Mike Mearls Talks (er, Tweets) About the Industry

I think history has proven Mike wrong. The problem is that D&D isn't a game. D&D is a framework that allows 5 players to make a game.

So if you like boardgames, you got lots of different games to choose from. If you like RPGs, you got lots of games to choose from. But those games are the things GMs do with D&D. My campaign is my own game I've developed. Your campaign is yours.

I think there's a market for lots of different RPGs in that sense. Because each gaming group playing D&D is running its own unique game, in their own homebrew setting with their own house rules.

But I don't think there's a market for different *frameworks*. I think there's demand for *a* framework, that players use to develop lots of different games.

 

[Remathilis]

. Mixing in Tolkein's high fantasy, Vance's Dying Earth science fantasy, Arthurian romance and 19th century Horror gives you something that isn't part of any particular genre and won't be identifiable as one. .

You'd pretty much get Ravenloft, when each is viewed though a dark lens...

 

[Tony Vargas]

No one framework does everything well. The d20 framework, for example, would not have done the Deadlands campaign I just ended well at all.

The d20 framework is mostly just slightly cleaned up D&D scrubbed of few proper nouns. Of course it doesn't do a lot of things well.

There have been some good universal and multi-genre systems produced, though, that can handle virtually anything you might want to base an RPG upon. They'd constitute that kind of 'framework.'

So, yes, there is a desire for different frameworks, because not all players like the same things, nor does even one player want the same thing all the time.

Very true. Even though we've had some ideal 'framework' systems put forth, none has achieved dominance, nor even much success. That's simply not what the RPG community wants - they want D&D, for D&D's sake. There's a hard-core of Forge types who want to find the 'perfect' RPG, and the kind of 'framework' idea mattcolville came up with would be a candidate for that. But the bulk of the hobby started with D&D, and either still plays D&D, rarely plays at all, or comes back to D&D when they, inevitably, can't find that elusive 'perfect game' (or, tragically, find it, and can't find anyone else who wants to play it).

In diversity, there is much more innovation and flexibility.

Nod. You can see that in the indie side of the hobby vs the D&D/d20/Pathfinder/OSR side. On the indie side, it's all about innovation, and a revolutionary game can see print and possibly not bankrupt the guy publishing it, and possibly even be remembered years later. On the D&D side, familiar D&D-ish-ness sells well (and dominates the hobby, when combined with the D&D name), while the corpses of fantasy heartbreakers who were D&D-ish but for an ambitious change or improvement or two, litter the streets, and even D&D doesn't dare improve or innovate by more than the barest increment at a time, for fear of a backlash like the edition war.

It doesn't have to. If it does enough well, and satisfies enough people, then there won't be enough demand for other frameworks, and you'll never see a competing framework at the same level of success.

I think this is what D&D has done. There's demand for other frameworks, but not enough.

Not remotely, no. D&D is a terrible framework for anything but it's own demented melange of fantasy/sci-fi/lovecraft - and not even very good for that. d20 is not much better. It's just not a mechanically great system - which is understandable, since it was the very first RPG, and changed very little for the first 25 years it was around.

But, in addition to being the first RPG, D&D is the only RPG anyone outside the hobby has ever heard of, and thus the most likely first RPG experience for new gamers testing the waters of the hobby. So, anyone who tries D&D and doesn't like it most probably concludes that they don't like RPGs, and never enters the broader hobby. While anyone who stays with the hobby, because they liked their first D&D experience, is likely to stick with it or at least come back to it now and then.

The problem is that while almost every supplement has something worthwhile in it, it also has a lot of crap.

Sure, thus 'system mastery.'

If you follow the game from the start, you can have a pretty good idea of what's what because you went through the books with a few months in between each one. But if you start playing when there already are a bunch of books out, that can be pretty intimidating.

Also very true. Which is bad for growing the hobby by retaining new players, but good for serious players who develop lots of said system mastery. Pathfinder is succeeding on that phenomenon. 5e's slower pace of releases might indicate a hope to retain more new players by keeping the game more approachable, longer.

You might be able to mix Conan, Elric and Lankhmar, but they're all in the "Sword and Sorcery" sub-genre of fantasy. Mixing in Tolkein's high fantasy, Vance's Dying Earth science fantasy, Arthurian romance and 19th century Horror gives you something that isn't part of any particular genre and won't be identifiable as one. Which is what D&D did, taking a set of skirmish wargame rules, sticking in influences from a huge variety of fantasy that seemed cool at the time to the participants, and created something that wasn't really part of any of those sub-genres but either one of its own or just Fantasy in general. Which is what hasn't happened in SF RPGs, with no game doing the same thing in taking a wide spread of influences and incorporating them whilly-nilly into a rules set that wasn't particularly designed to handle all of them.

