Tabletopocalypse Now - GMS' thoughts about the decline in the hobby

[SteveC]

My reaction to this is: what companies had any sort of releases other than the ones listed here?

I mean, we have D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader before Dresden Files. What were the other major releases, period, during this timeframe?

I guess what I'm saying is that the sky isn't exactly falling yet.

--Steve

 

[KeepFlying]

My reaction to this is: what companies had any sort of releases other than the ones listed here?

I mean, we have D&D, Pathfinder, Warhammer Fantasy and Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader before Dresden Files. What were the other major releases, period, during this timeframe?

I guess what I'm saying is that the sky isn't exactly falling yet.

--Steve

Another release? ICONS. Though, this is a self-serving comment.

 

[Umbran]

The problem with the site numbers is that they don't generally count active members, just total members.

Correct. EN World's 95K+ includes everyone who as ever registered - including spammers and folks who haven't posted in years. Active members are, iirc, in the single-digit-percentage of the total - it depends on what you call "active"...

So, the message board community population is in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, while WotC was suggesting the overall gamer population was more like a million, last I heard.

 

[pawsplay]

Just spotted this:



Ummm, what? The online gaming community is smaller now than in the past? Hasn't En World practically doubled in size in the past five years? I thought I saw somewhere something like 90k members. WOTC's site is ginormous.

How has the online community gotten smaller?

It just looks smaller to GMS because he is moving away from it.

 

[MerricB]

The thing that makes the stats on BGG interesting is that we [know[/i] they had 60,000 active members (who visited the site) over the course of a single month, out of their 250K signed-up members.

Cheers!

 

[Mercurius]

Please dont compare real games like chess, and checkers, to a published IP like Dungeons and Dragons.

No offense, but....
I think its important to point out, the main differance between a game like chess and D&D publications, is that publishing companies dont design games to be played forever (thats why I dont call D&D a "real" game).
Publishers produce books about games and then design the books to become obsolete, as soon as possible. This is done so they can sell more books.

This seems to be an overly pessimistic outlook, as if RPG companies have a similar mentality as car manufacturers or electronics makers. But most RPG companies are run by gamers, by people who love to game; Hasbro may be an exception, even its subsidiary WotC; but I would be surprised if anyone within the Dungeons & Dragons didn't love to play D&D.

Your view implies that the makes of D&D 4E deliberately made it a bad game, that they designed flaws into it that they can fix. I highly doubt that this is the case. This doesn't mean that there isn't a bottom line factor to WotC--there certainly is--but it doesn't come through the design of the game itself, it comes through what is produced and when.

I daresay that nobody designed games to be played forever. The rules for all those classic games I mentioned evolved over centuries. And for all we know, centuries from now, chess may be virtually unrecognizable to us.

And there is nothing preventing anyone from using the OD&D rules- assuming they have a copy- 3000 years from now. (And they'd better invite diaglo.)

Your first paragraph is key: D&D is not any particular version of the game, but the whole "living currrent" itself, from the first stirrings of inspiration in the minds of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, to D&D Insider and beyond. In a similar sense that when we ask, "What is human civilization?" we cannot look to any particular iteration and say, "It is the Greeks in High Antiquity" or "It is the Italian Renaissance"; it is both and more, it is the entire historical development past, present, and future.

I have one counterexample to this assertion.

Personally I am one of those "mythical" tabletop gamers who is not involved in MMOs, trading card games, miniature wargaming, or board games.

Ha! Me too. Well, I have a size-able miniature collection but I don't actually wargame - I bought them because I like little metal dudes, in paticular the sadlly now out of production Rackham Confrontation line. But I've never played or want to play an MMO, I am not drawn to TCGs, and I rarely play a board game. My love is for tabletop RPGs because, to quote a child that Gary Gygax once asked why he preferred radio to TV, "the pictures are better." TTRPGs utilize imagination as primary, whereas all the other games either minimize it or actually impede it.

The problem with the site numbers is that they don't generally count active members, just total members.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a large majority of EN World and RPG.net accounts are duds and duplicates. I also suspect that only a small percentage of members visit the forums regularly, and an even smaller percentage participate on a monthly basis.

