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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5359974" data-attributes="member: 59082">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.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.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.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?</blockquote>

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