So What IS Happening to Tabletop Roleplaying Games? Dancey & Mearls Let You Know!

At PAX East a panel took place entitled "What Is Happening to Tabletop Roleplaying Games?" It featured Ryan Dancey (CEO of Goblinworks which is producing the Pathfinder MMO, architect of the Open Gaming License, and one of the people who spearheaded D&D 3E), Luke Peterschmidt (CEO of Fun to 11), Derek Lloyd (owner of the game store 'Battleground Games and Hobbies'), Luke Crane (Tabletop Games Specialist at Kickstarter and RPG designer of Burning Wheel, Mouseguard and more), Matt McElroy (Marketing Director at DriveThruRPG/OneBookshelf and Onyx Path which currently handles WoD products) and Mike Mearls (senior manager of D&D Next). [threadcm]http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?354586-So-What-IS-Happening-to-Tabletop-Roleplaying-Games-Dancey-amp-Mearls-Let-You-Know![/threadcm]

It's well worth listening to the whole recording if you have an hour to spare, as it contains plenty of interesting summations of RPG publishing over the decades, plus a lot of discussion about how great Kickstarter is and why it's the latest of a series of industry expansions which included the advent of desktop pubishing, the Open Gaming License and d20 System License, and now Kickstarter. It also touches on the various times the RPG industry has almost died (from what Dancey says, the rise of World of Warcraft seriously hit the industry, and later surveys while he was at CCP working on Eve Online indicated that a lot of people playing these MMOs had once played tabletop RPGs but now played MMOs instead, not in addition to).

Ryan Dancey also goes into the various surveys from ICv2 over the last few years (those ones which have put Pathfinder as the world's leading RPG since 2010 or so, although he acknowledges that this isn't a great way of determining sales - they call a number of retailers and simply ask what their top five selling RPG products are within a given month; no numbers, just a ranking), which leads to an interesting exchange between him and Mike Mearls.

[pf]x[/pf]Dancey: ...some of those games we talk about being mid-market kind of games, they're on this list. Some of the games that are coming out of Kickstarter are on this list... you know, FATE is on this list, Exalted is on this list.. and then we've got this classic duel between Pathfinder and D&D. I wish I could stand up here today and say, like, you know, any given game you ask me and I can tell you how much it's sold, sales, I have no idea, it's impossible to tell. Y'know anecdotally I can tell you that most of the games on this chart, with the exception of Pathfinder and D&D, they're probably not selling more than 20,000 units of whatever their core product is, and some of them are probably selling less than 10. It's hard to say, especially with games that might have a lot of supplements and add-on products, what the total volume is for any one of these games. And ICv2 lumps them all under one category so every sale of Mutants & Masterminds is in that one line, not just the core books.

But here's the thing I want you to see... some of these games are the classic games, the games that we've seen, y'know, for four decades, and some of these games are relatively brand new games that no one's ever seen before, and they change. So the thing that was really interesting to me is that if we had looked at this data from the 90s - and I have data that's kind of similar to this that was collected by an out-of-print magazine called Comics & Games Retailer - and if you just looked at the top five games from like 1990 to 1995 they were essentially the same five games every month, month after month after month. It was very, very predictable. The frothiness, the rate at which these games change and appear on these lists and go away is new. And certainly the fact that D&D is not the number one game on this list is definitely new, that has never happened before in decades. So, there are some weird things going on in this market. We don't have any quantitative data, I can't put a number on it, but we have this kind of qualitative sense that there has been change, that it's easier to get success but it's harder to keep that success.

