Do we want one dominant game, and why?

[Hussar]

Hussar, it is arguable that there are as many people playing 1e today as there are playing 4e or 3e. It is also arguable that there are not.

Frankly, whether or not 0e and 1e managed to keep the audience is entirely conjecture.


RC

Seriously? This is what you're going to try to argue? That the 1e gaming population is equal to either the 3e or 4e gaming populations? Sorry, this I don't believe at all.

And, are people now arguing that there wasn't a boom and a bust in the early 80's? I thought this would have been one of the few things we could all agree on. If 1e had kept selling at the same level, without any drop, would we have seen Unearthed Arcana when we did?

I had thought that that the boom/bust was pretty well established.

 

[flamingbunnys]

ONE, bc if there was one dominate game then the books would be widely available and the price would hopefully drop. you could also join anyone's runing game and all ready know all of the rules exept house rules of course. the only down side is if the company that owns the rights to the game get greedy and start making addons in small portions and charging rediculus prices bc they know people will buy it.

 

[Nifft]

ONE, bc if there was one dominate game then the books would be widely available and the price would hopefully drop.

That always happens when someone has a monopoly.

the only down side is if the company that owns the rights to the game get greedy and start making addons in small portions and charging rediculus prices bc they know people will buy it.

Corporations are never greedy.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Ariosto]

I think it's very common for experienced gamers to think that "rules light" is a good idea for an introductory RPG.

I also think it's very, very wrong.

I think it's very common for experienced gamers to mean by "rules light" something quite a bit shy of, say, Risus or The Pool!

I think it's very common that they mean basically "not as heavy as these 1000 or so pages".

I think it's very common that they mean something on the order of, e.g., Villains & Vigilantes (48 pp.), or Traveller Books 1-3 (72 pp.), or Moldvay/Cook/Marsh D&D (128 pp.), or (Chaosium's 2nd ed.) RuneQuest (128 pp.) plus Cults of Prax (112 pp.), or Call of Cthulhu (5th ed., 240 pp.).

In other words, they very commonly mean something like what was their introductory RPG, back in days when, perhaps, introducing new players was rather a bigger part of the hobby and industry.

 

[Ariosto]

It's the same way with RPGs. Who cares if you found your perfect RPG, if you can't find anyone to play it with you? Or worse...to find the perfect system, only to later find out the product line is no longer supported.

These problems are strange to me.

If it's perfect, then how come nobody else will play it? Is it really more satisfying not yet to have found a perfect game, yet to feel that there must be something better than having to play a shoddy game or none at all?

I can see the possibility of someone being an RPG game junkie.

If someone really has a compulsive need to play, then the least-bad case is not to have an addiction satisfied only by "the dominant game". The ideal (if one may so call it) is to be an indiscriminate consumer.

For many people, that priority is almost upside down. Sure, a professional Poker player might be in it for the game rather than the company. I understand that Magic The Gathering has tournaments with hefty prizes, too. So, yeah, one might consider that such venues are (I am guessing) more common than high-stakes Contract Bridge.

More often, though -- at least in the society familiar to me -- one chooses a game because it suits the social gathering. The people are the priority, socializing the end to which the game is a means. If people are not interested in Scrabble, then maybe it's Mexican Train Dominoes.

It's the intersection of common interests and convivial personalities that is most interesting. Faking an interest in this or that might work as a dodge to spend time with an attractive person. In the long run, though, popularity in some arbitrarily big population is probably not as relevant as whether one personally and truly happens to find it fun.

If "finding out that the product line is no longer supported" is somehow some big deal to you, then for goodness' sake stay away from WotC-D&D! The next "nth edition" is guaranteed to come along sooner or later and make the present one officially obsolete.

If a paper-and-pencil RPG were as buggy as some operating systems, then I guess "support" would matter. That calls for considerably more sheer complexity and clunkiness than I would be interested in anyway.

I sure as heck can't see how that's worse than finding nobody with whom to play it! I quite enjoy playing AD&D, and can't see that it really makes any difference at all to the experience that the product line is "unsupported". If for some reason the get-together were canceled, then what I would miss could not be made up by going to a game of 4e with strangers.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I think it's very common for experienced gamers to mean by "rules light" something quite a bit shy of, say, Risus or The Pool!

I think it's very common that they mean basically "not as heavy as these 1000 or so pages".

I think it's very common that they mean something on the order of, e.g., Villains & Vigilantes (48 pp.), or Traveller Books 1-3 (72 pp.), or Moldvay/Cook/Marsh D&D (128 pp.), or (Chaosium's 2nd ed.) RuneQuest (128 pp.) plus Cults of Prax (112 pp.), or Call of Cthulhu (5th ed., 240 pp.).

That's certainly possible. But when I'm replying to someone who says that all editions of D&D have "the makings of a niche game [...] something much more rules light would probably be better", then I'm pretty confident that they're not talking about Moldvay/Cook/Marsh D&D or anything like it.

Since that's, ya know, an edition of D&D.

Sorry, but I have a pet peeve for people who can't be bothered to read a thread before responding to it. Particularly when they combine that with redefining common terminology in order to claim that other people were really saying something that they very clearly and self-evidently did not mean.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

These problems are strange to me.

If it's perfect, then how come nobody else will play it? Is it really more satisfying not yet to have found a perfect game, yet to feel that there must be something better than having to play a shoddy game or none at all?

For me, HERO is about as close to perfect as it gets. And you KNOW not everyone likes HERO.

What is perfect for me may be anathema to you. Hence, the myriad of games.

 

[Ariosto]

double-post

 

[Ariosto]

Sorry, but I have a pet peeve ...

Well, maybe you could keep it on a leash, eh? I certainly don't want it!

That's me "redefining terms" -- not my sharing of what "I think experienced gamers very often mean". It is you who must be doing some heavy-duty redefining to come up with your creation.

You are apparently "reading between the lines" words that are not even there, which may say something about the one who actually comes up with them.

It is you making (presumably in good, if careless, faith) a false claim when you claim that I "claim that other people were really saying something that they very clearly and self-evidently did not mean."

I mean, just who are these people? I did not identify any of the individuals from whom I drew my generalization!

If you read the thread, then presumably you read the responses that I wrote while reading through it page by page.

You have produced a lot of something, maybe irony.

 

[Starfox]

What do we mean by "one dominant game"?

What I originally meant was commercially dominant. Maybe twice as large a market share as its closest competitor. A guesstimate is 30-60% of the market. share. And I was talking about game systems, not companies.

So far in RPG history as I understand it, this has been the position of Dungeons & Dragons.

I did not mean dominant as in having 90% of the market and pushing others out of it - that would be also be dominant, but its beyond the degree of dominant I was thinking of. Also, has this situation ever been around except right after OD&D launch? Did OGL (seen as one monolithic "system", not a family of different systems) achieve such a position?