The Fortnite-ification of Everything

I still don't buy the idea that having different settings "fractured" the D&D player base: no one I ever knew refused to buy Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft books because they "only played Dark Sun." Yes, people may have had favorite settings that they focused on, but everyone always bought everything they could in my experience, and ran multiple games in different worlds, including homebrew which they would fill with ideas cribbed material from all the books. Just because Greyhawk was my favorite didn't mean I didn't also buy up Drow of the Underdark and Dragon Kings the moment I saw them, or consider The Code of the Harpers to be one of the best and most interesting D&D books I've ever owned and still crack open to read through today.

Producing more books than they could sell is what killed TSR, not having multiple settings.

 

[Aaron L]

Or mine! Everyone I know has a favorite setting for D&D, whether an existing one like FR or a past one like Planescape, and clamor for new stuff in that setting.

I specifically said that we each had our favorite settings but that never precluded any of us from buying books for other settings as well, if only just for material we could mine for ideas and for our preferred world... or simply because most of us liked more than once setting.

My great love of Greyhawk never stopped me from also loving the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun as well. While most of us had a favorite setting we liked above any others we all liked the 'Realms enough that we would always be happy to play a campaign set on Toril. But honestly, despite all of this current discussion, probably 90% of all of our group's campaigns were actually set in our homebrew campaign worlds we had spent years designing and building. Our main DM's campaign was set in his homebrew world that expanded and evolved over about 20 years, from about 1991 through about 2013 when he started a new one... and even then he still uses it sometimes. My homebrew world has been going since '85 or so and it is still what I use 95+% of the time. In fact, despite how much I dearly love Greyhawk and its twisted Weird Tales Alternate Dark Age Earth feel, I've probably only ever actually run 2 games set on Oerth. Any time I want to run a game the players clamor for me to use my own world of Alterra, a dark fantasy alternate Earth that's a mashup of Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, Tolkien, and Lord Dunsany, a fairytale Dark Age Britain overlaid with the Cthulhu Mythos, instead of any others.

 

[ccs]

I used to play with a group that only ran DM-written (this is multiple people) campaigns, and I can say confidently, homebrew is not as good as the published material. We were the first and only beta-testers for merely-OK and always overlong "modules" (I was going to say 'wankery').

Homebrew < than published? Really?
Have you ever read/played/run The Forest Oracle as written?

In my xp, homebrew or published material, it's the DM that's the key factor.

 

[Hussar]

IME, slapping a specific setting on a book made it largely a no-sell for most of the groups I played with. I remember [MENTION=2174]Erik Mona[/MENTION] talking about how any Dungeon Magazine that featured setting specific adventures would tank in sales as well. So, yeah, setting specific stuff is generally not the way to go, again, IMO.

That being said, WotC seems to have gotten around this by making everything FR specific, by and large, but, we'll see how that goes as time marches on.

But, I'm not sure it's a case of "emulation" as much as simply parallel evolution. It's not that D&D or Fortnite is copying each other, it's just that they are taking similar paths, albeit to very different audience sizes.

 

[ParanoydStyle]

Based on its body text this article would be more accurately titled "the D&D-ification of Fortnite", Mike. Which is a stretch as you know. But looking primarily at the market place of OTHER VIDEOGAMES, yes, there really is a "Fortnite-ification of everything" happening--or maybe "already happened" would be more accurate". Besides the ranks of outright clones, it seems like virtually every post-Fortnite game has needed to include massive multiplayer and/or survival and/or crafting elements. It's a continuation of the trend started by Minecraft which I still don't understand, because I am old.

I am starting to think I will never understand this streaming thing either ("Spectacle"). One of the only things I can think of more boring than watching a stream of someone else playing videogames and talking over them is watching a stream of OTHER PEOPLE having fun playing D&D. And yet, these things are making people boku bucks, catapulting nobodies to stardom virtually overnight, and expanding the D&D fanbase wildly...I guess with D&D it's that the streamers are allegedly "charismatic" or "entertaining" but with that I don't know, they kind of fall into a lose-lose with me. If they're too attractive/charming/witty, they read to me as opportunistic Hollywood-type scum capitalizing on the D&D streaming fad that currently exists: fake gamer guys. And if they're not attractive/charming/witty enough...then it's like...I have personally spent hundreds of hours gaming with people much more interesting than you, I will probably game with people more interesting than you at the next con I go to, why would I want to watch you game?

I know plenty of the forumgoers are probably older than me and probably think it's funny when I refer to myself as old even though I'm in my early 30s. But to me...this feels like the process of becoming "old". I am trying my best to wrap my head around something that young people today like and understand what about it appeals to them and just failing and failing and failing. I don't get what these kids today get out of this streaming crap.

