NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 2554573" data-attributes="member: 9225">The RPG industry needs to be able to collectively present its wares and how to use them. Unfortunately, this initiative requires a level of cooperation that we don't currently have. The root of the problem is that companies often don't want to promote anybody but themselves. The fact of the matter, though, is that the general public is about as interested in approaching an entire pastime through a single game about as much as you would enjoy a baseball league with two teams.This doesn't mean that there are masses of people yeaning to play CoC out there. It means that variety is an attraction even to folks who don't make use of it. Even if you only really follow one or two teams in a sport, the others are what make it interesting. Even if you only listed to Britpop, the fact that it exists in a sea of genres gives it room to distinguish itself.Another step would be formalizing what hobbyists aready do, by categorizing games by genre and rules set. John Nephew had the idea of labels that store owners could use to clearly categorize their stock, but unfortunately, nobody was there to really back him up and push them.The time has passed when we could just rely on grassroots outreach. What's needed is cooperative, industry-driven efforts to:* Remind people what RPGs are and how to play them.* Remove their stigma.* Demonstrate the depth of the form (not necessarily "artistically," but in terms of variety).* Deal with the press with both proactive and reactive PR campaigns. Don't just deal with bad press -- create good press and turn one body into the go-to group for the media.I think another problem is the design of games -- a problem that started during the legal arrangement that separated D&D from AD&D. WE don't have to deal with that any more, but it hangs like an albatross.If you look back to the B/X/C/M/I sets, you see a brilliant way to gradually immerse players in the complexities of an RPG. TSR did a great job here -- but it shot itself in the foot by providing a completely different game for the core of hobbyists. So folks "graduated" from box sets to books for a much different iteration of D&D. One was elegantly designed for newcomers to exerts, but the other was more heavily supported by the player network.Everybody still makes this mistake. 3e emulated AD&D but again, has a "fake" game to draw folks in -- one that they will abandon if they play for an extended period. Every other company emulated AD&D -- the game for gamers -- and use some variation on the "fake game" (like fast play rules) in a halfhearted attempt to get players.These days, I think the "fake game" should be *the* game. I believe traditional RPGs should introduce their full complexity over several core releases instead of from a corebook to supplemental "options" which subdivide the fanbase To be honest, it would get completists to buy more books, but the "basic games" of each line would be playable without being obsolete once the buyer chose a deeper commitment -- and the sequential nature of releases would ensure that commitment as well as whet the appetite for rules mastery that many people have. Such players would just have to financially commit to the most complex, "high level" iterations of the game.</blockquote>

Verification