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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dd.stevenson" data-source="post: 7650921" data-attributes="member: 6683099">You've been completely gracious in handling my criticisms--thanks for that.To answer your question about what I think the future should/will look like, I have to assert something that some people probably disagree with. Specifically, I believe that the spoken/printed word are the foundation of our hobby, and that map-orientated tabletop tools (and other visual tools as well) will always be somewhat peripheral to this market as a whole. Thus, I believe that the future of the ttrpg industry will resemble the future of the publishing industry (rather than, say, the CRPG industry). I know you've explored this in other articles, but the publishing industry is in flux right now--its old business model is dead, and nothing new has risen yet to functionally replace it. E-publishing has hope, but it's just not there yet and it's not perfectly obvious that it will ever be more than a mere shadow of the publishing industry of the 20th century. I'm both a kindle app user (on my ipad) and an avid technophile, and even I still yearn for the physical book when I'm flipping through my virtual pages. It's possible that young people will be exposed to only virtual pages and thus not be conditioned to read physical books, but I don't think that's the most likely outcome, as long as the dead tree publishing industry can soldier on with the blockbuster model.At a guess, I would say that the future of publishing lies within some yet-to-be-produced electronic device, that closely resembles a dead tree book, but which can be configured to display different content on its pages with the press of a button. Also, and perhaps alternatively, I would speculate that we're going to see a serious print-on-demand boom, perhaps reaching the point where every middle class family has a book printer next to their computers in their homes.But all this has been explored by people better informed than I, and we're still no closer to the solution. So who really knows?Now all that being said, I don't think that the TTRPG brands will ever become shy about merchandising their lines into the CRPG space. Right now, I suspect that we're looking at the beginning of a low-end CRPG boom consisting of products like Torment: Numenera. It's more than possible that these products will evolve into a set of end-user tools that could be used by would-be dungeon masters easily create great content for online sessions. However, while such a suite of products might come to overshadow the TTRPG industry, I don't believe it could ever legitimately replace it.</blockquote>

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