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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freeAgent" data-source="post: 7647800" data-attributes="member: 6687435">I joined this site just to reply to this article.I agree that the TRPG market is contracting and has been since at least the mid-late 90s.  My first experience in RPGs was with AD&D when one of my friends and his older brother allowed me to sit in on one of their sessions and play a character.  I thought it was really cool and wanted to play more.  This was probably in 1995 and I was 10 years old.Unfortunately, I had a hard time finding anyone to play with other than my one friend and his older brother.  In fact, I had a hard time playing with them, because it was really the older brother's game (he was the DM), which he played with his friends.  I was only able to play with them a handful of other times.  I tried to get some of my other friends interested, but I never had the financial resources to buy a ton of books, so I was stuck with the intro to AD&D box and some random add-ons mostly about the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.  In any case, my attempts to actually play D&D as a TRPG were a failure.  This was also due to both "hobby" games stores I knew of in my area going out of business (Fantasy Forum and Arlington Comics and Cards, though the latter was primarily a Magic Cards shop).I still read the Forgotten Realms novels, and I played Baldur's Gate/II, NWN, and stuff like that on the computer but TRPGs were essentially dead to me for over a decade.  When computers and the internet became more widespread, I used them to play computer games and not to connect with pen and paper RPG players.Fast forward to the near-present.  I was discussing geeky hobbies at a party recently and found that a couple friends-of-friends used to play or still do play TRPGs.  We decided to throw a D&D (3.5e) party and it was a blast.  Everyone had a great time, even people who had never played an RPG before.  At this point, I decided the time was right to try and get back into TRPGs.I checked out what games were out and what was popular.  I discovered Pathfinder and thought it was awesome that Paizo publishes PDFs of all their books, so I jumped in.  I also got the Legends of Drizzt boxed game to see how that was.  I played it once with a few friends and really hated it since it's so limited and has no roleplaying component.  Its only redeeming quality as far as I'm concerned is that it brings back memories of the R. A. Salvatore novels I enjoyed as a kid.So, Pathfinder it was.  I looked at the local community for gaming and found that there is one out there in Chicago (which seems to be centered around Chicagoland Games/Dice Dojo and the Chicago Order of Weekend Screwballs).  Unfortunately it's not in a convenient location for me and I can't play during the week at all.So, I decided to start my own group.  It includes:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">My girlfriend, who hadn't played RPGs until two months ago</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Two other friends of mine who had never played TRPGs, but are big into board games.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A friend of the other two friends who has 3.5 experience</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A person I found on Meetup who had been looking for a weekend group in the downtown Chicago area since at least May, 2011 (this was in December).  She had played 3.5 and probably earlier editions as well.</li> </ul>As the organizer of the group, I became the de facto DM/GM.  This was a pretty daunting thing to jump into because I have very little time to read and write adventures and I hadn't played Pathfinder or D&D since the 90s.  Since my overall investment in TRPGs quickly went from $0 to around $300 not including my time, I wanted to make sure I was successful this time around.I was glad to find that Paizo also offered the Adventure Paths, so I went that route.  I also got Hero Lab.  I've found these to be invaluable time-savers for someone like me.  I also found Hero Lab files for all the NPCs in the Adventure Path I chose (Second Darkness) and Combat Manager.  These tools have all allowed me to successfully GM my first two sessions with MUCH less time commitment than I would otherwise need to invest.  With resources like Hero Lab and d20pfsrd.com, I don't even have to know all the rules and the rules, tables, math, etc. behind everything since it can be referenced on the fly.  This is great.Anyway, all that is a roundabout way of saying that for someone like me the new online and technology-assisted resources aren't just nice.  They're necessary.  Things are still not incredibly user-friendly for someone completely uninitiated (like most of my group).  Unless you've already played RPGs before or are otherwise extremely motivated, you'd be hard pressed to locate all of the great resources out there before giving up and going back to CRPGs or whatever else you do in your limited free time.I think that in order to really grow the TRPG business, a publisher needs to find a way to dramatically cut down on the time and effort needed to get started.  Right now, tools are generally spread across the internet.  The problem with this is that someone who first goes to Paizo or WotC (or Amazon) will most likely not get exposed to any of this unless they do more digging on their own.  They'll get a game that's playable only if you do TONS of manual work with pens and paper.  The publishers should start trying to partner with or absorb the groups putting out computer/internet-based tools and resources so they can cut down the up-front time commitment and present a more unified system of play to the consumer.  Basically, in order to compete with CRPGs on a long-term basis publishers need to try and make their games as accessible as possible without dumbing them down like the D&D boxed games.  At this point, nobody has done that.  Paizo has come closer by releasing books in PDF format and declaring Hero Lab the "official" character generator for Pathfinder, but they still have a long way to go.  The frustrating part is that the parts are already out there, but nobody has put them together yet.</blockquote>

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