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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 2024850" data-attributes="member: 19893">This is really brilliantly put.In particular, point "C".  SO few people in the "industy" out there today seem to understand that what most people want is a game that is fun, principally, and a GAME. Not an "improvisational theatre experience":  they don't need fifty pages on role-playing styles. They need a neat, relatively simple, tactical system that allows them to have concrete mechanics to play an adventure, usually with relatively little RP involved.  The typical online forum pundit today wants RPGs that are either very low-rules and high on "story", or very high on rules and high on story. Neither of these are ideal for getting new blood.Most people's (most of us older guys anyways) first experiences were with the old D&D (either the original books, or the Red Basic set, or AD&D1st).  If you try to think back to those days, and those first sessions, there was precious little roleplay going on, and what there was of it was something you were able to make out on your own, after all none of those old games were particularly fabulous at giving character interpretation guidelines beyond "the paladin must be Good" etc.Now imagine you at 12, 14, 15, whatever, playing your first rpg, had some old wanker show up telling him all about how he has to play a sophisticated character, and giving him a manual filled with garbage about "interpretation"; it would be relatively easy for the teenaged version of you to decide that either the game was dull, or that this was clearly not meant for your age range and you'd best go off and play Vice City.And that is why we lose new players today. They aren't being catered to. In fact, if a company had the brilliance to make a game designed for younger, newer players based on what those players would really like (ie. a simple but concrete set of rules allowing for something fun without seriousness, and comprehensibly identifiable as a "game" rather than as "art", "group therapy", or "improvisational theatre"...oh, and cheap), I'd wager that far too many of the forum-pundits here would slam it into the ground for being "crap" or "broken", or "discouraging roleplay", etc etc.Its sad, but really its that exclusionist, incestuous, "we want only what we like and we don't need new people" mentality that is killing the industry; not having too many d20 companies around. Its the mentality of someone saying "my life with master" would be a good introductory rpg with a straight face. Its the total disconnect from reality of people talking about the "state of the rpg industry" and claiming that D&D should be exluded from consideration in the discussion. Its the quixotism of believing the average gamer gives a damn about Origins, or what's happening on the Forge, or even what's happening on Enworld.And this small-minded "internet fanboy" mentality wouldn't be such a problem if it wasn't that so many damn game designers are on these fora too, and you spend enough time here, you start to believe that these places are representative of what gamers really are, and really want. Its a disconnect from the truth.  I mean, you get the opinion of a 100 guys on Rpg.net to figure out how to make a "breakthrough rpg" product, then you only sell 100 copies and claim the industry is falling to pieces.. thats what this amounts to.Nisarg</blockquote>

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