D&D General Mike Mearls' blog post about RPG generations

[Stalker0]

That article is sorely in need of some examples. Ok people have flocked to these new 5th generation games.....what are they?

A picture is worth 1000 words and an example 10,000.

 

[Scribe]

The biggest problem with chronological analyses is that the further you get from the origin generation the muddier everything gets as experimentation gets broader and it becomes harder and harder to confine all or even most of the prevailing zeitgeist to a single definable entity.

Yeah, I do assume there is at least a partial (or fully realized) D&D-centric bias to the generations, but I'm not an RPG scholar as some here would be so cannot speak to the various other branches.

 

[Scribe]

5th generation games.....what are they?

Shadowdark.

 

[dbolack]

Is the Forge stuff all the faux-intellectual stuff? Hard pass there.

This at least seems to make a reasonable amount of sense at a high level.

Gen1 - Born of the Hex/Miniature systems of the day.
Gen2 - Leaning into that Heroic setting and a desire to recreate the books/movies/settings we knew.
Gen3 - The beginning (imo) of self referencing loops of design. Its not enough now to be playing the heroic setting, now the setting itself becomes a focus.
Gen4 - CRPG, OC focus with 10 pages of font size 10 backstory at level 1, 4e as its 'final form'.
Gen5 - OSR, and the freedom due to self publishing to realize it.

This really misses like the bulk of the 80s? Hyperrealism and Generic Systems, particularly.

 

[payn]

The "generations" are not a monolith and Mearls does a lot of generalizing here, but I can see where he is going with it. I wouldnnt be so hasty to confuse products designers and companies were selling with exactly what players wanted in those years. I think trends are more appropriate because as much as folks want crunch and setting days behind them in place of their OSR darlings, its coming back before you know it.

 

[AlViking]

Precisely.

The biggest problem with chronological analyses is that the further you get from the origin generation the muddier everything gets as experimentation gets broader and it becomes harder and harder to confine all or even most of the prevailing zeitgeist to a single definable entity.

There's also the implication of a linear evolution that I don't really buy. There have pretty much always been multiple alternative games out there with different approaches, different focus, different styles. It may be easier now to get something up and running with kickstarter but that doesn't mean many will rise above the fray.

Evolution is not this singular path to "better" with each generation improving on the last and I don't think it matters if we're talking about species or games. Things change, some things are more successful than others until they aren't. Time marches on and things continue to change.

Meanwhile I hope people can find games they can enjoy for years to come.

 

[Minigiant]

My main gripe with this theory is that there are only 5 generations.

Once D&D really hit off in the Internet, the generational shifts became shorter as new ideas and new fans rapidly were shared within the community. There's probably 3-4 generations alone from 2000 on.

 

[Gradine]

Shadowdark.

Scribe, you cannot answer every question with Shadowdark

 

[Theory of Games]

Mike said it's about new games making things easier for GMs to run... whereas I think the turn is reallly about the rise of Indy RPGs leading into the advent of Actual Play. With games that are more about character personality and character emotions and character relationships taking center stage, with combat and mechanical "character builds" no longer the focus.

"Actual Play" has been a thing since at least the late 70's, long before the "5th Generation".

Shadowdark.

You could argue the entirety of the OSR, with its focus on clearer, cleaner rules making the GM's job easier.

There's also the implication of a linear evolution that I don't really buy. There have pretty much always been multiple alternative games out there with different approaches, different focus, different styles. It may be easier now to get something up and running with kickstarter but that doesn't mean many will rise above the fray.

Evolution is not this singular path to "better" with each generation improving on the last and I don't think it matters if we're talking about species or games. Things change, some things are more successful than others until they aren't. Time marches on and things continue to change.

Meanwhile I hope people can find games they can enjoy for years to come.

I'd argue that there was a time when there weren't multiple alternative games with different approaches out here. For a long time it was D&D, and then came games that had similar rules and similar gameplay objectives.

Also, Mearls wasn't writing about the "evolution" of games - I didn't even see the word used. He was theorizing on shifts in game design and gameplay, with each shift attracting or alienating a certain segment of gamers. I don't agree with his "generational timelines", but he's made a strong point that many of us in this hobby are currently looking for ttrpgs offering systems that are easier to run and play.

 

[Scribe]

Scribe, you cannot answer every question with Shadowdark