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D&D Older Editions
Jonathan Tweet: Prologue to Third Edition
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<blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7782086" data-attributes="member: 6874262"><p>A lot of roleplaying history debates can be settled by looking at demographics, something nobody's really mentioned so far. Situate yourself, reader, in terms of when you were born and your roleplaying history. 1e's boom coincided with the teendom and early maturation (to mid-20s) of the Late Boomers, born say in the late 1950s to the end of Boomerdom in 1964. While this group wasn't as large as Early Boomers, the ones who went to Woodstock and Gary Gygax's basement, it was still huge. I think one unexamined issue here is that this group began to age out of 1e starting in the mid-to-late 1980s: kids, jobs, less silliness about running around pretending to be elves. Now, Generation X was right behind them, ready to take up some of the slack, but confusion over 2e and then the double whammies of CCGs and "storytelling style" games, notably by White Wolf, drew a huge chunk of younger players toward those games in the 1990s. And in truth, CCGs solved a *lot* of the problems with roleplaying: portable, quick, fewer player requirements, easier to play with strangers, and a substantial amount of fun even when not playing (the "C" aspect). TSR was trying to solve the wrong problem in the 1990s, I'd argue. It shouldn't have been about improving the Dungeons and Dragons play experience. It should have been about addressing the reasons that the target demographic, now Gen X, played games. In other words, the company was acting as if the Boomer core audience, a source of so much strength, was still around and in the same circumstances as of old. They weren't. As time passed, this was a reason for the demise of Chaosium and Avalon Hill--AH even called this out specifically in an investor letter a year or two before they went under. Gen X was also a poor long-term bet, at least for White Wolf. It was much smaller than the Boomers. White Wolf's games were too tied to specific audience interests, which were themselves the product of a very narrow cultural point in time. They were also anchored in player behaviors that lessened with time. (A lot of LARPing was about rehearsing adolescent drama--who's dating whom, who your friends REALLY are--in cool vampire costumes.) When that audience got older, it paid attention to other stuff, which in turn caused the whole "90s-style" stuff to disappear. We're seeing a lot of Gen X nostalgia now--I am one, and have been running a 5e campaign for the past two years after decades away from roleplaying games--but even that is likely to be transitory. (And that nostalgia, interestingly, seems to look more like Stranger Things rather than, say, a Buffy reboot...ie., coming from an earlier point in a Gen X geek's life.)Generation Z, just now graduating college, is similar to X in terms of size. The millennials are now mostly 24-26--the biggest chunk of that cohort, even though the oldest ones are approaching 40--and I think we'll see 5e continue to grow for another 3-5 years. I'd be a little nervous about 2025, though, if I were a WOTC product manager. The first shifts in tastes and behavior--and they will come--will probably start to show up around then, typically too subtly to notice until it's too late.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Vanveen, post: 7782086, member: 6874262"] A lot of roleplaying history debates can be settled by looking at demographics, something nobody's really mentioned so far. Situate yourself, reader, in terms of when you were born and your roleplaying history. 1e's boom coincided with the teendom and early maturation (to mid-20s) of the Late Boomers, born say in the late 1950s to the end of Boomerdom in 1964. While this group wasn't as large as Early Boomers, the ones who went to Woodstock and Gary Gygax's basement, it was still huge. I think one unexamined issue here is that this group began to age out of 1e starting in the mid-to-late 1980s: kids, jobs, less silliness about running around pretending to be elves. Now, Generation X was right behind them, ready to take up some of the slack, but confusion over 2e and then the double whammies of CCGs and "storytelling style" games, notably by White Wolf, drew a huge chunk of younger players toward those games in the 1990s. And in truth, CCGs solved a *lot* of the problems with roleplaying: portable, quick, fewer player requirements, easier to play with strangers, and a substantial amount of fun even when not playing (the "C" aspect). TSR was trying to solve the wrong problem in the 1990s, I'd argue. It shouldn't have been about improving the Dungeons and Dragons play experience. It should have been about addressing the reasons that the target demographic, now Gen X, played games. In other words, the company was acting as if the Boomer core audience, a source of so much strength, was still around and in the same circumstances as of old. They weren't. As time passed, this was a reason for the demise of Chaosium and Avalon Hill--AH even called this out specifically in an investor letter a year or two before they went under. Gen X was also a poor long-term bet, at least for White Wolf. It was much smaller than the Boomers. White Wolf's games were too tied to specific audience interests, which were themselves the product of a very narrow cultural point in time. They were also anchored in player behaviors that lessened with time. (A lot of LARPing was about rehearsing adolescent drama--who's dating whom, who your friends REALLY are--in cool vampire costumes.) When that audience got older, it paid attention to other stuff, which in turn caused the whole "90s-style" stuff to disappear. We're seeing a lot of Gen X nostalgia now--I am one, and have been running a 5e campaign for the past two years after decades away from roleplaying games--but even that is likely to be transitory. (And that nostalgia, interestingly, seems to look more like Stranger Things rather than, say, a Buffy reboot...ie., coming from an earlier point in a Gen X geek's life.)Generation Z, just now graduating college, is similar to X in terms of size. The millennials are now mostly 24-26--the biggest chunk of that cohort, even though the oldest ones are approaching 40--and I think we'll see 5e continue to grow for another 3-5 years. I'd be a little nervous about 2025, though, if I were a WOTC product manager. The first shifts in tastes and behavior--and they will come--will probably start to show up around then, typically too subtly to notice until it's too late. [/QUOTE]
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Jonathan Tweet: Prologue to Third Edition
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