Wow, are we having a non-linear conversation or what? I wonder about the nature of this 'wall' around the hobby /that you brought up/ and how it's clearly been up since the end of the fad in the 80s, and all you an focus on is the last 6 years and trying to get back offended players with the fiction of a 'simple' (actually just familiar) game? The 'high wall around the hobby' is not keeping Pathfinder or AD&D fans out, it's keeping /new/ fans out. Appealing to grognards is not the solution - it may well be part of the problem.
Tony, I'm not only focusing on the last six years - I think that is your "4E defense mode hackles" getting up. But I do think that where the larger challenge has always been how to get new players coming in, over the last six years a new problem has arose: how to get old players
back. Whether you like it or not, 4E did distance a lot of folks, and a major part of the 5E strategy was to get at least some of them back.
"We seem to have had trouble getting new players for the past 30 years."
"That's terrible, it must all be due to something we did 6 years ago, lets try to get old players back!"
Again, they are two separate issues - see above.
That's not much of an alternative. We've got a hobby that was briefly huge, then turned insular with that 'high wall' you mentioned. D&Ders didn't just stop making new friends in 1987. And the game, itself, didn't change much for 20 years, then took on a distinct 'system mastery rewarding' character. I think tradition and elitism account for a lot of the stones in that wall around the hobby.
I'm reading between the lines here and it is my sense that you are basically saying, "4E was the best chance D&D had to reach a larger market but the grognards and traditionalists ruined it."
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
Those last two are pretty nearly mutually exclusive. The things that make the game familiar and 'really D&D' to us old-timers (and lapsed players) make it weird and less-approachable to new players (old or young). The /attitudes/ of grognards don't help, either.
I don't disagree about the attitudes, but think you are making a false equation there and don't think the two are mutually exclusive. The traditional qualities of D&D don't inherently make it unapproachable to new players. Maybe some of the really weird gygaxisms do, but since 2E came out they tend to be rather buried. But when I skim through the 5E PHB, which has a more traditional vibe than 4E, I don't see a lot that is overly weird or unapproachable to new players.
I'm going to be doing my bit to be the change I want to see in the game and make the effort to give new players at Encounters and conventions the best play experiences possible, in spite of the system, itself. But that's just me.
Nice, glad to hear it!
That's about as positive a spin as you can put on "give up on an IP but, let it slide for a while instead of shelving it outright." Frankly, between the tanking of Essentials and the announcement of 'Next' shelving still seemed like a very real worry. In retrospect, it seems, the transition was about adjusting the franchise to a much lower level of investment. You can get acceptable RoI with big investments and huge growth, or by slashing costs and divesting. 5e looks like the latter - much less risky, so we can at least not worry about the franchise being shelved right away.
Yeah, I think you're right about lower level of investment. If anything, this might be the main source of nerdrage (or grograge) - people saying they love 5E but wish WotC was investing more into it.
However this hobby is simply not for everyone, it takes time, education ,social skills. math skills and an interest in acting and imagination however tepid. This combination isn't common. Why in the were so many causal gamers in the 80's to early 90's is simple, there was no internet, no Netflix, fewer computer and video game and simply many less entertainment choices. Thus people who might have a strong interest are still interested (in fact we probably get more of them) but the casual gamers just aren't there as much.
Yeah, I think this is basically right. It also speaks a bit to the dumbing down of our culture, especially with regards to imagination. We're a quick-fix culture and like everything fed to us. D&D requires actual
work.
To counterpoint the OP...
The Industry's problem isn't, and never has been, that the hobby is "Greying" or that it new generations aren't interested. The Industry's problem has always been the Myths it constructs to explain its inability to advance beyond a business model that quite frankly sucked in the 70's and hasn't improved.
The Industry generally claims that the reason board games and RPG's fell out of favor was because of video games. The problem with this assertion is that it assumes that video games are some kind of unbeatable product that people are drawn to. Video games are what people are having fun playing, the reason board games and RPG's fell out of favor is because people weren't having fun playing them. It's really that simple, if a person enjoys something, they'll spend time doing it. If they don't enjoy it, they won't.
This, I think, is a bit of an oversimplification. I think it is less about what is more or less enjoyable, and more about what is
easier to get into. I've said before that the difference between a video game and an RPG is similar to the difference between a movie and a book. People don't watch movies over reading books because movies are more enjoyable, but because they're easier - they're quick and require little from you, other than just sitting there. A book requires a kind of focus, attention, and patience. It also requires one's imagination to fire.
D&D, and to a lesser extent board games, have a number of impediments that impact enjoyment.
-For RPG's there's a *major* hurdle in learning the game. To play the game, with just core books, you're talking several hundred pages at a minimum. With accessories, you're talking thousands of pages. Starting in the late 90's, people's time spent on reading decreased significantly enough that the bookstore industry pretty much died. If people aren't reading books as much as they used to, and your product requires people to read many books, there's a correlation there. Nevermind the issues with memorizing all of those rules.
I agree, yeah, this is a big one.
-For both RPG's and board games there's a state issue. Saving the state of the game is challenging when compared to video games. If you're playing a video game, you click a button and your game state is stored. If you're playing at a table you have to write down the state of all of the characters and adventure, or cover the game pieces with boxes and hope no one jostles the table.
This seems relatively minor.
