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="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 6579759">The mantra here always seems to be that RPGs will be just as popular or more than these mediums if D&D simply makes a "better" system. I am not convinced this is the problem. I think the issue may be that table top roleplaying, just by its nature, is going to have limited appeal. I has had a few big moments where it reached a slightly broader audience or entered into the popular mind more, but if the system were the problem, and if 4E was such an improvement, why didn't it take off during that edition? (And why haven't any of the countless other RPGs out there taken off, since people could just as easily introduce non-D&D players to them as they have any of these successful boardgames. People keep advancing this idea that people who play D&D want a broken and bad system. No one here is saying it is perfect, but I think the detractors of the game and its "sacred cows" might simply not appreciate why these have worked and been popular over the years. Some of it you can certainly attribute to things being grandfathered into the hobby, but a lot of it really seems to have stuck for a reason. In terms of bringing people into the hobby who are not already part of it, the biggest hurdle I encounter is not the quality of the systems. For what RPGs do, that honestly isn't the biggest hurdle I meet (unless the game is so broken it makes play impossible or difficult). The biggest hurdle, across the board when I bring new people in, is the lack of simplicity. RPGs tend to be a bit hard for people to learn (even easy ones like Savage Worlds have tons of little things that non-RPG players find a bit hard to grok). Because RPGs are about playing a character and immersing in an imaginary world, I don't think it is like board games or card games where you need mechanics that are themselves entertaining away from the imaginary events they generate. What matters in RPGs is the imaginary events themselves. So I just don't think this notion of a perfectly designed system is what will bring new blood to the hobby, what we need are easier entry points. But even then, I think table top RPGs are still only going to appeal to a limited audience. Increasing the popularity of the table top hobby requires more of a shift in the broader culture I think (where people are open to the idea of it and it has a certain coolness factor) rather than a shift in the culture of game design.</blockquote>

Verification