Ryan Dancey on Redefining the Hobby (Updated: time elements in a storytelling game)

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Whoa, whoa. White Wolf's Vampire game was very much a superhero game. It had a very cool setting, sure. But the mechanics were 100% "power up and smash". People hitting each other with manhole covers or hurled automobiles. "Soaking" a clip's worth of bullets. Punching someone through a wall, having a garou tear off an arm, and so on. Nature and Demeanor weren't really used that often, and many (most) games encourage players to pick behavioral traits anyway.

Just saying that WW's storyteller system, well, wasn't a system that--from a systems/mechanic standpoint--did all that much to encourage or enable storytelling.

Yeah, so what? I know there's a group out there that insists that people can only play the games encouraged by the rules, but White Wolf (among others) show otherwise.

This is especially the case in White Wolf, since so much focus is given in the DM, er, Storyteller advice into crafting the game AS a Chronicle.

Heck, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is explicitly about superheroes, and it has possibly the best of class advice for crafting a game that works as a story that's both episodic and hangs together in seasons.

White Wolf's success isn't because it lets players be vampire superheroes. Rifts did that years before. It succeeded because it married a topic to a style of play that had been a marginal sort of play previously. As we can see on this thread, suggesting that D&D players think about stories causes quite a few of them to freak the hell out.

 

[Zaruthustran]

Ryan Dancey makes some intriguing points. Basically, what if D&D were more like Warhammer Quest or Arkham Horror?

My group enjoys those games because everyone gets to be a PC/no one has to be the DM. It's perfect for those times when no one can DM because everyone is too busy with life/work/whathaveyou, and yet the whole group still can get together for a game.

A hybrid would be a game that had a guiding GM, but that gave the players a greater degree of influence over the course of the story. Say, something like the horror game that Piratecat mentioned a while back. Dread .

Anyone want to tackle this? In a true DM-less game, how do you handle NPCs?

Well, I think you nailed it. A DM-less RPG (in other words, games that are more open/expansive than a board game) would require a pretty sophisticated group of players. I'm not sure that's the route to go if the goal is to expand the playerbase.

 

[T. Foster]

Perhaps the biggest advantages of tabletop rpgs is that they're extremely cheap to play. Only 1 person in a group of 5-6 actually needs a copy of the rules, and beyond that all you need to play are pencils and paper (which it can be safely assumed everybody already has -- though you might need to buy a pad of graph paper for a buck or two) and dice (which varies by game -- back in the 80s most games game in boxes that included dice so assuming everybody was willing to share a single set that's no extra investment, some games use only six-sided dice which most households already have (or if not you can buy a set at the supermarket for ~$2), and even if every player in the group buys a full set of polyhedral dice we're still only taking, what, a one-time investment of $5 per person (confession: I haven't bought a set of polyhedral dice in ~15 years and have no idea what they actually go for nowadays)?). Sure it's possible (at least for most games) to buy assorted accessories (GM screens, characters sheets), supplements, adventures, and of course minis to the tune of $100+ a month, but none of that stuff is really necessary and it's perfectly possible to play the game (or at least most games) without any of it.

This is something that the rpg industry seems to have spent the last 20 years trying to change (or at least downplay) which, at least IMO, is ultimately a mistake as it obscures one of the few truly undeniable advantages rpgs have over pretty much all of their competition. Why not make the fact that for a single $40 investment (boxed set with ~100pp rulebook, intro adventure, character sheet blanks, and whatever dice are needed to play -- pretty much the same model we saw in the early-mid 80s, when rpgs were at ther peak of popularity) an entire group of people can be entertained for at least months, probably years (and possibly a lifetime...) into a selling point, or even the selling point?

I'm still playing with 1E AD&D rulebooks I bought close to 25 years ago, and have never given WotC a cent of my money (the last "Official D&D" product I purchased was sometime around 1993) but I'm still "supporting the hobby" by playing the game, talking about the game, introducing new people to the game, and increasing its visibility. I'm pretty sure that WotC has written me off as part of their customer-base (they'll make an occasional nostalgia-based appeal to try and lure me into the fold of the current edition, but as long as I'm not buying they're not listening to me), but why shouldn't they be holding people like me up as paragons of what the game is capable of? A single investment and you can still be having fun a quarter century later; no console game or MMORPG is ever going to match that!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A single investment and you can still be having fun a quarter century later; no console game or MMORPG is ever going to match that!

Why can't a console game do that?

 

[T. Foster]

Why can't a console game do that?

So you know a lot of folks who are still playing Adventure or Swordquest: Earthworld?

 

[Sundragon2012]

Sure, if you want to play a wizard that looks like a quarterback in a dress. Or you like watching gnomes run by going "choo choo!" and doing the locomation. Or if you really get a sense of heroic adventure by CaptainCrunch announcing "xp 2 low, loot sux" after you nail a difficult boss. Or you are forced to discard the coolest looking armor because no one will group with you unless you wear the Ugly Gray Breastplate of Plusses to Everything.

