Scott Thorne, a retailer, comments on recent events

[Dannyalcatraz]

Side note: Actually, flying cars are real and have been around for some time. They just are not and will never be a commercial success in our lifetime.

After all, we have enough accidents with regular cars now- imagine a city with an appreciable number of aircars, and one has an accident. Where is that debris going?

And imagine being an air traffic controller in that city!

 

[Chainsaw Mage]

virtual reality <=> flying cars
digital media replacing books <=> digital music replacing vinyl and CDs.

(Shrug) All I know is people have been predicting the death of paper since at least the 1960s. I'll believe it when I see it, no matter how many 20-year-olds confidently predict the book's demise.

 

[shadzar]

Agreed.

Agreed.

Wow good discussions die fast....only the good die young.

 

[BryonD]

I'm 41 and have no reason to be in a hurry for you to believe it.

 

[carmachu]

You're making the classic cum hoc ergo propter hoc statement. I'm not "throwing stuff against the wall". You are implying that there is a DIRECT, rather than INDIRECT, link between 4ed and the OGL. This is what you are saying.

You are also ignoring the traditional means of how others in the gaming field got their jobs. You are ignoring plenty of other considerations

And your ignoring evidence in front of your eyes.

[quout]
It was the talent of Mearls that was the primary draw, and I suspect had there been no OGL, Mearls would have eventually ended up at WoTC.

I would have to say my "evidence" is greater than yours, as I am at least looking at the history of how people got their jobs.
[/quote]

You can suspect whatever you like. Evidence, you have not provided. So the answer is none. The very fact that Mearls DID work for a popular OGL author shows exact that his talent did get noticed.

Prior to that it wasnt easy to get noticed. OGL changed that.

I don't dismiss it totally, but I dislike the whole "OGL Worship" I see where the license becomes more important or just as important as the game. And I think one negative of the OGL is that we've ended up going backwards. Instead of being creative the largest game publishers now sort of use a single base. I think if the 3e system didn't dominate we would have had stronger alternatives to the D&D system, like we had in the 80s and 90s.

Sure you are. You've pretty much dismissed it out of hand.

If we went "backwards", that isnt the fault of the OGL. One can lay it clearly at WOTC's feet for failure to both take advantage of the OGL when it was around, and then for trying to release the GSL as a replacement.

The fault isnt in the license, but in the publisher. Instead of panicing and trying to hit a reset, they should have used it and taken advantage of what it brought.

 

[GreyLord]

Fair enough.
But those examples were wildly speculative.
I can already show you people using e-readers and PDFs on IPads.


I'm not saying something that doesn't exist will spring into being. I'm saying something that is happening, as a reality, right now, will happen even more in the future.

Someone could have talked 25 years ago about flying cars as being an example of how they would never stop listening to their music on vinyl. And yet their example didn't stand in the way of reality.

An equivalent to your flying cars would be virtual reality and/or hologram based online shared space gaming. That would be awesome. But they may never happen.

virtual reality <=> flying cars
digital media replacing books <=> digital music replacing vinyl and CDs.

I know it's already been stated, but it needs restating. Flying cars have existed for decades now. They've been around since at least the late 80s when there were at least around 3 on the market (though the each cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and weren't sports cars that went fast...but they didn't have wings either and two of them could take off vertically out of traffic if you wanted. You also needed a PPL in order to fly them out of traffic I think...it was a limited number of people that actually wanted it...most preferred the sports car).

I think it's a century or more till paper goes away...IF it goes away. In the Western world it may go away for a while...until some major catastrophe destroys the digital age and we go back to the old fashioned forms of storage which are more durable and long lasting. In other nations...since the digital age hasn't really been strong there in regards to storage devices and other arenas...I imagine paper will be around even when the most of the Western world has gone to something else (IF they go to something else...like digital).

This has gone off topic now...hasn't it.

 

[BryonD]

I know it's already been stated, but it needs restating. Flying cars have existed for decades now.

This has gone off topic now...hasn't it.

Yes, we are way off topic.
But it is also not relevant to the tangent even.

Chainsaw Mage did not claim electronic media products do not exist, he claimed they would not replace books (actually he just inferred, but whatever), just as flying cars have not replaced conventional cars. The existence, much less how long that existence has been in place, has zero bearing on the actual question.
Everyone agrees ebooks and flying cars both exist.



Also, I don't think paper will go away any time soon.

