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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rogue Agent" data-source="post: 5719035" data-attributes="member: 6673496">Recruitment of players seems like a red herring to me. Recruitment of DMs is the important part of growing an RPG.And what the 'net allows is the sustaining and transmission of memetic communities that would otherwise be too small and too dispersed in the real world.Would there be people still playing pre-3E versions of D&D if the internet wasn't a factor? Certainly. But they mostly wouldn't be aware of each other; talking to each other; developing games; developing support products; or creating new ideas and communities that are capable of attracting others.Re: The OP. Online forums are specialized communities. Specialized communities are generally going to self-select for those most deeply involved in the given hobby. This is true for RPGs just like it's true for anything else.If you go to a forum of wine connouisseurs, their discussion is going to be very different from the vast majority of wine drinkers: They're going to be interested in specialty wines. They're going to discuss wine-related issues using specialized terminology and values that will frequently be quite foreign to the casual wine drinker (although that doesn't, necessarily, mean that it's irrelevant to the casual wine drinker).Same thing with RPGs: Online forums are probably fairly representative of gamers who are deeply interested and involved with RPGs. This subset of the hobby is going to be interested in specialty games and yada yada yada. Given that RPG-playing is more of a niche than wine-drinking (which is completely mainstream), this subset is probably a larger percentage of the total population of RPG-players than wine forums would be of the total population of wine-drinkers... but one would assume it's still a minority. (Unless the hobby has completely collapsed in on itself.)</blockquote>

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