D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[doctorbadwolf]

According to the SCA's own census report from 2010, roughly 65% of the respondents first learned about the SCA through a variation of friend, family member, or significant other. Only 4% of the respondents said they first heard of the SCA through a chance encounter with an event or a demo.

Okay?

D&D is probably a bit different in that many people have heard of it just through cultural osmosis, but I would suspect that the vast majority of players are brought into the fold by friends, family members, or significant others rather than coming across an event by happenstance..

What happenstance? I'm talking about people who are already at game stores playing DnD, going on to try other games because people they know are playing them or talking about them at the gaming store.

In the case of the SCA, I think it's more that people are having fun, and want their friends to join in. I think that's the case with most RPGs as well though I don't have any data to back that up.

IME practice recruitment is slow and basically a trickle, but it works. I've also known a lot of people who see people fighting with sticks in armor at a park, talk about it with their friends, find the one friend who is involved or whose parents are involved or whatever, and go to a practice after talking to them, but I've also watched a couple dozen people become involved after watching us practice at a park, or watched people fight at the local comic or anime convention at the fair grounds, where the local shire likes to set up right between the two main buildings, and gather quite a crowd.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think what would help indie/smaller games more than anything, would be a website that helps gamers looking for other gamers interested in certain games find each other.

Granted, we have a lot of those. I think ENWorld has a forum for gamers looking for groups, as does Roll20, etc. However, the problem is that indie games tend to have relatively small audiences to begin with. By spreading them out over dozens of different LFGs, you're either forcing them to post on dozens of sites (which, let's face it, nobody wants to do), or you're spreading them too thin among those sites, such that they'll be lucky to ever find each other.

What I'm thinking would be like the Facebook of LFG (in terms of popularity - practically no one uses MySpace anymore, and G+ died out). Of course, that's easier said than done. You'd need a robust site, and you'd probably need a significant amount of advertising to get it the traction it needs. Which is, again, easier said than done, especially since this site is unlikely to draw FB-like advertising revenue.

I think it's what the indie community could really use right now though. It's easier than ever to find a game, but because they're diffused among various sites, for an indie gamer it still isn't easy.

And to be clear, no, I'm not willing to implement it. But it's something I've been thinking about the past few days, largely as a result of this thread. I believe that the gamers are out there, at least in the majority of cases. It's just unreasonably challenging for them to find each other. That's something that the right technology with the proper traction could definitely help with.

IMO the way to get that to work would be to partner with a service like itch.io to both give indies a platform to sell their game, and give communities tools to find eachother and start groups.

Imagine in DMSguild had a good UI rather than a kinda bad one, and integrated tools to find groups both local and online. Now imagine that but focused on everything but dnd.

Maybe integrate the videochat software in the same service.

 

[pemerton]

I think one of the biggest impediments to trying new games (which is getting better at least with younger gamers) is the centrality of the set gaming group where you have a specific set of people you play all the RPGs you play with, often with a set GM or maybe like 2 or 3 who rotate. Being willing to break with that set group was a huge factor in me finally finding the sorts of play experiences I was looking for. Being willing to play Vampire with these people over here, Apocalypse World with some different people, and D&D with yet a different group of folks.

I mean it's fairly natural for us to do this with video games or board games. We know Tony is a bad fit for Risk, that Sam loves Settlers of Cataan, and that there's certain people that make for great chess partners.

Not knocking the set gaming group by the way. It works for a lot of people.

I've played with much the same group for a long time now (a dozen or so people have been part of the group, in various combinations, over the past two to three decades). Over the past six or so years I've taken the approach of introducing new games. Because many RPGs are much more straightforward than D&D in both PC gen and the mechanics and processes of play, this has been pretty successful.