The Game for Non-Gamers: (Forked from: Sexism in D&D)

[Aus_Snow]

On the topic of XP and all that, Sweet20 is an interesting one. Worth considering, or tinkering with, at least. If in search of alternatives in the first place, that is.

 

[Umbran]

A bit defeatist, wot?

Quite the opposite. This is aiming to win by using well-considered, focused strategy, rather than shotgun attempts in the dark.

RPGs will not grow at all unless they are backed by some decent business sense. That requires knowing one's potential market, and efficiently targeting it. Use of shoehorns to make square pegs fit round holes is waste of effort, time, and money, and in a niche business to begin with, the companies making the products don't have any of those in excess to spare.

This is not to say that one cannot run a game for someone for whom combat is not a draw, as in the OP.

But I will submit, for example, that no "system" for romance will ever be found satisfying for a player for whom romance is the draw. Good romance is about emotions, and that cannot be gotten through a die roll.

 

[Dannager]

When I sit down to play Dungeons & Dragons, I'm there to explore some dungeons and slay some dragons.

If the broader market desires a game that lets them do fantasy housework, someone can make that game. But Dungeons & Dragons (and most - if not all - other RPGs as well) is escapist. Picking out matching clothing, sweeping the floor and having tea with friends isn't escapist unless your clothes all suck, you don't own a floor and you have no friends.

I am, frankly, uninterested in expanding the RPG market if the market becomes such that I have no desire to interact with a large portion of it. The only vested interest I have is in bringing people to role-playing who will enjoy the kind of role-playing I enjoy.

 

[WayneLigon]

The housework comment surprised me. A bit more discussion, and the comment became clear: building and beautifying the area would be a far more important and noble goal for her than slaying monsters. She'd want to deliver medicine to the sick. She'd want to find pretty jewelry. The whole slay monsters thing, that's what you hire oafs to handle for you.

That's a big reason why The Sims is the best selling PC computer game of all time.

There are several RPGs that allow you to do this sort of thing, but D&D will also let you do it as well. All these political and courtly D&D games people talk about running and playing in? All right up this same alley, with the focus on personal attachments, moral choices, and all sort of other non-monster-slaying stuff.

It's not so much the game, as the players. Such games are few and far between, because they're hard to do. They require significant buy-in from the players, and work from the players. You have to have people who like making back-to-the-seventh-generation family trees and worrying about what their family crest looks like and all that. Most D&D - really, most RPG - games aren't like that because the slaying monsters thing is quick and easy to do.

 

[WayneLigon]

Some people just don't like Dune, Puccini, and pretending to be an elf. Even after they give it a go.

True, but also there are many people whose 'go' isn't done correctly. I've read some true horror stories about people's first RPG experiences and it amazes me even more that those people ever looked at a pair of dice again without shivering. Who knows how many people's only exposure to RPGs has been some nightmare like the group in Fear of Girls? (Yeah, it's comedy and so somewhat hyperbolic, but only somewhat. I've been in two games where the GM did come out in a hooded cloak, etc, and it wasn't for comedic effect.)

 

[I'm A Banana]

There is some crazy wisdom in the OP.

With regards to D&D, some of those points are why I think the whole "It's to make the game more appealing to the newbies!" reason for some of 4e's changes is pretty dunderheaded.

If you want to make D&D more appealing to the newbies, the change you make isn't "Focus on the action and reboot Forgotten Realms!" The change you make is to the very structure of the game.

It's a tough nut to swallow when you're starry-eyed with fantasies of D&D riding the fantasy wave, but the fact is that spending four hours a week in a room with six people pretending to be elves is fundamentally out of the reach of a HUGE portion of humanity, and it only gets rarer as you get away from middle school, high school, and college (which have a way of mitigating the usual pull of social tides).

4e can't be serious about making the game appealing to the masses, because D&D is still a game you play in a room for four hours on a weekend pretending to be an elf with six other people. There's other things that contribute to it, too. One is the "entrance cost": Three two-hundred page books, special dice, special sheets, special toys, special markers, special online databases, special boards....(which 4e has been unashamed about encouraging you to buy, even moreso than 3e was). One is the "effort factor:" The DM has to put in work when he's not playing so that the game can be played. The players have to study the rulebooks like textbooks. One is the lack of eye candy: there's nothing that wows you, because you have to work at imagining everything. It takes a special kind of dork to be wowed at rolling high on a dice, which is pretty much the high point of a D&D game.

And one, of course, is the heavy combat focus that is present in all editions of D&D but is glorified in 4e as the minis combat system has become, in many ways, the D&D game, with everything else going to support that leg.

Which really defeats the interest of anyone who really doesn't like or doesn't want to invest in minis combat. Which would be "most people."

There's some broader themes in gaming in general: how the Sims is a "girlfriend game," for instance (not coincidentally, that is a game that is basically about playing house).

But for D&D, the big thing is that D&D as we know and love it will always be incredibly niche. In order to make D&D appeal to a broader section of the population, we would need to change the game so much so that it probably wouldn't be "D&D" even by the broad brushstrokes of 4e's criteria. It might still be a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff, but it's not like there's not games like that which aren't D&D. And might not even be a game about that!

Of course, I think long before we reach that point, one of two things will happen:

(a) the game will loose enough of it niche without gaining from the outside that it becomes fairly unprofitable

(b) the game's designers will become comfortable in a D&D niche big enough to support a steady business.

 

[Starbuck_II]

And this may explain a little bit of the attraction that Vampire had with the less hack and slash oriented wargamer-derived set (who are not necessarily women). The game could very readily be set around building up resources (herds, contacts, followers, etc.) and 'building empires.' Granted, quite often the other players were just as enthusiastically trying to build their own characters empires at the expense of foiling your own ambitions, but that also could be fun (and when they did cooperate and pool their political and social resources, things got very fun).

But Vampire is an amazing game for hack and slash. Unlike D&D you don't need +X's weapon/armor making killing easier to build for.

I've never played it myself but I know people who have used hack/slashin Vampire games to great effect.

 

[Corinth]

The Vampire games I've seen and run still, inevitably, result in the most personally mighty character (run by the most skilled and cunning player) becoming the center of all things- in Vampire, as in any other commercially viable TRPG, Might Makes Right.

 

[Cadfan]

"Make D&D mainstream" and "broaden D&D's appeal" are two very different things. Any argument which proceeds along the lines of "you can't make D&D mainstream because the vast majority of the public doesn't want to sit around and pretend to be elves" and then proceeds to arrive at "and therefore this or that specific change isn't going to help" is leaving a huge amount of middle ground unargued and unexplained.

 

[Set]

There are several RPGs that allow you to do this sort of thing, but D&D will also let you do it as well. All these political and courtly D&D games people talk about running and playing in? All right up this same alley, with the focus on personal attachments, moral choices, and all sort of other non-monster-slaying stuff.

Eberron had a pretty decent focus on that sort of thing, with the Gnomes being very much a social / city-based / intrigue-based racial group. Al-Qadim also had a storytelling / social storyline focus, and Spelljammer had a secondary focus on ship-construction and trade-route / business-based adventuring (much as Traveller did, at times).

The Realms and Greyhawk haven't had as much of a constructive focus, in their core presentations, but books like Stronghold Builder's Guidebook and whatever opened up that sort of campaign for those who were interested in it.

Some people like to build castles in the sky (which could be represented by fans of Civilization, the Sims or Second Life), other people like to tear them down (fans of Doom, Crysis and Duke Nukem). Some of us, like the child who builds a massive sandcastle and then stomps through it gleefully, like a little bit of both.