You've never player Elder Scrolls: Oblivion have you?

I don't know what you are referring to, but I wouldn't play crap like whatever you are referencing.



Sundragon

 

[Sundragon2012]

I, personally, haven't seen anything to convince me that they've meaningfully improved their offerings from the early days of the D20 license when they churned out virtually unedited schlock as fast as they could secure time on the printing presses. I consider their success to be predicated entirely on clever branding and saturation distribution of mediocrity. More recently they seem to have extended this strategy by securing popular, well-recognized licenses and then using those licenses to continue churning out their mediocrity.

The Conan RPG is excellent. It along with True20 from Green Ronin, is my D20 ruleset of choice. Its what D&D can be without magic glut. Its a great D20 system. A new version is coming out soon that promises further improvements. Runequest is quite good though different from D20 and is OGL like Conan so publishers can capitalize on this. Mongoose IMO is a matured company that is making excellent products with high production values and excellent support. The Conan line has great support and the writing is top notch. I was no fan of the Quintessential series, but that was a long time ago.

I would place the materials they have created in the last few years right up there with WoTC and Green Ronin. I get a lot more use out of recent Mongoose and Green Ronin materials than I do from WoTC these days. I am also looking forward to seeing what they do with Elric.



Sundragon

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So you know a lot of folks who are still playing Adventure or Swordquest: Earthworld?

Good lord, not Swordquest, are you kidding?

But Atari 2600 in general? You bet. There's a pretty substantial scene of videogamers owning and playing classic console games.

 

[Alnag]

Combined, they're part of the 10-12% that is not D&D or WW. Individually, they're each lucky if they have 1-2%.

Well let's pretend, that you are right, and these games have those 2%. How much is that in absolute numbers? Somebody probably knows more about this, but let's say we have 5 millions of players worldwide. (Just my wild guess, but still). Those 2% woud mean 100,000 players than.

Now compare that with those indie games... best one has sold how much? How many players acutally play those games? That is completely different league...

As far as I know, gamers go to GenCon. To see a continued, growing presence on the part of the indie folk both there, and at Origins, and at local cons... that means something.

As somebody already point out, the visitors of gamecon are not a good sample of the gamers out there. It is unnecessary activity of a gamer. Most of the causal gamers never visit this con or any other. But those casual gamers are pretty much the big base of buyers. If you will not appeal them... well, you might get your game hyped on forums or cons, but that is pretty much all.

They are also doing a ton of con organizing, i.e., local cons for the common gamer.

Are you sure, that common gamers visit cons? For what purpose?

I agree that it's maybe not a great model for the industry as it exists now. However, it could be a new model that's good for the hobby.

Hobby yes, industry I am not so sure about.

As for comparing anything to the D&D boom of the 70s-80s... it's an unfair comparison, IMO. You're talking about the birth of the entire hobby.

As far as I understand Ryan Dancey, he is speaking about rebirth of the hobby. Anything less would miss the point. So the comparison is important. Indie revolution is very small scale, very local and globaly unsuccesful. That would not save the industry. I am sorry...

Also imagine, that you would want to do those "one-man" publishing for like thousands or tens of thousands people. That would require different approach which I am worried the indies are not prepared to. They still sell in hundreds at the very best, which could be managed. That is not a model that can simply be just made larger.

 

[Delta]

Yeah. I see your point. But to be honest... D&D has the product for beginners. D&D Basic set Which would do the job nicely in 4 hours, I belive. The problem is, when you or anybody decide to begin with the game, he will not be offered this (in most cases) but PHB instead.

I also think that the major problems confronting modern D&D are the barrier to entry of new players (rules-wise) and the difficulty DM'ing. Simplifying the game would help both these problems (reduce classes, reduce skills and feats, reduce equipment and spells, nix AOOs and reduce special attack options, etc.). Failing that, a good introductory Basic set is a must.

But the problem with the recent "Basic" sets, like the one you link to, is that it seems that they cut out the personalized character-generation step, which is so much what hooks people on D&D that I think it's nigh-madness on the part of WOTC. To my understanding, the Basic set:

- Has 4 fixed characters to choose from.
- Has no character-generation capacity.
- Doesn't even have ability scores.

That's not D&D, and its lacking the whole major point that hooks people on D&D, and the experience is not transferable to D&D. You've got to have a Basic set with "real" D&D character generation (not pregenned characters, not templates) or you've missed the whole point of an RPG.

If WOTC finds it technically impossible to present "real" character generation in the context of a stripped-down Basic set, then that is a bright-red flashing sign that the game is simply far too irreducibly complicated. It must be simplified or Dancey's perceived death-spiral will be unavoidable.