Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vanveen" data-source="post: 7617324" data-attributes="member: 6874262">Loewy's train wasn't influential because of the bullet design, although that was what naive people paid attention to. It was because he fixed the toilets and the food. I consult on product strategy professionally. For the first time since I got the Blue Box in 1979, Dungeons and Dragons shows signs of being a professionally managed product. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting really close, and the problems that remain may be inherent to the form and the industry. (Discovering them is a major sign of an industry's maturity.) Put simply, the rules are the least important part of this product. Being able to play it is the most important part. 4e failed because it was too complex for new players, even players with roleplaying experience from other RPGs or earlier editions of Dungeons and Dragons (1e and 2e). It required too much cognitive and financial investment. For instance, understanding the structure of WoW-style raid optimization was central to the rules. (Tank, buffer, etc.) People who didn't play WoW didn't get that. (Also, one wondered why, if you did get that, you weren't playing WoW.) Optimizing your character's progression was a huge part of the game. Unfortunately, the kind of people who are into this can't sustain an entire product, not at scale. 5e has been designed to appeal to new players, especially those without experience; to be playable frequently, e.g. by an organized event circuit; and to require (relatively) little time and financial investment. That said, it's also in the middle of a literal once-in-a-generation demographic boom. Most people in the US today are 25 or 26. That is a perfect age: still lots of friends, many from college; not enough money, but enough to spend on things like roleplaying and beer at a bar where there's roleplaying; and generally fewer commitments like kids, six-figure jobs, and taking care of parents. They love geek culture!!!! but it's the Avengers movies, not a 20-year-collection of the books. When you get serious fans, usually on boards like these, this stuff doesn't get taken into account. They'd much rather argue about THACO, simulationist approaches, or the fact that one rule system is objectively "better" (insert spluttering here) than another. While these various points may even be TRUE, none of them are GERMANE to how a professionally-designed product works at scale. (Hint: it isn't professional until it works at scale.) To put it another way, people don't buy Dungeons and Dragons because of the rules. The rules are a means to various larger ends. (These ends are considered at some length by e.g. Ulwick and Christensen in their "Jobs to be Done" framework. If you're really interested in this stuff, their work is fascinating and essential.) The second part of scale is, well, scale. GURPS, the vegan crossfit atheism of roleplaying systems, may be a superior system. (I don't think so, because the problems it solves it solves at a mediocre level and those problems weren't very important in the 1980s and are MUCH less important now. Also, the "flexibility" of the system requires significant cognitive outlay, usually in the form of RPG experience, to make work. Yeah, it can simulate anything. But it's Tuesday...what the hell do I simulate with it TONIGHT?) But that said, the reason it's dying is because nobody plays it, and the reason nobody plays it is that SJG doesn't have the money to throw events where people would play it. SJG doesn't even have enough money to pay people to tell other people to play GURPS, even at a few cents a click. This is why most people aren't atheists, crossfit customers, or vegans. Although they never shut up about it, there aren't enough of them to tell enough people to make it a breakthrough phenomenon. EVERY other roleplaying system will have this problem and will fail. PERIOD. If you can't solve this problem you won't scale and you won't survive. Sure, you can throw a game of Paranoia *tomorrow* if you want. Get the books off Ebay, do some Web research to grab hints and adventures, and go. But don't mistake perpetual availability of every cultural product forever as a living system. Essentially you're combing through the ruins and playing with some cool weird old tech you found there. Go ahead, show a few guys in your village. But when you lose interest, that tech goes back in the junk heap. It's never going to become The Next Big Thing.</blockquote>

Verification