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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2351114" data-attributes="member: 32740">It's not that there needs to be more advertising as such - what is needed is hieghtened awareness (and more ACCURATE awareness) of what roleplaying gaming is, was, and could be.  You can plaster all of NYC with ads for "Eberron Widgets - the last RPG supplement you'll ever want or need!" but it'd be like seeing those ads for new medicines that don't tell you what they're supposed to cure (though the side-effects always include dry mouth...).  Nobody will know or care except the few gamers who would very likely know or find out about it anyway in the same ways they do now - magazines, websites, and game stores.  MORE advertising means nothing. Advertising is about making people aware of and interested in your products/services.  People know that D&D exists.  What they don't know is what roleplaying games like D&D actually are or why they might be fun or interesting to THEM, and that's what you need to communicate. I think roleplaying games are quote close to experiencing something of a revolution because of what we can do with computer games - but we're not quite there yet.  I think WotC was actually looking to MAKE that next big step forward with what they were trying to get with the first replacement for the Character Generator after 3E was released.  It was going to have mapping capabilities, adventure design capabilities, 3d modeling of monsters, etc. etc.  It failed because it was just WAY too much too soon (at least to also be profitable and functional). Right now you could take a FPS engines like from Doom3, or Half-life2 (or even earlier versions) and with enough level designs actually RUN a campaign within it - and I think that's where we'll actually end up heading.  A very user-friendly level-design/editor to work within a FPS engine that would be used to at least run the encounters in the game three dimensionally, if not also provide physical ambience for purely roleplaying situations.  Currently, level design (or adventure design for a game like Neverwinter Nights) is a VERY limited resource operation, so to speak.  There just aren't enough people who want to take the time and develop the skills to actually create enough 3d space for truly running a weekly D&D campaign as we would around a kitchen table.  But the games are getting better graphically all the time and eventually the level-editing/creation software will become easy enough to use that an AVERAGE DM could create as much of a 3D RPG environment as he might cannibalize or buy from other sources online. Then there's what can be done with individualizing characters in computer games.  Look at the costume and body-shape changes that can be done in a game like City of Heroes and realize how easy it would be to design not only individual player characters but all the individual NPC's you need as well as monsters.  Complete with combat and roleplaying (read facial expressions) animations you could want. You know what this is called - it's virtual reality.  While we're not in danger of having holodecks anytime soon I think we ARE getting closer all the time to being able to three-dimensionally create our own reasonably complete RPG game worlds with about as much effort as we currently expend to prepare games with paper and pencil.  Again, we're not QUITE there - but it's heading this way... That step is how I personally would "reinvent" roleplaying.  Not by turning D&D into a computer game.  We can and have done that already and you can judge for yourself whether the results are anywhere close to the tabletop gaming experience.  But what we can do is to explore OTHER means of exercising our imaginations - give DM's even more tools for presenting the game world to the players other than voice description.  I mean, wouldn't it be fun to actually move a virtual character into a room or down a street and see for yourself exactly what your character sees?</blockquote>

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