Is the RPG Industry on Life Support? (Merged w/"Nothing Dies")

[Doug McCrae]

I am diaglo.

Prove it!

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Character Generating Programs Don't Save Enough Time

I noticed some discussion about character generating programs.

IMO they won't satisfy a lot of people until Artifical Intelligence is invented. Seriously. When it comes to creating DnD characters, the part that takes me the longest is magic items. There's no way the computer can know what magic items I want to use, so it can't do the work for me. I have to, and since that step takes a huge amount of time, it hardly saves me any time.

When it comes to creating D20 Modern characters, choosing skills takes the longest time. Again, the computer isn't intelligent or psychic; it can't make these decisions for me. A D20 Modern character generating program doesn't save me enough time to be worth it, either.

 

[Sholari]

The overall impression I expect people got from the panel was that the hobby game industry was going the way of wargaming or model railroading: something that was well past its peak in popularity, that continued to appeal to many devoted fans, but wasn't gaining new ones fast enough to replace those that drifted away, so that the core audience was graying and dwindling.

Thanks for the download, Tav. It's good to hear your perspective firsthand. Moreover, whether people agree or not with different points or perspectives, I think it is a healthy dialogue to have.

 

[mearls]

Some interesting observations:

All of that is conventional "industry" wisdom.

If I've learned one thing, it's that the RPG business's conventional wisdom is almost all utterly, completely wrong.

 

[Crothian]

All of that is conventional "industry" wisdom.

If I've learned one thing, it's that the RPG business's conventional wisdom is almost all utterly, completely wrong.

Any idea what is right then?

 

[Monte At Home]

Kenneth Hite has shown his work in estimating the size of the RPG business in his yearly State of the Industry columns, but I didn't hear any hard facts to support the contention that younger fans aren't getting into gaming like they used to (and this wasn't as obviously true at SoCal as it was at Indy; see below).

Over the years, WotC business people like Ryan Dancey and Keith Strohm have been fairly forthcoming right here on ENWorld with various results of the in-depth market research done circa 1998. It showed (if I remember correctly) that the number of people playing a p&p rpg of some kind at least once a month was about 1.5 million. And they show a fairly steady and constant growth. Even if you think that number is a little inflated, like I personally suspect, it shows that the number is higher than most people think and that an awful lot of gamers out there do not buy rpg products of any kind--not even a PH.

The three great waves of new players were linked to D&D, West End Games' d6 Star Wars RPG, and Vampire. But each of these new waves was smaller than the first, and the gloomy forecast was that there would never again be a year like 1981, when every college dorm and nuclear submarine had a D&D campaign to call its own.

I'm not sure this three-wave hypothesis has any legs to stand on, at least as presented. Is the implication here that more people were brought in by WEG Star Wars during its run than were brought in by D&D at the same time, or that the D&D wave was and still is the biggest (and continues)? If the former, I'd need that to be proven.

The conclusion is also disputed by the WotC market research.

The best-selling RPG of all time is believed to be Pokemon Jr., a RPG designed for 6-to-8 year olds which sold relatively poorly in normal channels but went like hotcakes when it was discounted at WalMart.

While I believe this to still be true, and absolutely was once true, with all due respect to Stan! and the others who worked on Pokemon Jr (a cool product), I look at this like a "trick" answer to a trivia question rather than real industry data. How many of these products actually ended up in the hands of a consumer who actually played the game?

Some of the blame (self-accusation?) was placed on designers: that we're interested only in making the kind of games we ourselves like, so that we're becoming increasingly insular and have less to offer younger players.

This is, and probably always will be, an ongoing argument among game designers. On the one hand, you have those who say that writing the products that you would like to have is good because writing about something that is personally interesting and appealing almost certainly leads to a good product. Writing about something you're not interested in, or attempting to guess what an audience you are not a part of wants, leads to disaster. The other side of the argument says that game designers are old, jaded fuddy-duddies whose tastes so completely diverge from the mainstream audience (or who don't even play the game anymore) that the real goal of the job should be to find out what gamers want and give it to them. Both arguments have their points and their holes, but it's an interesting topic.

 

[Eremite]

I see. Software is also written and developed for nothing, eh? The problems E-Tools and similar software has should give you a clue to how difficult writing it is. Coding a program to cope with all the variations that 3E throws up in its rules is exceptionally difficult - more so if you want to make it work past the core books. (If E-Tools had only dealt with the core books, it would be have been comparatively simple, but it needed to be open-ended... problems aplenty).

The problem with this argument, though, is that Evermore 88 did a fantastic job with the 2E Core Rules despite AD&D not being so much a coherent system as a hodge-podge of various unrelated systems and mechanics... and yet Core Rules worked.

If a programmer eight or so years ago can work out a functioning, customisable character generator for 2E then a programmer today should have far fewer problems with producing a useful character generator for 3E/3.5E.

Perhaps Hasbro should have been smarter and, when they sold the rights to IP for computer games, insisted on a functioning character generator as part of the price that was paid.

No offense, Barsoomcore, but since when are stewardesses part of the "creative, educated" elite set? Stewardesses may be hot, but if they had an ounce of education they wouldn't be serving cheap wine to drunk businessmen on airplanes. That said, I'll rather have a stewardess in my game instead of a professor any day!

That really was an offensive post, Krypter. I travel a lot and am generally very impressed with all of the cabin crew I have met either on aircraft or those I have gotten to know personally and the majority are not only well-educated but multilingual.

 

[jeffh]

I am diaglo.

Nonsense.

You post to rgfd, and every regular there is known to actually be Ron. Therefore you are Ron (as am I, of course).

Ron runs 3E. This is only possible if one's hat of d02 is finite; but we all know that Diaglo's hat of d02 knows no limit. Therefore Diaglo is not Ron.

But if you are Ron and Diaglo is not, it follows that you are not Diaglo, QED.

 

[jeffh]

The proper translation is "The exception puts the rule to the test of proof."

I'm sure this is bad form, but...

http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxtheexc.html

(And even if you accept what that site calls the "common misconception", this particular phrasing of it is new to me.)

 

[Akrasia]

... That said, I'll rather have a stewardess in my game instead of a professor any day!

Um, as a professor, should I be insulted by this? :\

There are plenty of well-educated and smart stewardesses out there, as well as non-fuddy-duddy profs.