What Does the RPG Hobby Need Now?

[SlyFlourish]

I think your grants to schools, @SlyFlourish, are a wonderful thing (and my school in particular benefited from your generosity!) We have 30-40 kids each week playing D&D. I'd love to teach them different games, too, but D&D is still the big dog in the market. I hope other publishers will do more outreach and support for schools (Troll Lords offers free books for schools, for example). Hook the kiddos early!

Thank you! We're going to start looking at providing support to Let's Quest which is an honest-to-god 501c3 for this sort of thing:

Let's Quest

A 501(c)(3) Non Profit dedicated to providing TTRPG materials and resources to after school programs for free. This includes books, dice, digital materials, and consultations.

www.letsquestafterschool.org

 

[The Sigil]

I think it is time to.finally kill prep. Games and adventures should be designed such that they can be used with little to no preparation. That can mean a lot of different things, but definitely includes embracing layout and art/cartography that informs. It means ending "paid by the word" style walls of prose. And it means tearing down the explicit divide between players and GMs.

So much this. While I think a little prep can be okay ("here are four possible pregenerated characters, roll to decide which one you will use"), it had better be "5 minutes or less." I think the biggest barrier to new folks discovering RPGs is that character creation has become completely unwieldly.

Compare the "onboarding material" from the 1983 Mentzger Set with today's stuff. Ignoring the "Solo Adventure" (which was mostly there to introduce you to game terminology), you had 5 pages (pp. 48-52) to follow for character creation. Class descriptions, INCLUDING SPELLS for casters, took a total of 17 pages, with most classes (excluding spell descriptions) taking up less than a single page.

Compare with the 2024 PHB... 384 pages. It's too much. We're killing new players thanks to paralysis by analysis.

I know there are a lot of experienced players for whom the fun of gaming is meticulously planning out, optimizing, and otherwise working on their character, and they love having 384 pages of options.

But they already know the rules... the 384 pages are a place to search for details they might have overlooked, ways in which they can express their cleverness or inventiveness or personality or what have you by finding the precise combination of mechanics that allow them to express exactly what they want to express in their character.

But a new player sees 384 pages not as something to reference for details they already know... they see it as the bar to entry in a world that has become increasingly short-attention-span theater and their eyes glaze over... "I'll never read all this."

I think the rules got to this unwieldly point thanks to a vicious circle that originally stemmed from adversarial play, whereby GMs and Players mistrusted the "other side" and thought the point of the game was to "win" and therefore players demanded more rules be laid down so they could "rules lawyer" to deny GM fiat... over time, GMs felt beholden to know all the rules lest a more knowledgeable player badger them with the rules... so GMs demanded to have rules for everything so they'd never need to result to GM fiat, leading for more rules to be laid down for players to "rules lawyer" with etc. and there's also some level of competition among players as to who can make the most broken but still "legal by the rules as written" character, lather rinse repeat...)

We've lost track of the fact that D&D was originally designed to be an ABSTRACTION of reality, not a SIMULATION of reality. We demand ever-more realistic rules to simulate things better, rather than ever-more vague rules to abstract things out of the way so we can get on with the real reason we're getting together... to have fun creating collaborative stories in a fantasy world with our friends. That's "winning" in D&D, having fun with friends.

 

[Jd Smith1]

We've lost track of the fact that D&D was originally designed to be an ABSTRACTION of reality, not a SIMULATION of reality. We demand ever-more realistic rules to simulate things better, rather than ever-more vague rules to abstract things out of the way so we can get on with the real reason we're getting together... to have fun creating collaborative stories in a fantasy world with our friends. That's "winning" in D&D, having fun with friends.

Your first mistake is assuming everyone plays D&D.

The second is to think that everyone wants collaborative stories in a fantasy world.

There is no 'one size fits all'. A lot of new players come to TTRPGs with inspiration from video games or tv/movies, and they just want to kill stuff and gain loot.

Sure, simplistic, abstracted rules sets are useful for attracting people who will game a few sessions, but its the gamer who does not flinch at 384 pages that will keep coming back, and most importantly, buy stuff.

Which brings us to the truth you completely missed: what the RPG Hobby needs is new members who will buy stuff. It doesn't matter how many play if you have one set of books per table. And lets face it: simpler, abstracted rules don't require buying to use well. But in a hardcore, 384-page system, players are more likely to buy their own copy to peruse between sessions.

