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Message: <blockquote data-quote="carmachu" data-source="post: 4837780" data-attributes="member: 34534">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.</blockquote>

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