating it around that core.

Yes, which given the last six years makes sense. WotC lost many of their core and want them back. I think they also designed 5E to be flexible for the future, for the possibility of attracting new players and offering them a game that is comparatively simple.

Maybe the core fan base /is/ the problem? Maybe it's not just the game that's hard for new players to get into or even grasp, but the grouchy, elitist grognards they have to contend with to even try it, that are driving them away?

Hmm, I don't know, Tony. This might be part of the problem, but I think it is relatively insignificant or at least is down the list a bit. I suppose a related issue might be that "back in the day" of TSR D&D, most people started playing by being introduced by friends, but it might be that given that the bulk of players are older and older, fewer new players are being introduced simply by virtue of age. It is one thing to introduce your 12-year old buddy, another a 40-year old parent of one your kid's friends.

But, as a counterpoint to my own theory, I have to admit that in the context of the public venue where I've been gaming for 4 or 5 years now (since the Dark Sun season of Encounters, whenever that was), the hobby is not that grey. The players have been mostly new, mostly college-age or 30s - with a few kids, and a few closer to my own age.

That's good to hear!

They probably don't have the resources, after the failure to push D&D to 'core brand' $100mil/yr status via DDI/VTT and trying to put the OGL genie back in the bottle. They took years to develop a re-iteration of the core game, and look to be outsourcing everything else. They may try to spin that positively, but I think the bottom line is that Hasbro (and WotC for that matter) no longer sees the D&D franchise as something worth investing significantly in.

Well this is the view I'm starting to believe in, or rather that they're taking two approaches: On one hand, having a stable core, a game that the fan-base generally likes, that may bring a few lapsed players back and not be imposing for newbies to play. On the other, exploring more adventurous possibilities that could bring about a new golden era, like a movie franchise, but that they aren't relying upon. More like, "Great if it happens, but if it doesn't then at least the D&D section of the company will play for itself with a stabilized and basically happy community."

(More responses a bit later)

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes, which given the last six years makes sense. WotC lost many of their core and want them back. I think they also designed 5E to be flexible for the future, for the possibility of attracting new players and offering them a game that is comparatively simple.

Wow, are we having a non-linear conversation or what? I wonder about the nature of this 'wall' around the hobby /that you brought up/ and how it's clearly been up since the end of the fad in the 80s, and all you an focus on is the last 6 years and trying to get back offended players with the fiction of a 'simple' (actually just familiar) game? The 'high wall around the hobby' is not keeping Pathfinder or AD&D fans out, it's keeping /new/ fans out. Appealing to grognards is not the solution - it may well be part of the problem.

"We seem to have had trouble getting new players for the past 30 years."

"That's terrible, it must all be due to something we did 6 years ago, lets try to get old players back!"

???

Hmm, I don't know, Tony. This might be part of the problem, but I think it is relatively insignificant or at least is down the list a bit. I suppose a related issue might be that "back in the day" of TSR D&D, most people started playing by being introduced by friends, but it might be that given that the bulk of players are older and older, fewer new players are being introduced simply by virtue of age. It is one thing to introduce your 12-year old buddy, another a 40-year old parent of one your kid's friends.

That's not much of an alternative. We've got a hobby that was briefly huge, then turned insular with that 'high wall' you mentioned. D&Ders didn't just stop making new friends in 1987. And the game, itself, didn't change much for 20 years, then took on a distinct 'system mastery rewarding' character. I think tradition and elitism account for a lot of the stones in that wall around the hobby.

In the past, I always assumed D&D was held back by the 'geek' stigma, but that doesn't hold water anymore.

That's good to hear!

Of course, those new/young players were all attracted and retained by 4e & Essentials.

Well this is the view I'm starting to believe in, or rather that they're taking two approaches: On one hand, having a stable core, a game that the fan-base generally likes, that may bring a few lapsed players back and not be imposing for newbies to play.

Those last two are pretty nearly mutually exclusive. The things that make the game familiar and 'really D&D' to us old-timers (and lapsed players) make it weird and less-approachable to new players (old or young). The /attitudes/ of grognards don't help, either.

I'm going to be doing my bit to be the change I want to see in the game and make the effort to give new players at Encounters and conventions the best play experiences possible, in spite of the system, itself. But that's just me.

