What does it take for an RPG to die?

[General_Tangent]

I'd argue that Dogs in the Vineyard is dead after the publisher withdrew the game from sale.

 

[MGibster]

So what does it take for an RPG to die in this hobby?

For me, I typically thought of an RPG as being dead when it was no longer in print. But what does it mean to be out of print in the age of PDFs? I have easier access to AD&D's Oriental Adventures today than I did in 1994. Now I think of an RPG as dead when no new books are being published for it. Someone, somewhere, is playing Cyborg Commando. I don't know why anyone would play Cyborg Commando, scientist and philosophers have yet to answer that question, but I still consider it a dead game because nobody is going to publish anything new. Will it rise like a phoenix from the ashes one day and experience a rebirth? Almost certainly not, but maybe.

 

[DragonLancer]

When a game is no longer being published it's pretty much dead, even if PDF copies are available for sale, or 3PP continue to publish material. My experience has always been that once a game or edition stops being published, players jump ship and it's harder to find a potential group for it. It's more like undead than death but still the same.

 

[Bae'zel]

For a while, Bloodbowl was out of print and no longer supported by Games Workshop, but I knew of a thriving Bloodbowl community. Same with Mordheim.

So "out of print" to me doesn't mean death of a game. A lack of community or fanbase does.

 

[Reynard]

What do you think?

"Dead" is probably a regional thing. I haven't seen a Champions game at a Con in years, and would be hard pressed to put a group together. But, I bet someone somewhere is turning potential players away from their Champions table right now.

 

[The Soloist]

So, is the question then at what point to games become zombies?

More like digital ghosts that haunt the internet, until a publisher decides to force them back into a new body by printing a new edition!

 

[Morrus]

We've seen various clickbait titles that "D&D 5e is dead!" or "is the OSR dying?" which, I know, is just there to get a reaction.

So many! And as many as you block, more keep springing up. It's so frustrating.

I think its actually a spectrum. Here's my indicators ordered by the least impactful to the true death of an RPG to the most impactful.

• A game's popularity (sales, search popularity, games played, or other metric) goes from a steep incline to leveling off.
• A game's main publisher no longer publishes material for it.
• Third party publishers no longer publish material for it.
• It's hard to find groups playing it at conventions.
• It's hard to find a group to join as a player anywhere.
• It's hard to put together a group and run it as a GM.
• It's hard to find the core material for the game at all.

I think that's fairly reasonable. Though, while groups like mine exist, #6 will never be true. We'll play anything any of us wants to run.

Would your contention be that all 7 of these need to be true to consider a game dead?

 

[MGibster]

So "out of print" to me doesn't mean death of a game. A lack of community or fanbase does.

I think of it like a "dead" language. There are no native speakers of Latin, but there are still people speaking it. It's still a dead language.

 

[Morrus]

I think of it like a "dead" language. There are no native speakers of Latin, but there are still people speaking it. It's still a dead language.

I don't think there are people actually using it to talk to each other though? i.e. for its intended purpose.

For a game, presumably people are using it to play with each other, which is a game's intended purpose.

I'm not sure the two are comparable.

 

[Lategamer]

As it only takes one GM to run a game for a group of players they have enslaved, it's hard to measure in that way.

I'd say it's dead when it stops growing (a biological definition if ever there was one). That kindly means that even super old games like MSPE or Jorune are likely still growing because someone somewhere just discovered them for the first time. And with RPGs it's not like they stop working. I think probably SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis is dead because the only copies out there are hardcopies and they haven't been on sale in literally two decades.