Mearls: Oh, I think what's interesting about this graph if you were to take the word "sales" off - I can't see the graph [something]... there's actually [something] well who's releasing the most supplements this actually maps almost perfectly to that measure. And I think the big change we're seeing is in the 90s there was a sort of expected tempo of .. for a tabletop roleplaying game you expected every month that you played Mage or Werewolf or D&D or some of the D&D settings, every month there's a new book. And what we're seeing now is that's not really, no longer the case for a wide variety of reasons. Really, outside .. I realise there's only one or two companies that are still able to do that ... we're not seeing the book-a-month pubishing pattern that we saw ten years ago. And I think that's one of the real big disruptions, where, you know, and there's a lot of questions and is that a good thing for the industry, is it a bad thing for the industry, and what does it actually mean for the ongoing tabletop hobby.

Dancey: And I think, one of the things you mentioned to me before the panel, too, Mike, was that this is really myopic, it's really only going to talk about retail sales, it's not capturing book trade, it's not capturing online, it's not capturing Kickstarter, it's a really myopic slice of the data.

The conversation continues amongst the panel about Kickstarter and the way companies use it to produce sequential different products rather than extended product lines - new games, not expansions.

Dancey: Yeah. Ok, so here's our last topic, which I suspect a fairly significant number of people in this room would like to hear Mike talk about.

(A short sequence of show-of-hand questions establishes that of the people there in the room about an equal number have played Pathfinder and D&D in the last month).

Dancey: OK, so here's my giant spiel. I do not work for Paizo Publishing. I'm not a member of the Paizo Publishing staff, and I'm not here to represent Pathfinder. I'm just moderating this panel. So, Mike is now going to debate an empty chair [laughter]... so, and, prior to this panel I sent the slides round to everybody and I said 'Hey Mike, this is kinda how I see, like, the next three years of life in the, at the top of the chart. Two big, muscular sluggers are gonna duke it out and when that's done one of those guys is gonna be laying on the mat'. And Mike said "I don't see it that way", so Mike, why don't you say what you told me about your theory.

[dnd]x[/dnd]Mearls: Yeah, so this kinda goes back to what I was talking about earlier about the change and about how we look at the ongoing support for D&D and how I think this ins actually interacting with tabletop games in general. So I kinda have this theory I developed, I call it the Car Wars theory. So back in 1987 when I was 12 I bought Car Wars, it was the game I bought that month, and it had a vehicle design system. And I spent hours and hours and hours building new Car Wars vehicles and drawing maps and just playing with all the things around the game but very rarely able to actually play the game, because in order for me to play the game I had to get my parents to drive me to a friend's house and then get that friend to actually want to play Car Wars and then teach him all the rules and all that other stuff, right? And in addition to having Car Wars, and D&D and other stuff, I had my Nintendo and I had my Apple, too. And I bought new video games at about the same rate, maybe once a month if I did chores or I had a little part time job, I'd get maybe one new game a month.

What has changed now is that a game like Car Wars can work very well if I'm not getting a new constant stream of games. Because I have all this time wherer I want to be gaming but I can't play a game, so I'll do all the stuff that exists around the game. But now thanks to, like, this phone... [something] smartphones, tablets, Steam, uh, XBox Live, PSN, I can buy games whenever I want. I mean, I was at the airport yesterday and I was bored so I bought Ten Million for my iPhone and I just started playing. Because I have other games on my phone, but I thought, nah, I'm sick of the games I have, I'm just gonna buy a new one. That would have been perfect time, back in the 80s, to like work on my D&D campaign, or read that month's D&D expansion, or work on new designs for my, uh, for for Car Wars. But what's happening is we have so many new games coming in that the amount of time that one game can take up without having you actually play that game, like World of Warcraft where you just log in and play, or you do things like in the auction house, thta's part of play, right, trying to get resources, you're selling stuff for actual money that's helping you play the game.

I believe that's what's really happening to tabletop roleplaying, is that it used to be a hobby of not playing the game you want to play. And there are so many games now that you can play to fill all those hours of gaming, you can actually game now, and that what's happening is that RPGs needed that time, we, a GM or DM needed that time to create the adventure or create a campaign, a player needed that time to create a character, allocate skill ranks and come up with a background, and come up, you know, write out your three-page essay on who your character was before the campaign. That time is getting devoured, that time essentially I think is gone, that you could play stuff that lets you then eventually play a game or you can just play a game. And people are just playing games now.