That is what D&D did, but I think it's probably more likely a strike against it than a reason for its success.

Just as the relative failure of great 'framework' presenting games like GURPS and Hero argues against the idea that D&D is succeeding by providing a 'framework' that people are using to play many different games, there actually /were/ science fiction games that went the whole-hog approach, early on. They weren't all Traveler, d6 Star Wars, or Battletech, with a liscence or single genre or single original setting.

Space Opera is the one that springs to mind. I think it's pretty obscure and was never that successful, but it took the whole universe of sci-fi literature (from HG Wells to EE 'Doc' Smith to Gordon R Dickson) and film/TV (Flash Gordon to Star Trek & Star Wars) as it existed towards the end of the 70s, and stuffed it into one perplexing, D&D-level-of-genre-incoherence, RPG.

Apart from the iron dominance of D&D, sci-fi RPGs have never been all that successful because of a critical difference between the sci-fi and fantasy genres. In fantasy, you ask the reader to accept a somewhat standard, familiar set of preposterous assumptions: magic, heros, monsters in an ancient or medieval setting. Fantasy works and sub-genres vary, but they don't vary wildly in that formula. The art of the science-fiction story, OTOH, is to ask the reader to accept /one/ preposterous assumption, one 'What if?' and the story flows from that. Earth is invaded by Mars. Positronic brains make sentient robots a reality. FTL travel is invented. Etc. That one assumption or question makes each sci-fi setting/story different, and that makes munging them all together the way D&D did with fantasy untenable.

 

[Mirtek]

2016 is the year VR is going to take off.

It may be the year it learns to walk, after the previous version were still crawling, but it's a long way to go until it learns to run.

And playing D&D just won't really be able to compete.

Have to disagree here. VR's primary strength is ego-perspective, and there are a lot of good reasons why most games are not played in ego-perspective. Just imagine having to play FIFA Soccer from the perspective of a single players on the field, it will work great for Battlefield of Call of Duty games. It would work for an RPG like Skyrim, but not so much for a game like Witcher 3.

D&D was always meant to be unlimited except by your imagination. But virtual reality worlds are a whole other level.

And even if they were to realize the great grafics that actually run on a standard system, being inside a computer game would impose countless limitations. Even the prime examples of open world games are full of restrictions and the things you can not do is longer than the things you can do.

Photorealistic games,

Photorealistic graphics is promised with each new generation of console or engine since I started gaming with the Sega Megadrive (incidentally the death of the PC was announced regularily since then too!)

The big problem of VR devices is that to merely get full HD at 30 frames your GPU has to provide 4K at 60 frames, since the work needs to be done for each eye. Nice if you are among the few per thousand PC players with a GeForce Titan, but the vast majority is running less than a GeForce 960. And totally forget about XB1 and PS4, where they struggle to get 720p at 30 frames

Oh yes, definitely, PC to PC and PC to NPC, NPC-NPC interaction are very important aspects of D&D which are hard to do in a game.

Indeed

The idea of an imaginary world run like a simulation, created by a DM with other people running around killing monsters and taking their stuff, is golden.

The game you describe would be golden, but unfortunately it's a mere dream (and for many years to come, since most of the issues are totally independent of whether you would watch this sim on a monitor or with VR), even the best open world games like GTA V are but a pale shadow of your vision of what freedom such a game should provide

I think this is exactly right. There is no reason that D&D the TTRPG couldn't be better supported AND successful in this day and age [...] It really comes down to prioritization.

It comes down to definition of success. A small company could publish a PHB2, get 5% ROI and call it a success. A corporation like Hasbro could tell anyone to not even bother approaching the board with a plan that is below 15% ROI.

 

[Umbran]

It doesn't have to. If it does enough well, and satisfies enough people, then there won't be enough demand for other frameworks, and you'll never see a competing framework at the same level of success.

Okay, that seems like a very different statement.

I was responding to the following assertion: "I don't think there's a market for different *frameworks*." Period, full stop, absolute - no desire for other frameworks. You did not say, "I don't think there's enough market for other frameworks to be as successful as D&D."

I think this is what D&D has done. There's demand for other frameworks, but not enough.

I don't think D&D does any more, any better, or satisfies people all that more than it has ever done.

