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

[MerricB]

Merric, I respect you greatly, but to say that E-Tools is part of a tri-fecta of electronic tools that well serve D&D players is NOT accurate.

Heh. By no means do I imply that. Wizards have just tried to cover the bases.

The failure of E-tools to do that is an interesting study in the difference between a RPG and a computer game.

Computer Games thrive on rules. RPGs thrive on exceptions. Prestige Classes are exception after exception...

Cheers!

 

[The Shaman]

Someone over at MaxMini's suggested spreading the word this Holiday season by buying a copy of the new Basic Game and tossing toyour local toy drive before Christmas. I'll be doing that.

Excellent! Count me in on that as well!

 

[Toben the Many]

I agree that people who play video games are probably more attracted to D&D than those who don't. BUT, that's not the point. The point is that kids playing video games are not playing the D&D RPG. In effect, video games are replacing in-person D&D and, IMO, will continue to do so.

That's really not true. At all. No market research backs this up. WotC did a serious market survey a few years ago and discovered one startling thing - people who played lots of video games didn't play them in exclusion to D&D. In fact, they played video games and D&D inclusively, accomodating for both.

Again, if all of us think back to our own lives, I'm sure you will remember long hours in front of the computer playing games. But that didn't stop us from playing D&D.

Now, there are some people I know that migrated from tabletop to computer gaming - but that wasn't because computer games won. It was usually real-life stuff (people having fallouts, poor DMs, etc).

By the way - book are passe? Whatever! As an educator, I can tell you gloom-and-doom people that books are on the rise. When I was a kid, I didn't line up with my buddies outside a bookstore until midnight to wait for a book to come out.

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders...these are all thriving buisnesses. And they aren't thriving because no one is reading. What is happening is worse actually - there is a wider and wider division between those who read and those who don't.

One last thing on marketing. No, I don't think they should market RPGs to younger audiences. Many people here started when we were in our teens. Myself included. However, I got into D&D because it was targeted towards an older audience. Let's face it. The AD&D Player's Guide, with the Big Red Demon on the front wasn't very kid friendly.

All of my students, who are younger BTW, listen to music, watch movies, play video games and read books that are all targeted to older audiences. Why? Because as you become a teen you start exploring older, more mature things. So let's keep D&D where it is. If you start making D&D like Pokemon...well....

 

[Sigurd]

You need to make up your mind - do you want better or cheaper?

The amount of work needed to make a decent tool is going to cost a pretty penny since you need real, paid developers to do the job. I would be willing to pay a reasonable amount for a tool that is actually useful. Unfortunately, Etools was not even close to fitting that bill!

I agree with most of your post but not this. The almost zero reproduction costs for software and the size of the WOTC market mean they should be able to supply an $80 book with appropriate software. Software at this point is for much of their clientele the logical reaction to their rule complexity. If they can't simplify they should automate. They will still sell more books and even the copied software will only tease people into buying the books to get the most out of the game.


But thinking about it I have to say that It's not publishers who will finally control RPGS. Players and DM's will thrash out a shared set of popular rules from the mess of publications and competing systems like they have always done. If those rules originate among the players, publishers will have to represent them to stay relevant. There will be a shake up and something will emerge.

(I think in that respect WOTC really hurt itself with 3.5, all the gamers I know would have preferred more time and a full revision to 4.0. WOTC lost a lot of respect from all the players I know.)


I think eventually a smaller, leaner publishing house will find a market and a following with a leaner, open system.


S

 

[Krypter]

I think the industry is doing well for most of the big players, but some small-fry are hurting a lot. This is normal in any industry. What the RPG industry has not yet discovered is consolidation. There used to be 40 car manufacturers in the USA a century ago. Few were consistently profitable. The problem with this industry is that it is so very imagination-driven, and that can be difficult to reconcile when combining businesses. Small RPG companies need to merge. Sometimes you just can't grow sales fast enough to get big. You've got to partner, acquire, and merge.