And what we're really doing with D&D Next is we're really looking at thriving and surviving in that type of market. If you've playtested the game, you see we've run much simpler with the mechanics, things move much faster when you play... one of our very early things was was to say, look, I was playing Mass Effect 1 or 2 at the time. I can complete a mission in Mass Effect in about an hour and a half. So why can't I complete an adventure in D&D in that time? Why does it take me 4, 8, 12 hours just to get from page one of the adventure to the end? I mean, yeah, you can have huge epic adventures but I can't do it in less than four hours.

Dancey: You didn't want to have 20 minutes of fun packed in 4 hours.

Mearls: Exactly, exactly, yeah. And so it's looking at the train and saying, well, things have changed, and tabletop roleplaying in a lot of ways hasn't changed with the times. We've been doing the same thing, the same way, that we were doing back in the 80s. I mean, the game mechanics have been refined but really until indie games [something] no one had taken a look at the core essence of what makes a tabletop roleplaying game tick and taken it apart and rebuilt it. And so in a lot of ways with D&D, and you know Ryan has the slide, that's really not how we see it at all because for me that boxing match, it isn't D&D against any tabletop roleplaying game, it's D&D versus the entire changing face of entertainment, of how a tabletop roleplaying game... that's the best thing you can do with your friends. But what about when you're home alone, or when you're online, or when you're waiting in line at the airport and you just want something on your smartphone. The big question for, specifically for D&D is, if you're a D&D fan, what can we do to fill that time in a way that's engaging and fun for you? To take those settings and characters and worlds, the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, or whatever, and bring those to life for you in a way that we haven't been able to before. Because in the past it's always been.. we have a new setting, we have Eberron, we're gonna do the 300-page book, and it's gonna be for the TRPG and that's where it' gonna begin, and that's where it's gonna end. All of our back-catalogue and settings, if we're not publishing it for the RPG line, are we doing anything with them, probably not, that's it, all we do is the TRPG. And so for us, it's really been looking at the entertainment, not just tabletop roleplaying, but entertainment as a whole, everything that people do now to engage themselves in stories, thinking where can D&D thrive within that terrain? And what can we do, starting with the tabletop roleplaying game, to make it more acessible, to get that new generation of players in. And even the current generation who are strapped for time and have a million other options, what can we do to live within that environment?

The too-long-didn't-read version of that, I think (and this is my own interpretation of what Mike Mearls was saying) is that much of the stuff we used to enjoy around an RPG we don't do any more, and we do other entertainment-related things with that time instead. So D&D (as in its settings and characters) is focusing on doing those other entertainment things rather than just being a tabletop roleplaying game - the goal, obviously being that "D&D" as a brand flourishes. And, further, that that means it doesn't matter to them what Paizo is doing with Pathfinder, because D&D doesn't need to be the top-selling tabletop RPG (not that I'm saying it won't be - I expect it will be again come next year, though time will tell) as long as D&D as an overall entertainment property is doing a whole bunch of things.

 

[Li Shenron]

I'm just going to say that IMHO making the minimum mandatory work as small as possible is the way to go, simply because you can always do more if you want.

If you have published adventures and a system that is light enough so that you barely have to read an adventure once before running the game, still nothing prevents you from devoting weeks to write your own highly detailed adventure. But if you don't have published adventures, or if the system is heavy and requires you to study an adventure and do more preparation work, you just have to do it.

If you have rules that let you run a combat in 15 minutes and a reasonable adventure in an evening, nothing prevents you to add extra rules to make combat more complicated, or to still design a long saga that takes a year to finish. But if you have the basic combats last an hour and a half, it's harder to fix it the other way around.

