RSDancey replies to Goodman article (Forked Thread: Goodman rebuttal)

[xechnao]

The mechanical framework used for combat has nothing to with it.

It has because this is what sucks up gameplay and gametime. It is the biggest one requirement to play 4e regarding the time and effort you invest as a player. Rules, gameplay etch

 

[xechnao]

Well darn I guess I'll have to tell my party of a Vampiric Genie who rides a giant lizard and seeks dark knowledge in hopes of a brighter future, a sea born artificier whose on a quest to survive a group of assassins and revenge his fathers death, a middle aged elf who is still searching for his fallen lost love after 200 years of failed attempts, and the savage dark elf who is looking for the truth behind the destruction of her home city, that they can't infiltrate the one of the cities highest connected dancers in the search for a stolen statue, which was promised for a Merchant daughter's wedding. After all Wotc failed to make a game that inspired people...

Are you a newbie or an old gamer? And even if you are a newbie for everyone like you there will be 1000 to log on some MMO server with their friends. So what do you say? Is it because tabletop is a worse environment?

 

[Cadfan]

D&D isn't going to become a crunch-lite game as long as D&D is big business. As long as D&D is the ten ton gorilla of the RPG world it will maintain a business model in which it sells things to people. One of the easiest things to sell to people is crunch. Therefore, D&D will have a lot of crunch.

That doesn't mean that you can't make the crunch more efficient or user friendly. But its going to be there.

 

[xechnao]

Who is a casual gamer in the context of role-playing games? The only meaningful definition I can come up with is a spouse and/or friend who plays RPG's for purely social reasons (ie, they like the people, not the game).

Also, I'm suspicious of calls to ignore the traditional fan base. Should operas be more like Broadway musicals?

Casual gamers are most of the million gamers that have played the game when it was at its peak. The game almost definitely will never reach that peak again but if it is to maintain itself for the very long run at some acceptable mass market level it should be reinvented as more casual.
Traditional things that should need to go could be things like the absolute emphasis on a tokens rules structure (magic weapons, spells, powers, abilities etch) that a digital environment does better. This thing sells better to a loyal fan base but as this base grows older and older no one will take its place.

 

[xechnao]

D&D isn't going to become a crunch-lite game as long as D&D is big business. As long as D&D is the ten ton gorilla of the RPG world it will maintain a business model in which it sells things to people. One of the easiest things to sell to people is crunch. Therefore, D&D will have a lot of crunch.

That doesn't mean that you can't make the crunch more efficient or user friendly. But its going to be there.

What I am saying that it wont be a big business for long if it remains like this. Cause people will not play tabletops anymore if tabletops wont adjust for accessibility to the natural advantages of the tabletop environment.

A rules lite game, if done well, with few abstract rules, done well -which means that any artificial (artificial as for whatever does not make any real world sense) elements should be kept to a minimum- could provide a powerful structure for gamers to naturally express any roleplaying situation or option in the most solid way. Am I asking too much? Well, I think I have to becasue it seems this where the competition is pushing for. Anyway, I do not think it is impossible. It needs research & development but it can be done.

 

[TheFindus]

I asked him to expand on the "forces of tearing apart RPG's" throw away line and this is what I got:

Quote:
MMOs are destroying the tabletop gaming networks. First and foremost, that's the root cause of all the other problems. This leads to several additional really bad things, like the best talent in design going to MMOs and not staying on the tabletop, and the acquistion engine for new players being almost completely obliterated. The growth for a "fantasy gaming nerd" now is Club Penguin -> Runequest -> World of Warcraft -> niche MMO. There's no point where they leave that track and pick up "TRPG" as a gaming option.

In addition to the monster eating the network, there are other factors at work as well that individually would be damaging but perhaps not ultimately fatal in the way MMOs are. Neighborhood culture is breaking down and kids are less able to group spontaneously but instead follow parent-programmed activity cycles. The D&D game has failed to produce a widely success mass market introductory product. Gender stereotypes which reduce the play of women are still afflicting the hobby. The accumulation of Grognards has reached epidemic levels so that new people to the hobby are likely to hear vastly more pessimism about how great things used to be than how great things are. The inflated costs of inventory carry have destroyed the fundamental business model of the full-line game store (despite a 400% increase in top line revenues in the past 15 years...)