I think what you see is not so much a matter of qualities of the game. It isn't that D&D does more, better, than other games. It is a matter of ecology/market behavior.

You can see this in, for example, fast food chains. The market is very large, there are many players of roughly equivalent quality. But, there's still one or two major player, and then a whole plethora of notably smaller ones.

In a given environment, there are some things that are large, and many others others that are small. This is normal, and healthy. You do not want, or expect that naturally all things to be the same size, even if they are of similar qualities. The size variation aids the long-term stability of the environment.

As we have seen with D&D and Pathfinder, once you reach a certain size, innovation is *hard*. These games are large, and entrenched, and if they make dramatic changes quickly, their fans will scream bloody murder. D&D and Pathfinder cannot easily experiment, and to put out a new version is an effort on the order of years. Real innovation is brought in by the smaller, experimental games. And ideas and experiences from those games feed up to the larger games, so eventually they may adopt some of the ideas - you can see a lot of this in 5e.

So, for D&D to remain vital and healthy, it needs and wants those smaller frameworks around to be the laboratory. Luckily, the existence of the big fish creates the environment that fosters the smaller frameworks, and allows them to exist. You see that here on EN World - a whole lot of talk about D&D, yes, but under that umbrella, there's talk about entirely different frameworks, too.

 

[Mercule]

It doesn't have to. If it does enough well, and satisfies enough people, then there won't be enough demand for other frameworks, and you'll never see a competing framework at the same level of success.

Windows. OSX. Linux.

I know people who love each, rabidly. I also know people who hate each, rabidly. Is one better than the others? Not touching that. But... you can create MS Office docs on all of them (though you might not use MS Office). You can write code (and run the apps) in most of the major languages on each. You can play video games on each. And, of course, you can surf the web and post commentary on each. by most measures, they all hit the mark. None are going to go away anytime soon. People will use them because that's what they use.

Maybe there's something like an iPad out there that will transform how people do things. Who knows? The big deal with iOS is that it was mobile without compromising what people wanted to do while mobile (mostly consume content and/or play games). That's probably not the same "magic bullet" that RPGs need.

So, what is the secret sauce for RPGs? Is in the Indie style (light and fast)? Meh, maybe, but probably not. Is it the story and/or setting that reduces prep time? Doubtful; we've had settings and modules forever. Is it Big IP (Dresden, Game of Thrones, etc.)? Probably not, since Stars Wars has had several RPG incarnations.

My guess: It's a little of all those, plus something else. It might be creating something that felt like a party game. You play with whoever is available. If it's a different group, next time, no worries. The base rules have to take less than 15 minutes to teach/learn. All you need has to be comfortable to set up in a living room, which means the character sheet has to fit on your lap and the "board" has to fit on a coffee table without a ton of fuss. A complete adventure has to be playable in under three hours. That's entry level, with the ability to expand if you really want (campaigns, additional "classes", etc.). That may or may not be what the answer actually is, but it's probably about the right distance from what we have, today.

 

[Mithreinmaethor]

Pretty brutal, but it's hard to say how much of it was the d20 life cycle (rather than Midnight specifically), how much of it was lower-quality supplements compared to the core book, how much of it was the mix of supplements we published, and how much of it was the usual declining sales of supplements. It was a "noisy" time in that segment, so it's hard to draw general conclusions. The core book (and even Second Edition) did very well for FFG, but I expect the company lost money on the supplement line. The pre-orders and print runs declined to, really, an unsustainable level, and by the end of the run, the d20 bubble had popped and they were mostly fodder for $5 sales so the inventory wouldn't be taxed as profit. Of course, performance of the other campaign setting lines (Dragonstar, Dawnforge) was worse.

I wonder if a "Midnight" rework for 5e would work.....I was one of the people that actually liked "Midnight" even though I despised 3.x as a whole.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I guess it depends on what you consider the 'hardcore' roleplayers. I think of them as the devoted hobbyists who are familiar with and try out many systems, are deep into game theory (both real and psuedo), and are always on top of the latest or most innovative RPGs.
While D&D is certainly the most-played of RPGs, I think that has more to do with it's status as first RPG, and RPG with mainstream name-recognition: most of us in the hobby start with D&D, many never move on from it, we often cycle back to it because it's comparatively available.

I feel like my experience shows it to be very hard to get people to consistently volunteer to play things besides D&D. That is, you'll find that there are 100 other systems out there that some people like, but if you get 6 random gamers together, they'll all probably play D&D. Its the Lingua Franca of RPGs and nothing has changed on that score in 30+ years. No other system has ever really challenged it in that sense.