On the other, exploring more adventurous possibilities that could bring about a new golden era, like a movie franchise, but that they aren't relying upon. More like, "Great if it happens, but if it doesn't then at least the D&D section of the company will play for itself with a stabilized and basically happy community."

That's about as positive a spin as you can put on "give up on an IP but, let it slide for a while instead of shelving it outright." Frankly, between the tanking of Essentials and the announcement of 'Next' shelving still seemed like a very real worry. In retrospect, it seems, the transition was about adjusting the franchise to a much lower level of investment. You can get acceptable RoI with big investments and huge growth, or by slashing costs and divesting. 5e looks like the latter - much less risky, so we can at least not worry about the franchise being shelved right away.

 

[Ace]

D&D in my neck of the woods at least isn't a graying hobby. Most of my play group is in their early 20's which makes me the old man. The youngest I think is 19 or 20.

However this hobby is simply not for everyone, it takes time, education ,social skills. math skills and an interest in acting and imagination however tepid. This combination isn't common. Why in the were so many causal gamers in the 80's to early 90's is simple, there was no internet, no Netflix, fewer computer and video game and simply many less entertainment choices. Thus people who might have a strong interest are still interested (in fact we probably get more of them) but the casual gamers just aren't there as much.

Also in many areas, the culture and demography have shifted a lot. With it so has the educational attainment and many younger people especially on the coasts say don't read as well as us older folks did or have the same attention span as we've seen in scale here in California where our educational attainment has plummeted. Without that baseline of learning and cultural commonality ts not so much that D&D is too hard but its that the expected entertainments by group differ too much. Its not easy to recruit from that pool especially casual players as to them the hobby is just too nerdy. I have no idea how to change that really and as such I don't think our expected pool of players has grown greatly from the 80's

I do hope this changes, I'd like a bigger hobby and a new golden era but at least I can say AFAICT , its healthy and not aging out unlike many other hobbies (model trains for example)

 

[Shemeska]

Of course, those new/young players were all attracted and retained by 4e & Essentials.

This is rather a large assumption, and one that I frequently see: that of all the editions past and current, only 4e is or was capable of attracting new players. I think every single edition has attracted its own share of new players from outside the hobby, and I'm not sure if anyone has data to support any particular edition or edition's design principles as being better equipped in and of itself to attracting newer players or younger players.

At GenCon I played in a Pathfinder Society Game with a 13 year old and a 9 year old. Several tables over there was an 8 year old girl GM'ing. I think the hobby looks good for the future.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is rather a large assumption,

No, it's not. It's the lack of nested quotes again. Follow the chain back and you'll see I was talking, specifically, about my experience at one FLGS over the last 4 or so years.

More generally, though, yes I've introduced new players to every edition but 0D&D and later BECMI, and, yes, 4e did the best job of retaining them, no question. JMHOX, though.

I'll see how 5e does, next (npi), but my current Encounters table is all established players. I'm running intro games at a con over labor day weekend, though.

 

[Rygar]

To counterpoint the OP...

The Industry's problem isn't, and never has been, that the hobby is "Greying" or that it new generations aren't interested. The Industry's problem has always been the Myths it constructs to explain its inability to advance beyond a business model that quite frankly sucked in the 70's and hasn't improved.

The Industry generally claims that the reason board games and RPG's fell out of favor was because of video games. The problem with this assertion is that it assumes that video games are some kind of unbeatable product that people are drawn to. Video games are what people are having fun playing, the reason board games and RPG's fell out of favor is because people weren't having fun playing them. It's really that simple, if a person enjoys something, they'll spend time doing it. If they don't enjoy it, they won't.

D&D, and to a lesser extent board games, have a number of impediments that impact enjoyment.

-For RPG's there's a *major* hurdle in learning the game. To play the game, with just core books, you're talking several hundred pages at a minimum. With accessories, you're talking thousands of pages. Starting in the late 90's, people's time spent on reading decreased significantly enough that the bookstore industry pretty much died. If people aren't reading books as much as they used to, and your product requires people to read many books, there's a correlation there. Nevermind the issues with memorizing all of those rules.