Tabletop RPG as a hobby faced an inflection point right about 1990. Down one path it could have become something like the model train hobby - high end products purchased by upscale customers willing to support a niche hobby for the next 30+ years as they aged through their peak earning years and into retirement, and down another path it could try to stay relevant in the 16-24 year old demograhic that had been its natural home since inception. Unfortuantely, it picked the latter not the former, and when something came along which was simply vastly more suited to that age demographic, TRPG as a business had no possible response.

(It could still become a Model Railroad industry, btw. That door is far from closed.)

Unfortunately, @bcwalker, there's no fixing this. Instead, what's going to happen is that MMO are going to continue to evolve until they reach the point of being able to deliver a fidelity of experience better than the tabletop ever could - and then they'll keep evolving past that point to deliver experiences we can only just now begin to imagine. The technical limitations people often cite are going to just be blown away by the combination of Moore's Law and a business model that is about a million times more profitable than the tabletop model. Our kids will play in virtual worlds that would seem like hallucinations to us today - Clarke's Law will obtain, and this advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic in a lot of ways.

For people in my age demographic, we'll keep playing RPGs (when we can find the time and find a group, and find the interest) but there will never be a viable new generation of gamers coming up behind us.

Sometimes I think that Mr. Dancey's views are just too negative. It seems to me that he exaggerates a bit. I would also like to see some concrete facts to support his theory that the the roleplaying hobby is absolutely doomed.


First of all, does anybody have the numbers that support the claim that actually less and less people play roleplaying games? Comparing, lets say 1982, 1990 or 2000 to 2009?
I would really like to see these numbers, because for me, the roleplaying hobby has always been a very niche kind of hobby and the number of people who play these kind of games are small compared to the players of, lets say, Settlers of Catan or WoW.


Is there actually less money made with roleplaying games comparing 1982 or 1990 or 1995 to today in the entire roleplaying industry? Again, I would really like to see somebody post some numbers before becoming too dramatic about it.


Do online-games really destroy pen and paper roleplaying games or push them aside? I think we are talking about two different kinds of games here. In WOW there is no roleplay, it is not a roleplaying game. DnD is.
Is there a significant amount of people who would belong to the roleplaying game target group but are not playing roleplaying games but play online games instead? Again, where are the numbers to support this?


It would be strange that we fill page after page about this issue without having something real to base this discussion on.
And if there are no such numbers: What is the basis for Mr. Dancey's claim?

I have a problem to understand "Neighborhood culture is breaking down", for example. Do kids not have a circle of friends anymore? My kids do. So do all of the kids they go to school with.
And how should WotC be able to create a "widely success mass market introductory product", if RPGs have always been a niche product? It just is not "cool" to play DnD. Never was. Not here in Germany and not over there.

It also seems to me that Mr. Dancey does actually support the spread of pessimism towards the latest edition of DnD with his comments. Why complain about it then?

Also, the miniature train hobby, which seems to be the way Mr. Dancey wants our hobby to go, has a lot of problems: Maerklin, one of the world's most famous miniature train manufacturing companies, declared bancrupcy only recently. Now that's a hobby that is going down the drain. That makes me think it is not a very good idea to go that route.

But: I agree with him very much on the fact that eventually, computers will be able to generate worlds in which full-blown roleplay will be possible. Something less than described in the Otherworld novels, but believable if not realistic nonetheless. Maybe then we will all be playing virtual roleplaying games on our computer. But even then, they will still be roleplaying games, which is what this game is about and what distinguishes it from other games. And what is so bad about that?

 

[cdrcjsn]

What I am saying that it wont be a big business for long if it remains like this. Cause people will not play tabletops anymore if tabletops wont adjust for accessibility to the natural advantages of the tabletop environment.

Who says they aren't? Power cards, collectible figs, sponsored game store events, all these cater to a tabletop experience. With that said, people right now are playing D&D with virtual tabletop software and finding that the experience is very comparable to a traditional tabletop. It would be foolish of WotC to ignore the online game demographic and concentrate only on those that play on the traditional tabletop environment.

