Hussar
Legend
I do think you're right there. The groundwork that WOTC and Paizo are both laying with things like organized play and the Encounters I think will really pay off in about four or five years. It's just going to take some time.
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
I don't want 5E, I want a definitive D&D (the Monopoly model)
- Thread starter GregoryOatmeal
- Start date
I do think you're right there. The groundwork that WOTC and Paizo are both laying with things like organized play and the Encounters I think will really pay off in about four or five years. It's just going to take some time.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
D&D was big in the early 80s in a way that it's not now. Not speaking about number of gamers or gaming groups or books sold, none of which I know about, but the D&D cartoon, D&D Halloween costumes, D&D woodburning kits?!? It's hard to look at that and not think that we receded from the mainstream since then.
Another thing is that White Wolf wasn't just another company; they were targetting a whole different audience than D&D. Now RPGs are back to targetting mainly fantasy geeks with a few token RPGs for the science fiction gamers.
Hussar
Legend
On the flipside, people now make a living as gaming commedians: Geek. Fanboy. Comedy Rock Star.. Mikey Mason's [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-yHSaP0Dyg]She Don't Like Firefly - YouTube[/ame] She don't like Firefly is freaking hilarious.
Sure, we had a D&D branded cartoon, and a Battletech one as well. Then again, now we have MMO's and computer games and NYT Bestselling authors publishing D&D fiction regularly.
Again, I know there is this gloom and doom meme that seems to permeate gaming - that we peaked in 1982 and it's been all downhill since then. But, I'm just not seeing it. I mean, how long can the hobby be dying before it's actually dead? The hobby has apparently been fading for the past twenty, almost thirty years. That's one seriously slow decline.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
I'd actually say that those are part of the downfall of tabletop RPGs; that MMOs and computer games provide substitutes for RPGs for a lot of people who might otherwise be playing them.
Just because there were better days in the past, doesn't mean there's a continual pattern of decline. Things have never been as hot for tulip growers since 1636, but that doesn't mean that nobody buys tulips anymore.
Contract Bridge has being going downhill since before D&D was born. It's still out there, but it's unlikely it will ever be as big as it was in the 1960s. In the US, chess was huge at the time of Bobby Fischer, and crashed right after that. The United States Chess Federation hit 60k members in 1974, and dropped and didn't return in absolute numbers until 1994. Depending on what numbers I toss around, they're about the 1974 levels as percentage of population right now, but they've been on a decline since 2000.
I think RPGs are fairly stable right now, but I tend to think we're far from the high point of gaming and unlikely to get back to where we were.
Hussar
Legend
OTOH, how high was the "high point"? It's pretty common knowledge that TSR massively fudged their numbers to the point where anything they said had to be taken with a BIG grain of salt.
Sure, there was the brief boom in the early 80's. But, again, that's based on sales. And the sales numbers are what TSR said they were. Sure, D&D appeared in ET. OTOH, when WOTC did some market research a while ago, they had something like a 90% brand recognition (I can't find the link). That's HUGE. That means that 9 out of 10 people know what D&D is.
They might not know exactly what it is, but, they at least recognize the name. You can't get much more mainstream than that.
See, what I think, and this is just my gut talking, happened is that in the early 80's, TSR managed to flog all these copies of the game to people who played it once, then put it on a shelf and never looked at it again. That's what a fad is.
So, when we compare numbers, we should be careful what's being compared. Someone who buys 4e or Pathfinder is likely being inducted into the hobby by someone they know - that's generally how it works. It's unlikely they buy the books, try it once and then never play again.
Once you clear away those guys from the numbers, I think you'll see a pretty steady increase in gaming populations over time. Heck, even during the dark days of late 2e, when TSR was going belly up, there's no indication that gamer populations were actually decreasing.
The problem is, we're all just fondling the elephant here. I have this bit of data and a gut feeling. You have that bit of data and your gut. Neither of us really knows and I have a sneaking suspicion that very few people actually DO have anything resembling an informed opinion.
Sure, there was the brief boom in the early 80's. But, again, that's based on sales. And the sales numbers are what TSR said they were. Sure, D&D appeared in ET. OTOH, when WOTC did some market research a while ago, they had something like a 90% brand recognition (I can't find the link). That's HUGE. That means that 9 out of 10 people know what D&D is.
They might not know exactly what it is, but, they at least recognize the name. You can't get much more mainstream than that.
See, what I think, and this is just my gut talking, happened is that in the early 80's, TSR managed to flog all these copies of the game to people who played it once, then put it on a shelf and never looked at it again. That's what a fad is.