-For both RPG's and board games there's a state issue. Saving the state of the game is challenging when compared to video games. If you're playing a video game, you click a button and your game state is stored. If you're playing at a table you have to write down the state of all of the characters and adventure, or cover the game pieces with boxes and hope no one jostles the table.

-There's also the movement away from quality retail adventures. If you're time limited, or imagination limited, without good pre-written adventures you simply are not a player. These people don't have time or imagination to come up with a coherent and cohesive campaign. A whole section of the market is lost. It's really another Industry Myth, "DM products don't sell as well as Player products", except without good DM products that enable fast play, you don't have those players.

This can easily be seen to be the case once one reflects on Magic the Gathering. People start out or participate casually with a fast-play solution like preconstructed decks or netdecks, as they become more enamoured with the game they end up spending hundreds of hours preparing to go play for 4 hours. Magic the Gathering is successful because it doesn't have a major requirement to get started, and easily has the same time footprint as D&D (If not more), but people play Mtg and not D&D. Because you don't need the same time investment to play casually. Mtg has a ascending curve in how much you have to learn to play, D&D has a high flat requirement in terms of required knowledge to play. I don't need to know how Humility interacts with comes into play effects to go play at my shop, I do need to know it if I want to play at a Vintage tournament. I need to know what the grappling rules are no matter what level I want to play D&D at.

If the Industry had ever made an effort to address its root problems we wouldn't be having this conversation. It has stayed rooted in a decades old format resisting embracing a digital world, likely because many of its leaders simply do not understand a digital world.

The solution to the Industry's problems has always been: Virtual Tabletop. Abstract away the "Behind the scenes" math of mechanics, substantially reducing the "Reading footprint" and allow for fast play and game state preservation. The things that make video games so attractive are easily adapted by the RPG and Board Game markets. These games now and always will have a significant knowledge requirement in order to play, but simply making use of computer technology can remove substantial amounts of that barrier to entry that makes it so unattractive. If I had a viable VT, I don't need to know what the equations are for Grapple, all I need to know is that it exists, and a touch interface implementation could even remind me I have that option.

The truth is: World of Warcraft is identical in complexity to Dungeons & Dragons, the only difference is that WoW abstracts away all of the "Nuts and bolts" of gameplay so that the Player doesn't need to know how to calculate his chances of hitting a goat, he just has to click a button, while D&D forces you to memorize: Strength bonus, character level's To Hit value, magic item bonuses, magic spell bonuses, target's AC, etc, etc. They're basically the same system, except one abstracts away the learning curve and has millions of players, the other doesn't and has only hundreds of thousands. Board games suffer similiarly, if you want to play Axis & Allies you have to memorize blitzing rules, what counts as a move for a plane, etc.

The Industry suffers because it is immured in an analogue format with comparitively very high requirements for entry. It isn't MMO's, it isn't video games, it isn't anything more than the fact that the Industry refuses to make use of the digital tools to improve the accessibility of its products.

Quite honestly, a lot of the problem is Hasbro. Hasbro doesn't understand digital technology, the company is deeply rooted in an analogue world. They owned Microprose, and sold it off because they couldn't see a way to leverage it. They had the rights to D&D and Mtg, two products *Guaranteed* to sell a metric ton of copies of games, and they've never figured out how to leverage it in house. MTGO is an embarassment at this point, each release makes the product worse and in some cases less stable. Hasbro has never shown that it has any idea how to take its analogue library and expand into digital versions of them. Hasbro was the leader in board gaming and RPG's, they set the stage, and since they don't appear to know what to do with computer technology, they left the Industry mired in an increasingly archaic state.

I also have to point out, the person who commented about Target and Wallmart missed a very important piece of information. Target and Wallmart do not stock Magic the Gathering. They lease shelf space to a company who happens to put Mtg on those shelves, but the sales of those products in stores is apparently so low that neither store feels it is worth their time selling it themselves. If Mtg isn't worth their time, D&D absolutely isn't.

 

[DM Howard]

That's not much of an alternative. We've got a hobby that was briefly huge, then turned insular with that 'high wall' you mentioned. D&Ders didn't just stop making new friends in 1987. And the game, itself, didn't change much for 20 years, then took on a distinct 'system mastery rewarding' character. I think tradition and elitism account for a lot of the stones in that wall around the hobby.