Also, I agree that videogames do not exclude P&P games. I did both, and still do both, though far less frequently than when I was 16!

 

[Mark]

Seriously, can anyone expound on who was on the panel for the GenCon SoCal seminar on "The State of the RPG Industry"?

 

[Greatwyrm]

I don't believe the fate of rpgs in general is so grim. Slow periods are just part of a natural product cycle. Somebody innovates, it catches on, people copy, and everything looks the same until someone breaks out of the mold again.

Seriously, how many other times have we seen things we were all certain would kill traditional rpgs? Crpgs didn't. Magic: the Gathering didn't. Even TSR's woeful financial situation could have been read as a black mark for the whole industry.

The thing is, there are two main things that will be able to keep rpgs and even D&D itself alive as long as we want to keep them alive. First, the OGL. A complete, free system that you can do just about whatever you want with. A complete rpg, running wild and free, spawning offspring forever. Second, electronic publishing. Now you don't have to have $5-$10,000 just to get your book printed. If you've got time and a buddy with a copy of Acrobat, you can sell your game. Removing this kind of barrier to entering the market just makes it more likely the next big innovator will have a shot at being successful.

 

[ssampier]

D&D/RPGs will continue to lose ground to video games, especially as the graphics and playability continue to improve in leaps and bounds. We can cling to our books and tales of the "good 'ol days" but the future is electronic, not hard copy.

There is a lot of truth to that. I see a big difference between RPGs and computer games, however. I'm going to be snobbish for a minute and say they aren't the same as face-to-face gaming and never will be.

In the early nineties, people decried CCGs as the RPG killer. CCGs are still very popular, but RPGs haven't gone away. Now the target is, of course, computer and video games. There are really fun, but in my mind, not RPGs, nor should they be (forcing a linear, round block into dynamic, square hole).

Personally, I think it's a crying shame that WotC and other RPG makers aren't spearheading the "electronicization" of RPGs. Quite the contrary, they've dropped the ball on the matter (can anyone say, E-Tools?).

Well, how do you suggest they do that? I can possibly see Wizards making more electronic products, but only as extension to their print products. In short gain a few thousand dollars through the license and then hope to gain a few hundred new players that are interested in that "Forgotten Realms" or "Eberron" thing. Am I missing something here?

 

[MerricB]

I agree with most of your post but not this. The almost zero reproduction costs for software

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).

Cheers!

 

[JVisgaitis]

In the early nineties, people decried CCGs as the RPG killer. CCGs are still very popular, but RPGs haven't gone away. Now the target is, of course, computer and video games. There are really fun, but in my mind, not RPGs, nor should they be (forcing a linear, round block into dynamic, square hole).

I agree 110%. You have your quick fix games that people will always declare will beat out RPGs: CCGs, Collectible Miniature Games, Video Games, etc. It hasn't happened and it won't happen. None of those games have the same dynamic that RPGs do. Maybe video games will replace Tabletop RPGs in the far future, but that will be at a time when video games can better emulate an open ended world (i.e. the RPG experience). Grand Theft Auto has come the closest on a single player scale, but that needs to be elevated to include multiple people, and even the latest version is starting to show stagnancy.

As to the theory that the complexity of 3.5 is turning players away, I'm sorry but no way in hell. When I was younger and first started playing, all I ever wanted was the rules written out to the letter. In the basic set, I never got that. And in later editions it took me a long time to figure out the game. THAC0, Percentage Rolls, Bend Bars, Infravision, what a mess! Only with experience do you become comfortable with adjudicating stuff on the fly. And when learning the game back then you never really felt like you knew what you were doing.

Are the stat blocks longer in the new editions? Yeah. Do they tell me 95% of everything in the game that I need to know at my fingertips? They sure do, and I would have killed for that when I was learning the game. Come on, if you guys want to run faster games and not be hung up on all the stats, forget them. Do it on the fly. Its all about everyone having a good time. You don't have someone looking over your screen checking your skill points or anything.