A rules lite game, if done well, with few abstract rules, done well -which means that any artificial (artificial as for whatever does not make any real world sense) elements should be kept to a minimum- could provide a powerful structure for gamers to naturally express any roleplaying situation or option in the most solid way. Am I asking too much? Well, I think I have to becasue it seems this where the competition is pushing for. Anyway, I do not think it is impossible. It needs research & development but it can be done.

Such systems already exist. D&D tried to do similar systems in the past (dragonlance saga rules), but people just weren't interested.

People want crunch. People want exciting combat. D&D gives it to them. If people want something with less fighting and less rules, then there are already other games around that can cater to them. But most people want the exciting combat.

 

[Alikar]

Are you a newbie or an old gamer? And even if you are a newbie for everyone like you there will be 1000 to log on some MMO server with their friends. So what do you say? Is it because tabletop is a worse environment?

I'm neither a new or an old gamer. I've been gaming for only 8 years and quite infrequently before 4th edition came out. Infact your stab at MMO players is odd too since everyone in my gaming group plays MMOs, but as plays PPRPGs. One of our players used to only play MMOs, but now also plays a number of PPRPGS with us. So I have seen that the rise of MMOs has only increased our players not decreased them.

I've also noticed your avoiding your core premise that Wotc failed to make an RPG that you can't have fun in. Its just a different rule set. Heck I'm sure I could make an interesting and dynamic fantasy world based on using a quarter to determine fate. It wouldn't be as interesting rules wise, but there is no reason the story couldn't be good.

 

[xechnao]

Who says they aren't? Power cards, collectible figs, sponsored game store events, all these cater to a tabletop experience. With that said, people right now are playing D&D with virtual tabletop software and finding that the experience is very comparable to a traditional tabletop. It would be foolish of WotC to ignore the online game demographic and concentrate only on those that play on the traditional tabletop environment.

These do not help for the entry level. The more things you need to successfully play the game the more you are losing its entry point.

Such systems already exist. D&D tried to do similar systems in the past (dragonlance saga rules), but people just weren't interested.

People want crunch. People want exciting combat. D&D gives it to them. If people want something with less fighting and less rules, then there are already other games around that can cater to them. But most people want the exciting combat.

I believe you can do a game that can focus on exciting combat and exciting fighting with what I am talking about. I sort of envision it like what the effects of the crunch you are talking about only that it will come out more naturally -it wont be something artificial based on an artificial structure you need to track or to calculate to figure out how to implement the mechanics: it will have to be more immediate and natural to our imagination as I say.

 

[Set]

Also, I'm suspicious of calls to ignore the traditional fan base. Should operas be more like Broadway musicals?

Mathematically, it seems brilliant.

1) D&D 3E appeals to the 1% of the people currently playing it, and apparently does not appeal to the 99% who do not play D&D.

2) If we make D&D 4E very different, so much so that the 1% who liked it don't like it, then, logically, the 99% who *weren't* playing D&D will love it and rush out and buy 99x more copies of the game than we've ever sold before to that 1%!

3) Profit!

Ideally, a 5E would have multiple types of characters, each using different mechanics, to capture an even larger segment of the potential playerbase. Instead of everyone functioning on a three tier 'daily, per encounter and at will' scheme, different classes and roles would function differently tactically, with some being resource-management base, some being 'all day long' based, and some using other schema entirely.

We could call one a 'Warlock,' and it could be an 'all day long' sort of character, while another could be called a 'Wizard' and have a finite number of spell slots changeable daily, and another could be called a 'Psion' and have the ability to micromanage individual power uses via different gradations of expenditure of some finite resource pool we'll call 'power points.' Other classes could have different sorts of situational adjustments, so that a 'Rogue' might be able to outdamage many other classes, but only if certain pre-conditions are met, and these pre-conditions would vary from class to class, with 'Scouts' getting bonuses when fulfilling another condition, 'Rangers' getting bonuses against certain types of target, etc., etc.

It will be brilliant! There could be classes to appeal to each different style of play!