 

[NN]

What use is it if the punters are just buying player-facing splatbooks that make the game overcomplicated and only encourage more splat?

The industry is not the hobby.

The answer is : players itching to GM.
“How” is the issue.

 

[cranberry]

What the RPG hobby needs now is love , sweet love. .

Seriously, it needs a better way to coordinate games and connect people.

 

[The Sigil]

Your first mistake is assuming everyone plays D&D.

Fair. But I would counter that since D&D is the largest player in the space, D&D can be used as a proxy to show what the "average" introductory RPG experience is like - I am not going to try to average the page count of every single PHB-equivalent in the RPG space because someone would object to my inclusion or exclusion of <Book X>.

Which brings us to the truth you completely missed: what the RPG Hobby needs is new members who will buy stuff. It doesn't matter how many play if you have one set of books per table. And lets face it: simpler, abstracted rules don't require buying to use well. But in a hardcore, 384-page system, players are more likely to buy their own copy to peruse between sessions.

I disagree, but NN has said it better than I could...

The industry is not the hobby.

The RPG Hobby would get along just fine for a very long time if every single RPG publisher shuttered its doors today and no new ones ever sprang up - goodness only knows there are millions of pages of material already in existence devoted to RPGs.

The RPG Industry may need new members who will buy stuff. The RPG Hobby needs more people playing stuff... and with the 5e SRD in CC, the Archives of Nethys for PF, etc., it's clear the barrier to play is not price. I think complexity is the current barrier to entry, particularly in the current short-attention-span world.

I would posit that a good game (RPG or otherwise) is easy to learn, but difficult to master. When I think of some of the most influential video games (I'm deliberately limiting this to older games because we have long enough to know they have stood the test of time; games released recently may be "better" but we haven't had enough time to measure their influence), for example, I think of: Pong, Pac Man, Tetris, Street Fighter, Doom, Ocarina of Time, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Wii Sports.

Each of these is in a totally different genre, but they have one thing in common - they are all relatively simple to grok immediately. Mastery takes longer. But you can plop anyone down in front of one of these games and they'll "get the hang of it" almost immediately. You generally know immediately what you want to do and once you are shown the button that does it, you're fine. "Explaining the controls" can be done, as was said upthread, with a 3x5 card.

In some ways, Jd Smith1's comment that some players want to "kill stuff and gain loot" is right on - it's a simple goal that players can immediately understand, even if you have to show them which dice to roll to do it.

Of course, the community sometimes derisively refers to this goal as "murderhobo," so maybe we're the problem?

Specifically, the OP has some very salient questions (emphasis mine)...

What would make it easier for new players to get into the hobby? What makes it easier for existing players and game masters to engage in the hobby? What products do we think are missing or underserved?

I have been focusing a lot on "new players" and I think the answer there is "reduce system complexity" but possibly also "make the goals more obvious" - of course, existing players and game masters seem to be up in arms when you do that because they say they want "more sophistication" in their hobby, so you would think that puts the two groups at odds with each other.

I still think one of the best series that has ever been written on Game Design in general comes from Mark Rosewater of Magic: The Gathering - it's his 20 Years, 20 Lessons series (or view the hourlong talk). Specifically, I'd focus on...

Lesson #1—Fighting against human nature is a losing battle

... Your audience for game design is humans. They come with a complex operating system. It's quirky at times, but it can be understood. Just remember that humans are quite stubborn. They like to do things the way they like to do them and it's hard to change their behavior.

Lesson #5: Don't confuse "interesting" with "fun"

... It turns out that there are two different kinds of stimulation—intellectual stimulation and emotional stimulation. The first is about stimulating the ways in which you think. ("Hmm, that's very interesting.") The second is about generating an emotional response. ("Ooh, that's fun!") ... in general, we humans like to think of ourselves as intellectual creatures. But interestingly, when scientists study how we make most of our decisions, it's not based on facts. Humans are much more motivated in their decision-making by emotions rather than thoughts. This means when making a game, you can have it speak to your audience on an intellectual level or an emotional one. Both are valuable, but when you speak to a player on an emotional level, you're more likely to create player satisfaction because for most people, emotional satisfaction runs deeper and is more core to how they respond.

Lesson #14: Don't be afraid to be blunt

... Artists tend to prefer subtlety. They're taught to show and not tell, that part of what makes art special is that it has a lighter touch. Here's the problem: sometimes subtlety doesn't work. People can often miss the obvious.