There might be something there with that train of thought, but. . .

In the past, I always assumed D&D was held back by the 'geek' stigma, but that doesn't hold water anymore.

I really don't think so. I think we still in our own world as a whole, a prime example is the likes of the TV show "The Big Bang Theory" because the audience of that show aren't laughing with us, they are laughing at us. Just my two coppers, but at least in my area of North-East Kansas being a geek isn't really that chic. Is it at bullying level, or outright derision like in the 80's and early 90's? No, but to say that we're somehow considered "normal" is, to me, a stretch. And Tony, not trying to put words in your mouth, this was just my stream of consciousness based on the above quote.

I also have to point out, the person who commented about Target and Wallmart missed a very important piece of information. Target and Wallmart do not stock Magic the Gathering. They lease shelf space to a company who happens to put Mtg on those shelves, but the sales of those products in stores is apparently so low that neither store feels it is worth their time selling it themselves. If Mtg isn't worth their time, D&D absolutely isn't.

I learned something today. Thanks.

 

[Ace]

I'm not entirely sure there is a huge digital divide issue keeping people from gaming, at least in my experience e. Our entire group has laptops, smart phones, tablets and similar tech and they get little use. Oh one player tends to prefer a die roller when she isn't engaged with the game. Big deal.

And this isn't a software issue, there are plenty of spreadsheets, char gen programs, indexed PDF's all that available, Its just we play pretty much the same way someone in 1975 or 1982 or 1993 would have played because its part of the fun, heck I even heard my E-Book audio Book enthusiast fellow gamer say right out print books were just better for gaming. I actually though the oldest cruftiest grognard there slightly disagreed which was a shock to me. Your group may differ but a lack of E-Tools is probably never the reason someone isn't interested

And a virtual tabletop or Microsoft surface, one tech we don't have however cool would not bring more fun to the group either, In essence what makes TTRPG's fun is people and hanging out and playing with minis and rolling dice and all that . Analog stuff, meat space stuff. Computers make some things easier but they don't increase the fun factor to a huge degree and the game can be played nicely without them.

Now I certainly possible to shift the hobby in a more "modern" direction but the risk is changing the hobbies fundamentals and in so doing you have to know whether the people your bring in will exceed the people you lose. I doubt the gains will be worth it frankly but I might be wrong

Also re: entry tax, its true enough there are rules taxes but an expectation of a basic degree of interest and capability to handle simple math and reading is reasonable. If you can't handle say 6th grade math and 8th grade (US) vocabulary and aren't a kid a nerd hobby doesn't need to accommodate you, you need remedial education before you play.

And while Tony Vargas isn't entirely wrong having played since Holmes I can say that today's system rewarding games are nothing new, rules heavy was the watchword by the middle 80's and even vaunted AD&D 1e was very rules intensive. Its not exactly the same as say "character optimization" in Pathfinder or 3x but the roots are old. I think though 5e is moving in the right direction

Still as I see it saying the hobby is too hard to enter especially as gamers IME are often quite accommodating smacks of a desperation dumbing down and we aren't anywhere near that short players. Its not that hard and even math intensive games like Rolemaster say require basic addition and subtraction, nothing special. Most of the time, someone will help teach the basic skills gladly and in truth anyone who can build a WoW character can build a Pathfinder one too. The skill base is quite similar.

if people lack the attention span to read the rules online or off and put some effort into them after a session or three the probably lack the attention span to actually play them game for a 4 hour session or to play a campaign and while a steady diet of story games or pick up games can be fun its a different hobby entirely. Heck I'd argue the basic knowledge entry taxis a good thing, it gives people a sense of community kind of gaming boot camp and of accomplishment as well. One of Us.

Also as to the assertion that it threw up walls, I don't think so. TTRPG's are a inherently self limiting hobby combining as one wag put it "double entry bookkeeping, improv theater, and wargaming" oh and the DM needs to be into creative writing too. Not many people out there like that and of the ones who might have given it a go one boring summer, the kind that the hobby doesn't click for but need something to do, they don't need D&D in 2014 We could get more of then to give it a whirl but they aren't going to support the hobby and what is being done now with Basic DD&D (and the PFSRD and more) free is I think the best approach. 1st hit is free and if it clicks, welcome aboard. We really can't do more.