If you have easy monster and NPC creation rules, so that you can 10 minutes while waiting for the train to design a new monster on your smart phone, nothing stops you from taking a whole weekend to design an entire ecology of monsters. But if the rules require 2 hours to make a mid-level NPC or monster, then you really have no choice.

I think Mearls is on the right track with this, he's simply acknowledging that D&D has to be flexible and adapt to the little time that a lot of people have available nowadays, either because they are 20 years older with jobs and families, or because they have many more interests/hobbies to pursue, or because the younger generations maybe just have a shorter attention span. The lucky ones who still have plenty of times don't have any disadvantage from a light and flexible system, they are just going to do more stuff in the same amount of time.

 

[Ahnehnois]

For me, much of what is being described by folks here as too much work/time is what distinguishes an RPG. I play them because of that, not despite it.

I think it's that rpgs are self-driven. You can make whatever characters and whatever scenario you want. As with most things in life, the more you put into it the more you're likely to get out of it. But how exactly you invest your time is customizable to what interests you personally (as opposed to most hobby games where everyone is trying to get better at doing what the game designers want them to).

 

[RyanD]

A lot of great comments in this thread - I'm glad people found something interesting to consider out of the panel at Pax East! Hopefully we'll be able to do it again in the future!

 

[Nagol]

Of course that's true. But are you telling me that you haven't watched a game and seen a bunch of things the GM put in there that could have been cut to make the game flow better/faster?

Like having 12 combat encounters stand between the PCs and the bad guy, instead of 3?

Or wasting time hex crawling across a map to get to the next city where the real adventure is and as it turned out, the only thing that happened was an encounter with orcs?

There are still editorial lessons a GM can take from how TV shows handle pacing, though obviously, not everything is applicable.

There are certainly things a GM could take out to make the story that did play out in the end have gone faster/more smoothly, but most of those things are branch points where the story could have altered substantially compared to the story that did play out in the end.

If there are not substantial consequences and the table isn't having fun doing what they're doing then sure the GM could use some pointers on adjusting play.

However, a primary audio medium dealing with multiple participants who have input on crafting each scene coupled with an overt mechanical resolution system will never be as narratively smooth as an edited TV episode for the same amount of content.

 

[SteveC]

Just wanted to say what a great thread this was: thanks for posting it. Thanks for giving this great info!

 

[Phototoxin]

At the end of the day, people can get more reward easier and faster from computer games. However computer games are never as flexible as the human mind (well not until our Skynet overlords become sentient..)

A big issue is the view of them as 'games' like monopoly, in monopoly it doesn't matter how much of a douche the car player is because it's a 'linear' game. Whereas in D&D that douche can ruin everyone else's game.

I think the emphasis needs to be on socialisation and creativity as well as the gaming aspect.

 

[Yora]

Interesting what Mearls says about the 1-hour game. Because I came to just the same conclusions a few months ago while I was browsing around for GMing advice for the new Sword & Sorcery campaign I was about to start.
My current group is all university students with no kids, who live in the same city with excelent public transportation long into the night, and even with just four players we managed to get together only about once per month. I had a great idea for an epic campaign, but even if we keep playing for the next two years, it could take ages for the great story actually becoming apparent and we may get only 20 session in all. There simply is no time for long campaigns that go for years, even under ideal conditions.
So I scrapped almost all my plans for the big conspiracies and slow buildup and go straight to the juicy parts of the story. I think the standard model for campaigns that most GMs have in mind is still that of a novel or even a novel series. But I think we could really use more "public awareness" for campaigns that follow the short story anthology style instead. We don't have to play out the whole adventuring career of the PCs. You can very much trim it down and focus on the most awesome and incredible tales in the long story of a heroes life. And that might even be more fun.

I don't think I want to play or run 5th Edition, but if this is something that is part of the brand strategy for D&D, I think they might actually be able to catch up with Pathfinder again. Because Pathfinder simply is based firmly on a system that is not meant to go that way. Instead of two brands competing for the same niche, having them aim at different directions should be much more beneficial.

