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It's funny how many of the choices are being made based on music, entertainment, and pop culture. Probably says more about our media-saturated mindset today than anything else. Non-entertainment factors such as housing affordability, social cohesion, family life, access to jobs and education...

We played AD&D with multiple PCs per play for year and years. In a game with such high lethality, and where published adventures were designed for 6 to 8 PCs, it made for an effective safety net. With the changes to the zeitgeist of the game, we rarely have multiple PCs anymore. The biggest...

This thread comes up on every RPG forum about twice a year. And every time I'm struck by the differences in my 40 years of experience playing RPGs, and the theorycraft and prescriptions bandied around online. Anyway, in my experience: * Most players don't want to collaborate on building a...

Tabletop boardgames are also much more efficient in digital form than face-to-face. There's no setup, the apps handle shuffling, dealing, tracking points, and cleanup. You can play against people anywhere in the world. And it's cheaper than buying a cardboard game. And yet cardboard tabletop...

Because they’re competing with Marvel, and Marvel movies are full of familiar pop songs because audiences love it.

On that note... Songs That Must be in the Dungeons and Dragons Movie Soundtrack Children of the Grave (Black Sabbath) The Wizard (Black Sabbath) Closer to the Heart (Rush) YYZ (Rush) In My Time of Dying (Led Zeppelin) Battle of Evermore (Led Zeppelin) The Number of the Beast (Iron Maiden)

Of course it’s going to be like Guardians of the Galaxy. And that’s awesome because the Guardians of the Galaxy movies are highly entertaining and did mondo box office. We want this movie to suceed, right? Anyone expecting a serious, earnest, straight treatment of D&D in this movie was setting...

My experience over 40 years of playing RPGs, and playing with somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50-60 people in that time, is that around a third of the people who play are just there for the beer and pretzels socializing. Many don't own and haven't read the rules. Some are passive, and don't...

The internal lives of protagonists, and in particular their emotions, are much more prominent in popular fiction today than decades ago. In creative writing courses and books, the terms are writing 'hot' vs writing 'cold.' Fiction of the mid-20th century tended to cold, where the protagonist's...

The CRPG analogy is apt. One of the appeals of games like Skyrim is immersion. When people play, they feel like they’re in another world, braving the winds on a snowy ridge, descending a gloomy tunnel, coming across a ruined castle in the moonlight. That immersion can happen because the world...

So if the rule book to Blood Rage were quadrupled in length and the mechanics were buried in lore and walls of discursive text, people would be more willing to read it?

Four out of six people in my game group regard RPG rules the same way - an unfortunate task they would rather avoid. And their bloated format makes the task even more unpleasant for me, the rules explainer, than holding their hands through learning a boardgame.

That runs contrary to everything the designers at WotC have said about 5E. In the leadup to the design, they carried out the largest market research of the player-base in RPG history. Their findings, which they explained in interviews and panel discussions during the development of Next, is that...

Do you hate boardgame rulebooks? They’re not written like TV installation manuals. But they are concise, clear, and follow fundamental principles of instructional design.

Exactly. I'm not advocating all colour and descriptive text be removed from RPG books. Just that the mechanical content be presented discretely and concisely. Jumbling it all together might be traditional, because the roots of the hobby go back to shoe salesmen writing game books. But it's...

I find the text in the Pathfinder pocket editions to be way too small to read. But I do like softcover digest books. People hate on 4E, but I found the Essentials books to be the most practical and user-friendly D&D books I've used. The layout, font size, format - they were some of the only RPG...

The further you get away from the handful of popular RPGs and into the realm of boutique games, the greater the ratio of buyers who will never actually play the game at the table, and for whom the book is essentially just reading material. I expect publishers are well aware of this. These games...

There are some people who will read an RPG book cover-to-cover for entertainment, but we're peculiar uber-nerds even by gamer standards. Most people who I've taught to play D&D have never actually read the rules away from the table. However, most everyone I've played with has had to reference...

I’d suggest RPGs are competing with the same market as hobby boardgames, and the experience new players are expecting - learn rules, sit down at table with friends, play game using those rules - is far closer to boardgames than to reading a novel.

The boardgaming hobby is booming right now, and boardgames feature concise, lean, rulebooks.