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!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4873731" data-attributes="member: 2067">The problem with that side of the coin is that what that game wants to do really, really well, is still only wanted at maybe 5% of the game tables out there. Probably, more than 50% of those gametables houserule the thing to hades and back again. A game that does one thing really well basically fragments your potential market into competing lines, because people won't learn more than one or two game systems, or diminishes your market into a tiny tiny piece of the whole (which, itself, is pretty tiny). It's also true that the segments are getting smaller as the genre gets bigger: people love Anime-style fantasy, but won't play anything that smells like the nostalgia of 40-50 year olds reminiscing about LOTR. A different crowd follows the "fairy tale" feel of Gaiman, or the "reality through the distorted lens" of Meiville. A lot of people will read or watch both (I like everything on that list!), but what they won't do is read 600 pages of rules for playing RPG's in each of those styles, especially as getting a game together in the first place is such a tremendous challenge. The difficulty with this isn't necessarily an insurmountable challenge, but to confront it directly means to drastically change what the hobby looks like over the next decade or so. The real challenge is in finding a new system that works before the old system gives way from underneath you. D&D has done well primarily because it was the first, the most popular, and it has been able to balance other people's archetypes with its own fairly easily (the "d20 + mods vs. DC" core mechanic is, as True 20 showed, pretty flexible). That success has carried it for 30 years and could probably carry it a good deal farther, but like spamming the same attack over and over again, it looses it's effectiveness. We've seen essentially the same model four times in a row now. It's worked, but it can't stay this way forever, and I bet D&D is already feeling the groaning of its aged system, even as 4e tries to take the game in new directions.I don't want to sound like one of those "THE SKY IS FALLING" Death of TableTop chicken little types, but the grain of truth in their wild speculation is that D&D can't keep doing the same thing and expect the same results as the world changes around it. The tabletop needs to adapt, and that is going to mean a lot of big changes. What the future looks like is hard to say, but it certainly isn't the same thing that the last 30 years have been. ...and on the topic of my pokemans:I really wish I had the resources to make a collage of images from "western animation," because I wouldn't say that Sin City, Wallace & Grommit, Indie Canadian cartoons, most of what's on Adult Swim, and Spongebob Squarepants are the same thing at all, but you could probably find visual similarities. The truth is that all of them are closer to certain types of other nations' animation than they are to each other. Maybe the best example I can find is The Animatrix, that compilation of animated shorts based on the world of The Matrix. A lot of very diverse styles come together in that. That's not to remove culture from the equation, of course. There are real differences in art style between many Japanese animators and many American animators and even many Korean animators or Canadian animators (you can probably tell which animation bits were outsourced on many shows without a whole lot of guidance). Lots of difference of purpose and the like as well. "I don't like most anime" is kind of like saying "I don't like most comic books." It's quite possible you legitimately don't like some of the more common elements (say, heavily stylized "humans"), but the thing is diverse enough to make the categorical dismissal more than a little naive. And, anyway, to tie it back into the point above, everyone wants different stuff in their games. If D&D chooses one style, it'll alienate everyone else. If D&D tries to be diverse, it will tend to be generic and bland and un-inspiring. It's loose-loose. The only hope is to re-define the battlefield.</blockquote>

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