Yep, I fully got that from your post and I tried to explain. I also gave a couple of examples such as combat and skill challenges and how they are off the mark that the game should be designed to target. Btw I am not saying that you are not having fun or that the game is not for you. I am saying that the future designs of D&D, if D&D is to stay as a tabletop rpgame should be optimized as a tabletop rpgame, that is all. My point of comparison or standard is not 3e in case you are suspecting this. I have yet to see a mass market game trully optimized for tabletop. And I believe this is so because of the lack of competition in the past. Now, with WoW the competition is more dire for the gamer's time and a tabletop game should provide the full flexibility to enjoy the advantages of the tabletop environment at their maximum: to lose nothing of this potential and exploit it 100%.
RSDancey replies to Goodman article (Forked Thread: Goodman rebuttal)
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Yep, I fully got that from your post and I tried to explain. I also gave a couple of examples such as combat and skill challenges and how they are off the mark that the game should be designed to target. Btw I am not saying that you are not having fun or that the game is not for you. I am saying that the future designs of D&D, if D&D is to stay as a tabletop rpgame should be optimized as a tabletop rpgame, that is all. My point of comparison or standard is not 3e in case you are suspecting this. I have yet to see a mass market game trully optimized for tabletop. And I believe this is so because of the lack of competition in the past. Now, with WoW the competition is more dire for the gamer's time and a tabletop game should provide the full flexibility to enjoy the advantages of the tabletop environment at their maximum: to lose nothing of this potential and exploit it 100%.
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.
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.
I'm not seeing how 4e's combat and skill challenges aren't optimized for tabletop play. They certainly seem that way to our group, which is to say they help provide an enjoyable gaming experience that is different and distinct from any online/CRPG experience.
I'd call MMO's a symptom. The root cause is a graying gamer population that's harder to assemble on a (frequent) regular basis, and simply has less time available to play.
Adult responsibilities are the root cause. MMO's neatly side-step them by allowing people to play whenever they can find the time.
Not optimized for a tabletop roleplaying game. The experience is still different than playing online but it has many a price to pay -for example the time some people complain about- and in comparison less more to offer. Moreover there are tabletop games, such as board games that they too offer a different environment than playing online. Which brings us back to focus on the tabletop roleplaying game -nor just tableop, neither just roleplaying game but the unique qualities of the combination of the two which are the exact qualities that should be developed in design.
The problem I see with 4e's combat philosophy -which is built around a board game environment: rpgames should be dynamic games. Everchanging games. 4e combat philosophy is totally different. It is build on the encounter idea. Each combat is one full encounter. When you play you think of encounters and what you did or what you can do in these encounters. The rule frames not only respect but are mostly limited in this type of design. For example the choices you have to make for your character creation-development and much thinking process evolves around this. After some time it tends to become repetitive. Because either you like it or not the rules were designed with this repetition in mind. And the game you are playing is all about these rules. I am not talking about the time encounters take here which may be another problem or price to pay. I was mostly trying to make you see the importance of the mind frame behind the design of a game and why the game should be redesigned with a different one if it wants to be a mass market tabletop game. It should struggle to optimize the basics, that will appeal to the casual gamer, not the hardcore one.
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billd91
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If that were the case, we'd expect to see declining league sports as well. Anybody got information on that?
This is why the game should not try to appeal to its traditional fandom but try to be an attraction for everyone, in other words the casual gamer. So to target its market for each generation.
How much of the casual gamer audience should they attempt to reach out to?
From the design of 4E, whether explicitly or implicitly, WotC may have possibly been trying to reach out to the MMORPG crowd. Though how successful they have been so far, is unknown.
If I was a kid today and went straight to MMORPGs like WoW, I don't know if I would even be attracted to pen and paper rpgs. Pen-and-paper rpgs may seem quite quaint in comparison to WoW, especially for kids with very short (or zero) attention spans.
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