 

[Haffrung]

There seems to be a rather high wall around the RPG ghetto - higher than most of us think, with perhaps a skewed perception from those of us within the walls as to what the popularity of the game actually is, which may be far less than we think. Further, it seems that there are very limited pathways for the fan-base to grow. I started thinking about how D&D might actually grow, if it could grow at all, whether it is stable in size or if the community is doomed to gradually, if slowly, dwindle away.

On the contrary, I think D&D is more popular than you would think by reading forums. Far more people play D&D as a casual activity among friends, in their homes, than the community who talk about RPGs on forums or attend organized events. It's the hardcores who post on forums about class balance, tweets by Mearls, and edition wars who represent the small but vocal minority.

It just seems that there are too many factors at work against a true D&D revival, that the best we can hope for is a small bubble with 5E and then a strengthened and stabilized core community, with just enough new players to make up for attrition. Maybe that is all that WotC really expects?

It's true that attrition is relentless. Which is one the reasons those who think in terms of a zero-sum struggle between 4E and Pathfinder or 5E and Pathfinder can't see the forest for the trees. If the D&D market consisted only (or even mostly) of long-time players, it would have dwindled away to almost nothing by now as attrition took its relentless toll. Every year, thousands of newcomers play D&D. With every new edition, tens of thousands play for the first time. And the new players tend to be young, as attested by Mearls comments about gearing the campaign length to a college year.

Have you stopped to think about the nature of that 'wall?' People outside the hobby /have/ heard of D&D. They've seen the actors in Big Bang Theory pretend to play it several times. In the past, being a nerdy/geeky thing was bad, but the past decade or so geek has been chic. MMOs losely based on D&D have had huge mass-market appeal. LotR movies have had huge mass appeal. Everything has been in place for D&D to really take off like it did in the 80s and then some - and has been for many years, going back to, like back to 2000.

And it hasn't. It hasn't even come close, no matter what WotC has tried to do to goose the franchise. They tried making it open source, and d20 did prettymuch eat the hobby alive for a while there, but it didn't bring in vast numbers of new players. They tried giving it an on-line component, but couldn't develop it. They tried improving it as a game - making it less arcane and more accessible - and the core fan-base rebelled and actively sabotaged it. Now they're just looking back and consolidating it around that core.

5E Basic is the first real attempt to make D&D truly accessible to casual players in more than 20 years. 3E (and Pathfinder) saw the peak of the complexity graph. 4E dialed back the complexity somewhat, but not nearly enough to capture the market WotC has it sights set on. In addition, the market associated 4E with the need for dungeon tiles and minis - a barrier of entry for many gamers. With Essentials WotC tried to make POGS available with every product to allay these concerns, but it was too little too late.

Maybe the core fan base /is/ the problem? Maybe it's not just the game that's hard for new players to get into or even grasp, but the grouchy, elitist grognards they have to contend with to even try it, that are driving them away?

We seem to disagree pretty fundamentally on who and what a grognard is. To me, grognards are the players who started with B/X and AD&D 20+ years ago and play a very stripped-down, simple version of D&D. Far, far simpler than 3E. Spend some time over on Dragonsfoot and some of the other grognard forums and the most common complaints against WotC D&D is that it's just too damn complicated and hard to run. These grognards prefer characters that can be created in 10 minutes and can be scribbled on an index card. They want much of the rules to be handle by DM adjudication rather than hard-coded rules in a book.

The hardcore from the 3E era are very different. They welcomed the mechanical codification of all game elements. They tend to be the char oppers who eagerly devoured every splat book released for the system. They're the first cohort to welcome a degree of character optimization that requires a software application to administer.

During the development of 5E, Mearls commented that the developers of D&D had been catering too much to the hardcore 'for at least 10 years'. Did he have market data to support that assertion? I assume he did. So it looks like he has the same notion of hardcores as I do - gamers who love to play with all sorts of dials and levers to engage with the mechanics of the game and optimize characters. Those gamers didn't reject 4E because it was too simple - they rejected it because it was unfamiliar.

