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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7680826" data-attributes="member: 4937">There certainly is an aspect of 1970's and 1980's gaming that was not playing the game you wanted to play.  It does have an aspect in RPGs, but you can see it more clearly in other sorts of table top gaming.Almost no one plays traditional hex wargames any more, and certainly no one is being added to the hobby faster than the grognards die out.  Hex wargames died back in the 1990's, when computer versions allowed you to actually focus on playing them when it was convenient for you, with as detailed of rules as you wanted, on as large of a map as you wanted, while doing the book keeping for you, for a fraction of the cost.Likewise, there were a number of turn based games that were quite popular once upon a time that simply don't have the prominence they once had because there are now video games that give you the visceral experience those games were trying to capture through their elaborate rules.  Star Fleet Battles let you play an intense space combat game - at a glacial real time pace.  As a kid, I desperately wanted to find someone to play Car Wars with.  As an adult, I look at the complex rules for sliding and drifting and all the rest, and I think, "I'm never going to play this unless it's on a computer."   There was a time when Battletech had as prominent of a place among gamers as D&D did.   But as early as the early 90's, Battletech MU*'s started beating pen and paper RPGs at their own game, and now, if you want to play Battletech you'll almost certainly play some sort of fast paced complex computer version of the reality that Battletech was trying to simulate with its pen and paper rules.The RPGs themselves have died off more slowly, because the computer still can't create the dynamic world of a good DM's imagination.  But they are clearly on the way out.  It's been noticeable for the last 10 years or more that no one wants to be a DM anymore.  Being a good DM inevitably means enjoying spending 10 or 20 hours a week not playing the game you want to play so that the content and game will be there to play.  There really is no way around it.  But for at least the last 10 years people have been trying to create RPGs that at least in theory don't need a DM to spend time not playing the game.  They've promoted the fantasy that all this content can just create itself during play and it will be the same thing, or that the game is little more than a series of tactical scenarios which you can buy a book of and play and that will be an RPG.   They've promoted 'fast prep' and 'no prep' and 'no myth' and all of those were just variations of saying, "You don't need a DM; all you need is a referee and some rules."   And I think the problem is ultimately that nothing like the worlds that the DMs wanted to play in and create and animate actually existed in the 1970's and 1980's, so that if you wanted such a world to play in and explore you just had to do it yourself.  OSR I think was built on what I consider a myth - that back in those 70's and 80's the rules were simple and game prep was easy and so you didn't have to spend much time prepping in order to have a really good time.  And I think that myth was largely a myth of players back in the 70's or 80's, because DM I think remember how much time they were putting into prep.  The sad truth is that nostalgia aside, the one sheet dungeon (to say nothing of the map) is no longer going to intrigue for long.   By 1990, that sort of entirely dungeon centric, plotless, 'old school' play we were doing as 12 year olds just didn't satisfy.  Partly that was because if that was all you cared for, computers had already started doing a pretty good job of providing dungeon exploration as a solo experience.  Partly that was because there is only so many hours of kicking down doors and pointless exploration that satisfies.And now, that same geek can just play Skyrim or Witcher III or something, and a goodly portion of them that create for its own sake and enjoy it probably are spending their time writing mods as a way of making Skyrim or any number of other fantasy engines more personal rather than creating homebrew game worlds.   I think Mearls is somewhat wrong to suggest that the problem is that players don't want to spend their time creating characters, when they could just play Skyrim or Witcher III.  It isn't the lack of players willing to make an investment that is the problem.  For one thing, the investment time in creating characters a cRPG isn't necessarily much less that of D&D.  People spend at least as much time pouring over their Path of Exile builds as they do their D&D characters.  I think it is true that D&D and ilk are less and less the only thing going for a person who wants to be a player, so that they can play D&D or Skyrim and enjoy the experience.  But I don't think that it is true that those players wouldn't or don't want to play a PnP RPG because those RPGs are no longer seen as fun or no longer offer something that you can't get from a solo or small group experience in a computer.   I think that something like Skyrim is simply more accessible because its a lot easier to print another copy of Skyrim than it is to make a good DM.  I think that there are vastly fewer PnP RPG games being played than people would like to play simply because of the effort that goes into running a game, that most players are now lacking a DM.</blockquote>

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