So, when we compare numbers, we should be careful what's being compared. Someone who buys 4e or Pathfinder is likely being inducted into the hobby by someone they know - that's generally how it works. It's unlikely they buy the books, try it once and then never play again.
Once you clear away those guys from the numbers, I think you'll see a pretty steady increase in gaming populations over time. Heck, even during the dark days of late 2e, when TSR was going belly up, there's no indication that gamer populations were actually decreasing.
The problem is, we're all just fondling the elephant here. I have this bit of data and a gut feeling. You have that bit of data and your gut. Neither of us really knows and I have a sneaking suspicion that very few people actually DO have anything resembling an informed opinion.
I agree with you that we are living in a golden age of geekdom. And the hobby certainly has not been in steady decline since 1982; the release of 3E brought a surge of renewed interest. I do think the hobby is in decline at the moment, but that does not preclude another surge in the future... which is one of the reasons I do want 5E.
There might be some nostalgia going for when D&D was edgy and rebellious. The Satanism scare gave the game a cultural presence that it has not had since. However, I think the main reason for the current atmosphere of doom is the 4E/Pathfinder split. By this point in 4E's life cycle, based on past experience, one would expect the edition wars to be largely over, with 4E in command of the field and the grognards driven back to their Gygaxian strongholds. The lack of a clear victor is unsettling, because a lot of people have an intuitive feeling that the hobby is not big enough to support two eight-hundred-pound gorillas* and this can't lead to good things.
[SIZE=-2]*The hobby can, however, support a lot of mixed metaphors.[/SIZE]
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TwinBahamut
First Post
I don't want to see a definitive edition of D&D. If such a thing had to exist, I'd at least hope it would not emerge for a long time. D&D is still a very, very young game. It has a long way to go before it is ready for someone to say "this version of D&D is good enough to last". As far as I'm concerned, 3E was a big improvement over older editions, but wasn't good enough. 4e was a big improvement over 3E, but still isn't good enough. D&D can be better, and to be better it needs to grow, change, and evolve. Maybe after a hundred years of improvements and refinements an "eternal edition" can be created, but even then I bet it will still get new editions and changes every so often, and I'll continue to look forward to them.
I mean, people here have talked about Monopoly like it is unchanging, but that simply isn't true. Sure, it was mostly unchanging from the mid-nineteen-thirties to 2008, but that isn't its entire history. The 1938 edition is pretty different from the original 1904 game that inspired it, after all. And of course, the big thing is that Monopoly has gone through a major rule change more recently than 4E was released. The "Speed Die" and other rule changes in 2008 represent a major change to the game. Monopoly is a changing game that gets new editions just as much as anything else. All games change.
If you want to look at how false the idea of an "eternal game" is, look at the oldest board game still being played: Go. It was played as early as the 4th century BC, but the board underwent important changes as late as a millennium later. The game received major changes that massively changes its strategy as the 20th century, with refinements of those changes continuing still even now. As eternal as Go has been, it still has room to improve, and will continue to improve. And that's a good thing.
I mean, people here have talked about Monopoly like it is unchanging, but that simply isn't true. Sure, it was mostly unchanging from the mid-nineteen-thirties to 2008, but that isn't its entire history. The 1938 edition is pretty different from the original 1904 game that inspired it, after all. And of course, the big thing is that Monopoly has gone through a major rule change more recently than 4E was released. The "Speed Die" and other rule changes in 2008 represent a major change to the game. Monopoly is a changing game that gets new editions just as much as anything else. All games change.
If you want to look at how false the idea of an "eternal game" is, look at the oldest board game still being played: Go. It was played as early as the 4th century BC, but the board underwent important changes as late as a millennium later. The game received major changes that massively changes its strategy as the 20th century, with refinements of those changes continuing still even now. As eternal as Go has been, it still has room to improve, and will continue to improve. And that's a good thing.
Tallifer
Hero
Forsooth. How can anyone say any edition of D&D is not D&D? Only a fanatic for this edition or that would care about the minor differences.
But this is not my call for a unified edition. Rather I know that we are indeed all fanatics of roleplaying in general and like variety. Let me play this, and you can play that. But let no man say that neither of us is playing D&D.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I submit that most of that will be totally unnoticed by anyone on the players' side of the screen. Stuff that might bother some DMs -- the idea of worrying about figuring out the skill points for an NPC who will be dead in three rounds seems pointless to me -- really doesn't matter in play, 99 percent of the time.
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
I no longer have any 4E books and can't speak with any confidence about it, so I did the rare thing on the Internet and didn't opine about something I didn't know anything about.
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