Lesson #19: Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them

My metaphor for this lesson is a doctor's appointment. What does a doctor always do first? They ask you how you're feeling. Why? Because you're the expert on you. No one else better understands how you feel. However, the doctor doesn't often ask you how to solve any problems that you might have because they're better equipped than you to do that. The same is true in game design.

Human nature, for better or worse, is "short attention span" - if you want new players, you need to be able to onboard them into your game in a matter of a few minutes - or better yet, seconds. A "character creation session zero" that lasts 3 hours fails that. For hardcore RPGer's that may be "interesting" and "fun" but usually for a new player, even if it's "interesting" it's not "fun" (because the hardcore player has fun imagining how his selections at character creation will interact with the game, the new gamer has no context in which to imagine that). So I think the best thing to do, because I'm blunt, even if it is "murderhobo"-y, is to throw a character sheet at a new player, show them their Armor Class (defense), Attack Bonus and weapons (offense), and then immediately throw them into a combat encounter. If you haven't "rolled to hit the monster" in the first five minutes of your RPG experience, I have failed as someone trying to onboard you.

And I include the last lesson to point out I'm good at recognizing problems ("game's complexity makes it hard to onboard new players") and bad at solving them ("what should you simplify the game to? I dunno.")

I will say, though, as a player with 40+ years of experience under my belt, a simpler ruleset would mean I didn't have to devote as much time to prepping for my sessions, which would leave me more time to, you know, actually PARTICIPATE in said sessions. When I was younger and had time and energy but no money, I wanted more complexity and more rulebooks. As I got older and had energy and money, I was able to buy those rulebooks but lacked the time to play as much as I'd like. Now I find I have a tiny bit more time but much less energy, so I want something where I can get a game session going immediately and get a lot of fun out of it, I don't want to be wasting energy or time chasing minutiae.

 

[Scribe]

What the RPG hobby needs now is love , sweet love. .

Every damn time this thread is bumped, I hear this.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You just

So much this. While I think a little prep can be okay ("here are four possible pregenerated characters, roll to decide which one you will use"), it had better be "5 minutes or less." I think the biggest barrier to new folks discovering RPGs is that character creation has become completely unwieldly.

Compare the "onboarding material" from the 1983 Mentzger Set with today's stuff. Ignoring the "Solo Adventure" (which was mostly there to introduce you to game terminology), you had 5 pages (pp. 48-52) to follow for character creation. Class descriptions, INCLUDING SPELLS for casters, took a total of 17 pages, with most classes (excluding spell descriptions) taking up less than a single page.

Compare with the 2024 PHB... 384 pages. It's too much. We're killing new players thanks to paralysis by analysis.

I know there are a lot of experienced players for whom the fun of gaming is meticulously planning out, optimizing, and otherwise working on their character, and they love having 384 pages of options.

But they already know the rules... the 384 pages are a place to search for details they might have overlooked, ways in which they can express their cleverness or inventiveness or personality or what have you by finding the precise combination of mechanics that allow them to express exactly what they want to express in their character.

But a new player sees 384 pages not as something to reference for details they already know... they see it as the bar to entry in a world that has become increasingly short-attention-span theater and their eyes glaze over... "I'll never read all this."

I think the rules got to this unwieldly point thanks to a vicious circle that originally stemmed from adversarial play, whereby GMs and Players mistrusted the "other side" and thought the point of the game was to "win" and therefore players demanded more rules be laid down so they could "rules lawyer" to deny GM fiat... over time, GMs felt beholden to know all the rules lest a more knowledgeable player badger them with the rules... so GMs demanded to have rules for everything so they'd never need to result to GM fiat, leading for more rules to be laid down for players to "rules lawyer" with etc. and there's also some level of competition among players as to who can make the most broken but still "legal by the rules as written" character, lather rinse repeat...)

We've lost track of the fact that D&D was originally designed to be an ABSTRACTION of reality, not a SIMULATION of reality. We demand ever-more realistic rules to simulate things better, rather than ever-more vague rules to abstract things out of the way so we can get on with the real reason we're getting together... to have fun creating collaborative stories in a fantasy world with our friends. That's "winning" in D&D, having fun with friends.

You just said that experienced players often enjoy those many pages of rules. Are you suggesting they be removed because you think new players are more important? What's your course of action?

 

[Micah Sweet]

What use is it if the punters are just buying player-facing splatbooks that make the game overcomplicated and only encourage more splat?