EN World has almost 100,000 memberships. Let's say half of those are duds; it may be less, but it is more likely more; this brings us to 50,000 "real" members. Let's say that half of those never visit anymore, which brings us to 25,000 registered readers. How many post at least once a month? Maybe 5,000? And how many of those post weekly? 1,000? Daily? A few hundred?

It reminds me of the supposed "six million" active world-wide D&D players, or the three million that supposedly play monthly in the US (according to a 2004 article I am too lazy to link to, but will if someone insists); I just don't buy it. I don't think that 1-in-100 Americans play D&D on a monthly basis. 1-in-1000, maybe. But where does this 3/6 million figure come from? (On other hand, of the few hundred people that I have had conversational contact with in the last year or two, I would guess that well more than 1-in-100 play D&D regularly, but that includes five other people I play with; in other words, there are "gamer friendly circles" and vast swathes of people that don't play RPGs at all or know anyone that plays RPGs).

Who knows, maybe I'm wrong? Maybe there really are six million D&D players worldwide, and three million in the US. I would love some decent figures on this. My guess is that the reality is a fraction of those numbers, maybe 1-2 million worldwide, and 1 million or less in the US. Who knows?

 

[Chaos Disciple]

I reject this dichotomy, no offense.

I daresay that nobody designed games to be played forever. The rules for all those classic games I mentioned evolved over centuries. And for all we know, centuries from now, chess may be virtually unrecognizable to us.

And there is nothing preventing anyone from using the OD&D rules- assuming they have a copy- 3000 years from now. (And they'd better invite diaglo.)

　
Ok, so games may not be designed to last forever, but chess has changed very little in over a thousand years, and in thirty-five years D&D publications have changed almost every year.
Im not going to speculate on the designers reasons for conceiving a new game, but the inventor of chess probibly didnt have to worry about a deadline, bottomline, or future sales.
So your right, people might play OD&D three thousand years from now, but i think we can agree, it was not published with that intention.

 

[ggroy]

Ha! Me too. Well, I have a size-able miniature collection but I don't actually wargame - I bought them because I like little metal dudes, in paticular the sadlly now out of production Rackham Confrontation line.

I never got into miniatures games.

The only miniatures I got was several hundred pre-painted plastic D&D minis, which a friend sold to me for a pittance awhile ago. (This particular friend needed fast cash). So far I haven't used them in a D&D game yet. (I haven't DM'ed a regular D&D game in 9+ months).

 

[Glyfair]

But while the hobby needed the specialty stores to get started, Pandora's Box has already been opened. While the industry needs sales, all the hobby needs to survive is players teaching others to be players.

One issue here is that there is a failure to define terms. What exactly does it mean when you say "the hobby is surviving." If 6 people in the world are roleplaying, but doing it on a weekly basis, is that "surviving"? Technically, yes. For most of us, that doesn't meet the standard.

When our hobby shrinks, it becomes harder to find people to game with. It especially gets harder when we want to play some of today's niche RPGs. That doesn't mean it is impossible, and it doesn't mean that we might not recruit more. However, when we reach a certain point, the difficulty in finding like-minded, available players because too much of a hurdle for many. Those players drop out, thus shrinking the hobby more, and compounding the problems.

I certainly don't believe the hobby surrounding roleplaying games is going to disappear in any of our lifetimes. However, I certainly consider it possible that it will decline to a level where the number of players is only a very small fraction of today's players. To me, not having several groups of local players to game with would consist of, at best, the hobby "barely surviving."

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Ok, so games may not be designed to last forever, but chess has changed very little in over a thousand years, and in thirty-five years D&D publications have changed almost every year.

Your math is a little off: chess as we know it today dates back to 1475- 535 years ago- with the exception of the current rules for stalemate, which only date back to the 18th century.

However, you can still find players of other forms of the game, which is why you'll sometimes see our chess called "Queen's Chess" (because of the distinguishing characteristic of the Queen being the most powerful piece) or "Western Chess" (because it is the primary form played in the West).

And don't think that means chess is static: speed chess has at least 3 variations, and I've even played a variant that only uses half of the board (which means the pieces start adjacent to each other and the first few moves perforce take pawns).

There is no inherent reason that some version of D&D couldn't stand the test of time.