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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 5692212">A very different situation. Cable was less widespread and it wasn't like you had the kinds of cable programming and variety you get today.   Conan wasn't a B movie. It was a big budget film for its time. You are also leaving out movies like Excaliber or Clash of the Titans. These weren't movies only geeks were watching at the time. And for kids you had countless films like The Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, Star Wars.   Clash of the Titans had Laurence Olivier, conan had Max Von Sidow (James Earl Jones, but don't know how big he was then), Time Bandits had the Sean Connery, Dune had Sting, Star Wars had Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing, Secret of NIMH had Dom Delouise and Derek Jacobi. Hawk Slayer had Jack Pallance, Last Unicorn had Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.   I think you are underestimating how mainstream many of these films were. They might look pretty bad in hindsight, but I remember many of them having star power and high visibility.     Honestly this is based on what I've seen locally in the gaming community and on what I've been advised as I've started my own gaming company. I am just not seeing that the hobby is growing, more that it is becoming more insulated. We have a strong base of gamers. But paizo grew by eating into wizards customer base. I don't think they attracted many new players. And 4E, by isn't where wizards wants it to be. You could be right, and I certainly hope you are (it is in my financial interest for you to be correct). But I just believe at the moment that there is less new blood coming into the hobby than in years past. Hopefully I am incorrect.   I don't know if I would use Japan though as an accurate measure of what is going on in the states and in Europe. And you are talking about one (highly successful) fictional line based on a D&D setting.   I don't know. I think it has booms and busts. There was a period in the 80s when I think it was a new thing, and really more of a craze. In the 90s, I think the geek stigma faded a bit, so by the time 3E came out, it had some broader reach. But I believe the geek stigma may be coming back to a degree (this is really hard to demonstrate and I really hope I am wrong, but I just get more of a "oh you play D&D, isn't that for geeks" kind of a vibe these days). I also think the vocabulary we use as gamers and the mechanics themselves have started to present a barrier to new players. Not to mention the splat book model (where you have a bunch of hardcovers that probably look similar and could potentially confuse new gamers).  Again, I could be wrong on this one. I think it changes by gamers making the activity more visible again and by society being less judgmental of "geeks" or "nerds". It could be that this is the case with young people though and I am just looking at the world from the vantage point of my age.</blockquote>

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