I think e-books will replace books over time and I think it will happen faster in RPGs than in books at large. But people will still be printing out particular selections, character sheets, references, whatever, for a very long time to come.

 

[JohnRTroy]

And your ignoring evidence in front of your eyes.


You can suspect whatever you like. Evidence, you have not provided. So the answer is none. The very fact that Mearls DID work for a popular OGL author shows exact that his talent did get noticed.

Prior to that it wasnt easy to get noticed. OGL changed that.

No, it WAS easy to get noticed, as long as theres a market for gaming. There was always the equivalent of the farm team or the minor leagues when it came to game design. Dragon Magazine lead to a lot of people accepting jobs at TSR. Smaller game shops ended up providing a body of work that would allow people to get hired at TSR or WoTC. I can give you many examples like I did with people like Warren Spector, Roger Moore, etc.

The only single thing the OGL did was make it easier to both produce a more exact clone of D&D (with permission) or make supplemental products, and for existing WoTC staffers to branch out on their own. But the farm team or minor leagues already existed. The OGL in itself did not increase the number of people taking part in these markets, just shifted the locations and make-up of them.

I have yet to see solid evidence that the gaming market expanded under the OGL, in terms of numbers. From what I saw a lot of new publishers showed up but other publishers folded and some flamed out fast. Was the market for the RPG under the OGL bigger than it was in the 1970s-1990s? Again, the OGL is just a legal license. Most people don't give a crap about it, they either contribute to gaming as a hobby because they love it and/or want to make money writing for it. That's always existed, beyond the licenses.

I think e-books will replace books over time and I think it will happen faster in RPGs than in books at large. But people will still be printing out particular selections, character sheets, references, whatever, for a very long time to come.

It's not a question of whether "print will die", but which areas of print will be replaced. Clearly paper is being replaced in areas where it is conveinent--e-mail has replaced much correspondence, and newspapers are moving to on-line formats. You can also expect low-selling niche hobbies to move more towards on-line than you can with bestsellers--or to become extinct. And it will also depend on what new technologies come out that make it easier to read digital copies instead of printing out sheets.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

It's not a question of whether "print will die", but which areas of print will be replaced. Clearly paper is being replaced in areas where it is conveinent--e-mail has replaced much correspondence, and newspapers are moving to on-line formats. You can also expect low-selling niche hobbies to move more towards on-line than you can with bestsellers--or to become extinct. And it will also depend on what new technologies come out that make it easier to read digital copies instead of printing out sheets.

Currently, I'm part of a team helping an MD discuss the costs of going 100% paperless. It ain't gonna be cheap.

In the RPG industry- as with any kind of publishing- going paperless will lower the cost of entry for small companies or self-publishers. For all companies, it will reduce shipping costs, especially to remote areas. If someone in Ulan Bator, Mongolia has a connection capable of handling a pdf or other digital media format, it will be a LOT cheaper to get him your RPG via that pipeline.

However, digital-only changes the power of "browsing". I can't tell you how many RPGs I've picked up from hanging out in a store and looking over the product. I can tell you how many I've done the same way digitally- ZERO. Now, there are some retailers that let you "look inside" a digital book offering, but, to date, they depend upon someone else's idea of what they think would sell the book, which isn't necessarily what I'd look at.

 

[BryonD]

Currently, I'm part of a team helping an MD discuss the costs of going 100% paperless. It ain't gonna be cheap.

I absolutely agree. I'm not talking about a paperless society.

But I think recreational reading will continue the already happening shift to emedia and I think gaming will be on the front edge of that curve.

Society at large, and businesses are a different matter.

Obviously the big "paperless" office push of the 1990s was an absolute bust with virtually everyone (apparently) seeing the same result I did. That being that e-mail in particular just resulted in that much more stuff to print, whether you really needed it or not. Rather than reducing paper use, electronic communication sent it into hyperdrive.

But, in the past two to three years, as a consulting engineer, I have seen a clear decline in our paper usage. We still use a ton. But we are seeing a drift toward more and deliverables in pdf format. Regulators usually still want a dead tree copy. But most have gone from three copies to one copy and pdf. And many clients strongly prefer pdfs. Mostly because it just vastly more convenient to keep up with dozens of pdfs in a clean file system than it is to keep up with dozens of 4 inch binders. And you are not paying square footage costs for paper to sit on a shelf.

But, I do find myself printing the same 8 pages every six or eight weeks when a question comes up.

Paper will be around for a long long time.

And still, gaming will shift to more and more emedia sooner rather than later.