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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5728361" data-attributes="member: 6673496">Probably.But wargames suffered a similar problem: As their original customers became veterans, the products and games they wanted assumed a form which actually made it more and more difficult to attract new players to the hobby. It was natural for the veteran players to want what they wanted. It was natural for the wargame publishers to make what their customers wanted.And it was, thus, perfectly natural for the wargame market to atrophy and then die.RPGs have had a gentler decline. (Largely because WotC saved D&D when they acquired TSR whereas TSR put a bullet in the brain of the wargame market when they acquired SPI.) But it's the same problem: Veteran gamers wanted more "story" in their games. TSR satisfied that desire with linear adventures supporting small groups willing to make long-term commitments.Nothing wrong with any of that, per se. But the inevitable result is an atrophying of the market.I think the claim that the only way to support roleplaying is through linear story arcs requiring long-term, regular commitments from small groups isn't true.What is true is that from 1980 until the late '90s, those interested in "story first" only had one method for achieving that: Preplotted arcs. And those preplotted arcs carried with them the small, long-term group dynamics.But that's begun to change in the last decade. Story games have broken a lot of ground in finding ways to achieve that "story first" feel without using preplotted arcs. Unfortunately, most of those story games are also completely impenetrable to newbies without veteran players to guide them and often require the same long-term group commitments in different ways.I think the interesting question is whether or not you can find ways of structuring campaigns which are:(a) Open tables (allowing flexible scheduling and making it easier to invite new players so that the game spreads virally);(b) Comprehensible and manageable for new GMs (in the same way that dungeon crawls are something new GMs can very easily comprehend and run without any prior experience);(c) Not disruptive of continuity (in the sense that you don't have to pretend to ignore that characters are teleporting in and out for no rational reason)(d) Capable of still supporting strong "story first" inclinationsThat, to my eye, is a magic bullet. And I'm not pretending I actually have that solution.</blockquote>

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