WotC are reaching out to a wider audience: that booming market of tabletop gamers who have fueled a golden age in boardgames. I know a lot about that market, as I'm probably more of a boardgamer than an RPGer (my membership number on boardgamegeek is in the 200s). I've seen how that hobby has exploded. I have some insight into its appeal. WotC clearly does to, because they've explicitly questioned why the tabletop RPG market is stagnating while the tabletop boardgaming market is booming. The answer is accessibility. If a game takes longer than 15 to explain, it's appeal drops sharply. If it takes longer than 2 hours to play, it's appeal drops sharply. If it can't be played by casual gamers who want to just show up and play, without and at-home reading or preparation, its appeal drops sharply.

5E basic is a game you can just show up and play. I question if full PHB 5E is. You certainly can't make up PCs on the fly in 15 minutes using one book. But with an online character generator (preferably free), it might be. The nice thing about 5E is most of the complexity is front-loaded in PC creation. Combat is far, far simpler than either 3E or 4E. The ease with which you can run a game where people go hours on end only speaking in in-world terms, while the DM occasionally refers to the rules, makes it more suitable for a style of play that WotC largely turned its back on with 3E and 4E.

Does that mean 5E will bring in a new golden age of D&D? I doubt it. But I think it will gain traction with the casual gamer market who brought in a golden age of boardgames. And it will also be more appealing to lapsed gamers from the last golden age, who don't have the time or energy to run rules-heavy or detailed combat sims, than either 3E or 4E. Those two markets - the casual boardgamer and the lapsed D&D player - are not at all incompatible. And they're the two groups where the growth will come from, not from competing with Pathfinder over the hardcores.

 

[Mercurius]

Trying to catch up here...

Being old enough to be critically aware of my own mortality (although delusional to the point of being frequently in denial of that grim truth) and without offspring of my own, I envision the day when my nephews and nieces will look at all of the RPG materials I've acquired over the years with the same jaundiced eye with which I've viewed the antique toys of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Well I think this is one of the questions I'm asking: Will D&D gain a new audience, a new generation of fans, or will it gradually dwindle away into a kind of anachronistic ultra-niche hobby that fewer and fewer people are into? Some of the anecdotes in this thread seem to go against that notion.

Most all of the young crowd came in as brand new players, and have become loyal new fans who happily embraced the new rules set. Mike Mearls in one of their recent podcasts mentioned that their info showed more younger players, and that the "greying" of rpgs was not the reality....mine own experience the last 4 years agrees completely, so I don't think we are in a high walled rpg ghetto. There is room for expansion, and with yesterday's event of the PHB hitting #1 in the overall books category on Amazon people are certainly giving it a look.

Good to hear! So the good news is that there are new, younger players coming in. But here's the million-dollar question: Can there be another boom? I'm not saying like the 80s, but what about something more moderate? New players have trickled in since the 80s, but it doesn't seem like there was another generational boom with 2E or 3E, just something more gradual. But I could be wrong.

So in reading this I found myself questioning the basic assumption that D&D is a "graying" hobby. A few years ago I would have accepted this without question, but now I find myself with a group where we have an equal number aged 40+ as 25 or less (oddly, no one in their 30's). And I'm in a second smaller group where there are more younger people than older. Obviously this is only my group, and I really don't have much contact with the gaming community beyond my group and these and other forums, so I'm not trying to say my group is typical. But it does make me wonder if we have any evidence beyond anecdotal that the hobby really is dying.

In the "Golden Era" thread (I think) someone made the comment that a gamer's career rises and falls and then might rise again, and that this follows somewhat of a pattern with age. We could imagine a kind of stereotypical gamer who gets into gaming at that magical age of 12 (or so), play a lot through his teens and then starts to slow down a bit in college, but still finds a group. Then, after college, his focus is more on career and perhaps marriage and family, so gaming drops away. Sometime in his mid-30s or so, with a stable career and family life, he's having a beer at a dinner party and ends up talking with another guy about D&D. Later that night he goes online and finds out about the new edition, and starts dreaming about playing again...

Of course there are as many "gaming biographies" as there are gamers, but I think that general trajectory is a common one - and certainly fits your observation that there's a gap in the gaming populace, but it might have more to do with age and related life circumstances than it does generation.