 

[Blackwarder]

I agree with him that an RPG company trying to compete with large multimedia properties like movies and comics and TV is out of the core competency, as he puts it - or as I put it earlier, those things aren't D&D's strengths. I disagree that nobody has time for solo engagement with RPGs - that's exactly what [non-multiplayer] video games are. We have plenty of time for solo activities. What he refers to as "lonely fun" is very common these days - but it's electronically facilitated, not book-facilitated. The tech's changed, but people still have "lonely fun" (that sounds dirty!)

That analogy is flawed, a better one will be spending time coding the video game in your "lonely fun" time.

Personally, I've seen this coming a couple of months ago, the intent to make the Prep time easier and shorter and making the game much easier to run and move forward is a great step forward in my eyes.

I don't get all the anguish about Mike's comments of taking D&D to the next level as a brand, I wish they'll succeed, I don't read comics but I love the Marvel movies and TV show, and the cross media interaction is, IMO, only add to the enjoyment I get from each of them and I would love if we get the same thing for D&D.

I've watch the LoTR movies countless times, I've read the books several times and while searching for information about the release schedule for the first Hobbit movie I came across The One Ring RPG game so I bought it just for the cross pollution and to get my hands on another source of LoTR goodness.

My point is, that taking D&D to the next level will do good to everyone, it will draw new players to the hobby, it will give us more venues to get out D&D fix and it will allow us to interact with friends and family who are non-RPG players with D&D related things.

Warder

 

[Li Shenron]

For me, much of what is being described by folks here as too much work/time is what distinguishes an RPG.

There is work and there is work however...

When I was DMing regularly in the 3e era, I was "working" on designing my own adventures and (short-lived) fantasy settings, or building around existing published adventures. But most of it was "work" that I did in my head or with just pen-and-paper, while travelling by bus to work, in bed before going asleep, in the tub while taking a bath... That is edition-indipendent and rules-free work I can still do as much as I want.

Then there was mechanical work. I was never into creating monsters, but I definitely wanted to design NPCs or slap class levels onto existing monsters, and it took dedicated time where I needed to sit down at a table, consult books, roll dice and make calculations. I also loved traps, and I had to do some mechanical work on those too. It wasn't bad because I could still choose to stop when I had enough, and use ready material for the rest.

OTOH, I stopped DMing and playing around where 4e came out, because I realized I couldn't keep up with system mastery anymore. I hadn't played for a few months and I had already started to forget 3e rules, and the idea that I had to go back and study them again just to run the game, or worse learn a new edition just as complicated, made me quit. Those seemed to be systems that either I can afford to play regularly, or I can't keep up well enough. My co-players were tired as well, too cumbersome systems, too many rules-checking at the table, too much time spent to make sure we were playing "correctly". And with 4e there was the feeling that the new trend was to update the rules continuosly... no way!

That's why I'm looking at 5e with lots of hope. It's not as simple as it could be, but definitely much lighter at the table, more importantly for me than being lighter between sessions, because at least I can choose the latter but I can't choose the first.

 

[Jhaelen]

I have seen many a game of Magic: the Gathering and chess played in complete silence.

I believe you, but I've never experienced a CCG being played in complete silence; to give just one example: there's almost always rules questions coming up that need to be discussed. For Chess as an abstract two-player game with a fixed ruleset that's been established for decades, it's far more likely.

To generalize: Other games allow interaction. RPGs require and reward it.

I suppose it depends on the game but there's also plenty of boardgames that require and/or reward interaction. The main reason RPGs require interaction is the GM role: Since not all of the rules are codified, the GM must supply rules for anything that isn't covered. But many (multi-player) board games feature trade or diplomatic actions, so even in games where it's not a requirement per se, in order to be successful you typically cannot ignore player interaction.
Talking about 'Diplomacy': Imho, it's a prime example of a board game that effectively requires player interaction. So it's not the exclusive province of RPGs.