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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Callahan09" data-source="post: 7653533" data-attributes="member: 6721803">I just don't know that I agree with the premise that people aren't putting as much "alone-time" into their RPGing experience because they have "more options" now than they did in the 80's.  There were movies, videogames, computers, arcades, books, toys, and all kinds of other things that were available to pass the time back then add there are now.  People either want to devote time to reading and prepping their RPG materials or they have other things they would rather do with that time.  Same was true then as it is now, for me.  In 1987 I was devoting more time to trying to complete Super Mario Bros, and riding my bicycle, than I did trying to read and prepare D&D stuff, though I spent some time on that as well.  These days I spend far more time on it than I ever have in the past.Is Mearls talking explicitly about multimedia as way of keeping the D&D brand at the front of our attention? It seems that way, but why would that be important to us as RPGers who are interested in D&D for the RPGing? That's a fine way to get new people into the hobby, by making quality entertainment in media that reaches a broader audience, but you've still got to have a game that people want to devote their time to! So the concern should be: how do we make spending time with the RPG materials themselves appealing to people even when they aren't actively with a play group? I think the materials themselves should be fun to "play with" outside of the game itself.His example of Car Wars makes this obvious... to be sure, he spent his time alone generating custom play materials for that game because doing so was fun in and of itself, considering he implies he almost never got to play the game in the first place.Of course some people will never want to spend their time doing that.  It all comes down to personal tastes about what's fun and how creative and imaginative you are.An RPG is in a lot of ways a toolkit for expressing your creativity.I don't think RPGers are concerned with a multimedia problem.  We just need to be presented with effective tools that are fun to use and allow us to express and share our creativity.So why even mention to a room full of RPGers (or at least seem to imply, unless we are all mistaken about what he was trying to say) that we have an attention deficit problem that can be cured by multimedia endeavors to fill our non-gaming time with D&D?  We aren't concerned with D&D, only Wizards of the Coast is, and as far as I could tell this wasn't an investor's meeting, we are concerned with having an RPG product on the market that will be worth spending our time and money on.</blockquote>

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