I don't regard the prevalence of MMOs as a sign that there is a groundswell of potential D&D players waiting to burst forth. Indeed, I see it as the exact opposite: Back in the day, before MMOs, there were a lot of people who just wanted to hack up monsters. They played D&D because it was the best option available at the time. Then MMOs came along and made it possible to hack up monsters on demand, with superior visuals, without having to assemble a gaming group or do a bunch of math or deal with a potentially-sucky DM. The monster-hackers migrated to MMOs, and they're not coming back, because MMOs are what they always wanted to play--D&D was just a substitute.

This is a very good point. I hate to sound like a "hater," but my first thought when reading this was, "Good riddance!"

That's what both we and WotC really ought to keep in mind. Without (I hope!) getting into edition wars, I think it's fair to say that one of the chief goals of 4E was to drastically overhaul the monster-hacking aspect of the game, to add a lot of tactical depth to combats which in the old days often devolved into whacking off chunks of hit points till somebody ran out. And it succeeded quite well at that. But it didn't bring the MMO players home. MMOs still do monster-hacking better than D&D ever can or will.

The question then is, if the monster-hackers are gone, is there any other set of people who might be drawn into the hobby? And I think the answer to that is yes. The great weakness of MMOs is that they offer very limited scope for creativity--and the great strength of tabletop is that it offers immense scope for creativity. D&D has always had great appeal to creative people, and that side of the hobby is still going strong. So D&D should be aiming to build on that strength. I see some encouraging signs that 5E is aiming in that direction.

I think you're right on here, and that 5E's "three pillars of adventure" probably arising out of a conversation around some of these issues. Combat is one pillar - which means that it is "only" one-third of what the game is about (in a general sense), but also that it is fully one-third. The vast majority of D&D players do enjoy combat, but it is that Extra Something - immersion within a story, the play of imagination, the thrill of exploration and lost mysteries, and the enjoyment of friends and role-interaction that sets tabletop gaming apart.

I was reading over the pdf excerpt of the new edition of Designers & Dragons and was thinking about how amazing the halcyon days of D&D
must have been, what an incredible, magical discovery it was, to take on the role of a hero in an imaginary landscape and story. I think the key going forward is to tap into that - not try to recreate the past, but connect with that which is universal - the play of imagination, the telling of stories and, of course, the adventure.

Winning in theatres is doing nothing for Marvel comics. Movie tie-in comics tend to do well, but that's equally related to putting talent on those books at the same time, and making the characters visible, selling to existing fans. The movies generate almost no new comic fans.

This is a good point, although there is a difference beween comics and RPGs and that has to do with interactivity. You watch a movie, read a comic, but play an RPG.

A hit movie *might* be nice, but it's not going to save the industry.

I agree, but as you just said--that the hobby is maintaining--maybe the industry doesn't need "saving?" It seems the general view is that the RPG industry is doing fine and is stable, but just isn't booming (although we just remember that all booms are followed by a bust). So I think the question isn't as much about how to save the industry, but how to grow it.

The best way to get kids into RPGs is the same way the majority of people were introduced: uncles.
Seriously. Family members and friends are the best way of getting people into gaming. It doesn't matter if the books are big and visible in Box Stores because kids are going to spend their hard earned money on stuff they know they like rather than take a risk on an unknown game. But if it's gifted to them that's a different story.
Getting people to think about "giving the gift of D&D" and targeting adults in a kid's life is the best way. Make parents remember the fun times they had with D&D when they were a kid. Or grandparents. Target the parents. Emphasise it as a family activity, something you can do with your kids as part of a family game night. A game that encourages read, and imagination, and math.

Yeah, I agree, although I do wonder about generational differences. I was gifted a set of hardcover AD&D books back in the early 80s when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old and remember diving deep into them, reading to all hours of the night - just loving the world I had discovered. But I wasn't raised in a culture in which I could simply turn on and tune in, pick up a joystick (or whatever) and be instantly entertained. In other words, the learning curve is different now - there are more competing distractions. So it goes beyond merely gifting but also teaching, and then it is a time issue.

People are masticating your ruminations. Just Cud.

Thanks. I guess.