FWIW I don't have a favorite D&D setting as such or at least I change favorites so often that none of them count. Right now it's Greyhawk, before that it was Aereth, a few years ago it was Krynn, two weeks from now it might be a homebrew setting of my own design.

 

[Zarithar]

I can't stand Fortnite... but I get the appeal it has for others. My 12 year old daughter has been playing it for months now, and basically... it's just a chat room with guns.

 

[Vanveen]

The article is witless. Fortnite is the *opposite* of RPGs--far more social, far less learning curve, far less friction in general than an RPG. In short, this is why it's so successful.

Those of you arguing about how much and what kind of TSR crap you bought in the 90s--you are literal examples of a cannibalized market. To put it another way, you're not anecdotes...but you ARE anecdata, that is exemplars of weird niches. [MENTION=926]Aaron L[/MENTION], you are a definite outlier in terms of group strength and play frequency. You are a fantastic customer, but you are a TINY market demographic. [MENTION=6724873]Crimson Fist[/MENTION], same thing. Except your tiny market demo is different from, and subtly incompatible with, [MENTION=926]Aaron L[/MENTION]'s. THAT is the problem TSR ran into during the 1990s. Your restaurant will go broke if you are continually making custom meals, even if the customers are gourmet gluttons. You want a customer base of gourmet gluttons who all like your roast duck. For roleplaying, that may be impossible. The duck fans are there. There aren't enough of them.

Hasbro has gradually been professionalizing the ranks of people at WOTC, the important ones anyway. These aren't the folks that get splashed on ENWorld. But you can tell, if you're a fellow product pro, by the fingerprints they leave on what's getting published. They're trying desperately to solve the roast duck problem. But it's more like..."Try our roast protein! You looooove protein!"

 

[JBGarrison72]

I'm glad to see Fortnite and 5th Edition compared to each other... it's probably not coincidence that I have zero interest in either (...as mostly follows with my Generation X demographic).

 

[MarkB]

I know plenty of the forumgoers are probably older than me and probably think it's funny when I refer to myself as old even though I'm in my early 30s. But to me...this feels like the process of becoming "old". I am trying my best to wrap my head around something that young people today like and understand what about it appeals to them and just failing and failing and failing. I don't get what these kids today get out of this streaming crap.

Yup - pretty funny. I'm 48, and streaming constitutes the majority of my weekly viewing. Age is not the issue.

The main issue is that you're still thinking in terms of watching people play a game. There's a game there alright, but in most of the more successful streams, the game is simply the tool that structures the stories they're playing out. And it's those stories, and the characters that bring them to life, combined with the fact that, being completely unscripted and partially dependent upon luck, they can play out in completely unexpected ways, that creates a compelling viewing experience.

 

[Staffan]

I still don't buy the idea that having different settings "fractured" the D&D player base: no one I ever knew refused to buy Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft books because they "only played Dark Sun." Yes, people may have had favorite settings that they focused on, but everyone always bought everything they could in my experience, and ran multiple games in different worlds, including homebrew which they would fill with ideas cribbed material from all the books. Just because Greyhawk was my favorite didn't mean I didn't also buy up Drow of the Underdark and Dragon Kings the moment I saw them, or consider The Code of the Harpers to be one of the best and most interesting D&D books I've ever owned and still crack open to read through today.

Producing more books than they could sell is what killed TSR, not having multiple settings.

But having multiple settings is part of why they produced more books than they could sell. At their height*, TSR published something like 100 books per year (not counting novels). Part of that was because many settings had their own splat books - Al-Qadim had the Complete Sha'ir's Handbook (which covered all sorts of Zakharan magic, not just sha'ir), Dark Sun had Defilers & Preservers, Forgotten Realms had Warriors & Wizards of the Realms in addition to books like Pages from the Mages and Volo's Guide to All Things Magical, and so on.

* For certain values of height.

 

[Staffan]

I don't buy this either. If anything, I think having additional setting material expands your audience.

It does, but probably not in proportion to the effort it takes to make the setting material.

For example, let's say for the sake of argument that there are 6 million players who are interested in playing/buying setting-agnostic or Forgotten Realms material (the stuff they're doing these days). This is supported by 3 books per year. Now, let's say that Wizards decides to release Birthright as a setting for 5e, and do one book per year for Birthright in addition to the 3 books they already do. That's increasing the effort made by 33%. Do you think that Birthright will attract another 2 million players who would not otherwise play D&D?