-There's also the movement away from quality retail adventures. If you're time limited, or imagination limited, without good pre-written adventures you simply are not a player. These people don't have time or imagination to come up with a coherent and cohesive campaign. A whole section of the market is lost. It's really another Industry Myth, "DM products don't sell as well as Player products", except without good DM products that enable fast play, you don't have those players.
I agree and would add campaign settings--in all shapes and sizes, from whole worlds to sandboxes to locations. This is also why I'm a bit concerned with Mearls saying that no Forgotten Realms book is in the works, not because I'm particularly attached to the Realms but because I'm worried that they won't produce setting material at all, or only minimally.
I think setting material, like
Dragon magazine actually, is a bit of a loss leader - not that you can't make a setting book profitable, but that sales figures don't really adequately reflect its benefits to the game as a whole. See Golarion, for instance. I have no idea if the setting books make Paizo money, but I do think they strengthen Pathfinder as a whole - they give it a
home.
This can easily be seen to be the case once one reflects on Magic the Gathering.... people play Mtg and not D&D. Because you don't need the same time investment to play casually.
So this should be a question WotC is asking: How to create venues for people to play D&D casually, but without taking away anything from the game itself?
The solution to the Industry's problems has always been: Virtual Tabletop. Abstract away the "Behind the scenes" math of mechanics, substantially reducing the "Reading footprint" and allow for fast play and game state preservation. The things that make video games so attractive are easily adapted by the RPG and Board Game markets. These games now and always will have a significant knowledge requirement in order to play, but simply making use of computer technology can remove substantial amounts of that barrier to entry that makes it so unattractive. If I had a viable VT, I don't need to know what the equations are for Grapple, all I need to know is that it exists, and a touch interface implementation could even remind me I have that option.
I hear you and agree to some extent, as long as the virtual stuff doesn't take away from the imaginative experience, because then you're in danger of losing sight of what makes RPGs unique. In other words, use virtual stuff as
augmentation and
supplementation but not as a replacement.
The truth is: World of Warcraft is identical in complexity to Dungeons & Dragons, the only difference is that WoW abstracts away all of the "Nuts and bolts" of gameplay so that the Player doesn't need to know how to calculate his chances of hitting a goat, he just has to click a button, while D&D forces you to memorize: Strength bonus, character level's To Hit value, magic item bonuses, magic spell bonuses, target's AC, etc, etc. They're basically the same system, except one abstracts away the learning curve and has millions of players, the other doesn't and has only hundreds of thousands. Board games suffer similiarly, if you want to play Axis & Allies you have to memorize blitzing rules, what counts as a move for a plane, etc.
You're missing the most important difference between the two: One employs the imagination while the other doesn't. And
that makes all the difference in the world.
I'm not entirely sure there is a huge digital divide issue keeping people from gaming, at least in my experience e. Our entire group has laptops, smart phones, tablets and similar tech and they get little use. Oh one player tends to prefer a die roller when she isn't engaged with the game. Big deal.
SNIP
Nice post - and, with the part I snipped, a better response to Rygar than mine, I think.
Also as to the assertion that it threw up walls, I don't think so. TTRPG's are a inherently self limiting hobby combining as one wag put it "double entry bookkeeping, improv theater, and wargaming" oh and the DM needs to be into creative writing too. Not many people out there like that and of the ones who might have given it a go one boring summer, the kind that the hobby doesn't click for but need something to do, they don't need D&D in 2014 We could get more of then to give it a whirl but they aren't going to support the hobby and what is being done now with Basic DD&D (and the PFSRD and more) free is I think the best approach. 1st hit is free and if it clicks, welcome aboard. We really can't do more.
OK, I think you emphasize an important point and perhaps why we shouldn't hope for more than a solid, sustainable level for the hobby. And perhaps that is what Mearls & Co are doing, no more or less.
On the contrary, I think D&D is more popular than you would think by reading forums. Far more people play D&D as a casual activity among friends, in their homes, than the community who talk about RPGs on forums or attend organized events. It's the hardcores who post on forums about class balance, tweets by Mearls, and edition wars who represent the small but vocal minority.
Yes, understood. I think you have two general player groups, "serious-to-diehard" people who are lifers, buy tons of books, and many of whom participate on forums, and then the "casual players" who might buy one or two books, but generally just show up to roll dice. Of course it is more of a spectrum, but I'm guessing that for everyone one serious-to-diehard player there are quite a few casual players.
It's true that attrition is relentless. Which is one the reasons those who think in terms of a zero-sum struggle between 4E and Pathfinder or 5E and Pathfinder can't see the forest for the trees. If the D&D market consisted only (or even mostly) of long-time players, it would have dwindled away to almost nothing by now as attrition took its relentless toll. Every year, thousands of newcomers play D&D. With every new edition, tens of thousands play for the first time. And the new players tend to be young, as attested by Mearls comments about gearing the campaign length to a college year.
In the above formulation, of those thousands of newcomers per year, how many become serious/diehard players? It seems that the hobby and industry thrives depending upon that (which is also why WotC focused so much on pleasing the long-term fans with 5E, I think).
Does that mean 5E will bring in a new golden age of D&D? I doubt it. But I think it will gain traction with the casual gamer market who brought in a golden age of boardgames. And it will also be more appealing to lapsed gamers from the last golden age, who don't have the time or energy to run rules-heavy or detailed combat sims, than either 3E or 4E. Those two markets - the casual boardgamer and the lapsed D&D player - are not at all incompatible. And they're the two groups where the growth will come from, not from competing with Pathfinder over the hardcores.
And perhaps this is all we can hope for.
).