I think its because fantasy is the central genre, all the other genre of RPG still contain some element of fantasy, but D&D just IS fantasy. And its a pretty broad generic fantasy that's hard to completely differentiate from. The system has a very steep power curve too, which is really still quite rare in RPGs.

As far as Eurogames go, I think its the design and play conventions that make those games. This has NOT happened in RPGs. 4e was informed BY Eurogames in its design, but there's very little consistency in that sense across other games. You cannot define a genre of RPGs that group together based on a physical design sensibility, which is ALL that defines Eurogames.

Mike seems to be quite fixed on the Eurogame analogy too. The 4e designers certainly pushed hard for a design language that was informed by them. I'm just not sure it works. I'm not sure there IS anything to 'figure out' with RPGs. Just publish what people clamour for and will buy. If production costs are too expensive? Lower the costs!

 

[Mercule]

I feel like my experience shows it to be very hard to get people to consistently volunteer to play things besides D&D. That is, you'll find that there are 100 other systems out there that some people like, but if you get 6 random gamers together, they'll all probably play D&D. Its the Lingua Franca of RPGs and nothing has changed on that score in 30+ years. No other system has ever really challenged it in that sense.

This is my experience, as well. We played WoD for several years, and Hero off and on. We always return to D&D, though.

Part of it may be the extremely strong archetypes that exist in fantasy, which the class-based system handles well. Pretty much everyone understands what a Fighter or Wizard are, even without seeing the rules. Cleric and Thief/Rogue might take a second, but that's in there, too, as are Paladin, Barbarian, and Monk. Ranger, Bard, Sorcerer, and Warlock my be a bit more niche, but still relatively quantified.

What do you have in a Western, though? Sheriffs, cowboys, bandits, and "Indians". How do you stat Ben Cartwright? If he's a cowboy, then what's Doc Holiday? What's the archetypal difference between Doc and Wyatt? Same goes for sci-fi and superheroes. All require you to break down to skills and maybe powers, which generally increases complexity.

 

[Valador]

Unfortunately I see a lot of demands for bloat and a lot of people demonstrating greedy neediness and the expectations of WOTC to just crank out every little demand that someone wants. Spoiled entitlement mentality...

 

[aramis erak]

Hero is one of my personal favorites because it's so flexible. Given enough effort, the core rules will do just about anything and support just about any genre. The key, there, is "enough effort", and I think it's why Hero has never been a break out success. It was fantastic during college, but is just unreasonable with four kids, a full-time plus job, and other activities. But, if I was given Eberron as adapted to Hero, with a large sampling of races, spells, psionic powers, etc. all included, I'd be very warm to it. That would give me everything I needed, plus a framework from which to draw to fill in group-specific gaps.

Hero is actually something of an oddity in that it's almost too abstract. Even something like Fantasy Hero could stand to be a bit more opinionated.

The problem with most universal systems is the "enough effort" clause.

I can, for example, see using either Hero or GURPS for moderns or westerns... but neither fits for the kinds of westerns I want to run. When I run a western, I want characters to be cheap, and easily replaced. D6 Adventure would work, with some tweaking. At least characters would be fast enough.

Then again, the kinds of western I want to run have even protagonists dying. No plot armor - Which rules out Firefly.

There are a LOT of generic engines. And none of them can nor will corner the market.
GURPS, Hero, Savage Worlds, BRP, EABA, CORPS, Fate Core, Fate Accelerated, nWoD... and a few others I've forgotten. And others best left forgotten (Amazing Engine).

And then the unified systems, where each game is tweaked from the core mechanics slightly to greatly:
Palladium, d6, Interlock, older BRP (eg: Elf Quest, Stormbringer), MRQ, Cortex, Cortex Plus, FFG SW*, Leading Edge Games' house engine (Phoenix Command, Rhand, Aliens), ICE RM (RM/SM/Cyberspace), LUG's Icon system (ST & Dune), Decipher's CODA (LOTR & ST)...

*Included because people are reskinning it for other genres.

Really, the variations for other genres work best for me when they are tailored, much like how Interlock and older BRP offerings were tailored to the settings, rather than tweaking the setting to fit the engine (which is the GURPS model now, and the first of many reasons why I've quit using GURPS). Using 5E as is for Sci-Fi would be a poor fit. Using the core mechanics with a totally new set of classes and abilities, now, that would be workable for certain subgenres.