The industry is not the hobby.

The answer is : players itching to GM.
“How” is the issue.

Perhaps the "punters" have a different comfort level with complexity than you do, and don't believe the books they buy make the game overcomplicated, and want more splat to be encouraged because they want to buy more content?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Fair. But I would counter that since D&D is the largest player in the space, D&D can be used as a proxy to show what the "average" introductory RPG experience is like - I am not going to try to average the page count of every single PHB-equivalent in the RPG space because someone would object to my inclusion or exclusion of <Book X>.


I disagree, but NN has said it better than I could...

The RPG Hobby would get along just fine for a very long time if every single RPG publisher shuttered its doors today and no new ones ever sprang up - goodness only knows there are millions of pages of material already in existence devoted to RPGs.

The RPG Industry may need new members who will buy stuff. The RPG Hobby needs more people playing stuff... and with the 5e SRD in CC, the Archives of Nethys for PF, etc., it's clear the barrier to play is not price. I think complexity is the current barrier to entry, particularly in the current short-attention-span world.

I would posit that a good game (RPG or otherwise) is easy to learn, but difficult to master. When I think of some of the most influential video games (I'm deliberately limiting this to older games because we have long enough to know they have stood the test of time; games released recently may be "better" but we haven't had enough time to measure their influence), for example, I think of: Pong, Pac Man, Tetris, Street Fighter, Doom, Ocarina of Time, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Wii Sports.

Each of these is in a totally different genre, but they have one thing in common - they are all relatively simple to grok immediately. Mastery takes longer. But you can plop anyone down in front of one of these games and they'll "get the hang of it" almost immediately. You generally know immediately what you want to do and once you are shown the button that does it, you're fine. "Explaining the controls" can be done, as was said upthread, with a 3x5 card.

In some ways, Jd Smith1's comment that some players want to "kill stuff and gain loot" is right on - it's a simple goal that players can immediately understand, even if you have to show them which dice to roll to do it.

Of course, the community sometimes derisively refers to this goal as "murderhobo," so maybe we're the problem?

Specifically, the OP has some very salient questions (emphasis mine)...

What would make it easier for new players to get into the hobby? What makes it easier for existing players and game masters to engage in the hobby? What products do we think are missing or underserved?

I have been focusing a lot on "new players" and I think the answer there is "reduce system complexity" but possibly also "make the goals more obvious" - of course, existing players and game masters seem to be up in arms when you do that because they say they want "more sophistication" in their hobby, so you would think that puts the two groups at odds with each other.

I still think one of the best series that has ever been written on Game Design in general comes from Mark Rosewater of Magic: The Gathering - it's his 20 Years, 20 Lessons series (or view the hourlong talk). Specifically, I'd focus on...



Human nature, for better or worse, is "short attention span" - if you want new players, you need to be able to onboard them into your game in a matter of a few minutes - or better yet, seconds. A "character creation session zero" that lasts 3 hours fails that. For hardcore RPGer's that may be "interesting" and "fun" but usually for a new player, even if it's "interesting" it's not "fun" (because the hardcore player has fun imagining how his selections at character creation will interact with the game, the new gamer has no context in which to imagine that). So I think the best thing to do, because I'm blunt, even if it is "murderhobo"-y, is to throw a character sheet at a new player, show them their Armor Class (defense), Attack Bonus and weapons (offense), and then immediately throw them into a combat encounter. If you haven't "rolled to hit the monster" in the first five minutes of your RPG experience, I have failed as someone trying to onboard you.

And I include the last lesson to point out I'm good at recognizing problems ("game's complexity makes it hard to onboard new players") and bad at solving them ("what should you simplify the game to? I dunno.")

I will say, though, as a player with 40+ years of experience under my belt, a simpler ruleset would mean I didn't have to devote as much time to prepping for my sessions, which would leave me more time to, you know, actually PARTICIPATE in said sessions. When I was younger and had time and energy but no money, I wanted more complexity and more rulebooks. As I got older and had energy and money, I was able to buy those rulebooks but lacked the time to play as much as I'd like. Now I find I have a tiny bit more time but much less energy, so I want something where I can get a game session going immediately and get a lot of fun out of it, I don't want to be wasting energy or time chasing minutiae.

Sounds like you just don't enjoy the reading and prepping parts of the game. That's fine, but not everyone feels that way.