The rehabilitation of roleplaying games

[Ranger REG]

Yes!!

..no that might be a bit too young

With D&D, you're never too old nor too young.

Just don't let them encounter them horny nymphs. They don't have any qualm about age.

 

[woodelf]

I'm not even sure if we really are languishing in the back anymore. As mentioned, role-playing is an every day word. However, there is a pretty large barrier into entering things - a honking big stack of rules. "Rules Light" games don't really solve the problem since they assume that any player is already a gamer. You can't really expect someone to ad hoc rulings right out of the chute and then expect the game to be good. It's a lengthy learning process.

One thing that the gaming industry has to learn from the computer gaming industry is how to get girls. The average computer gamer is 30 years old and 40 some percent of them are female. DnD demographics put female gamers at a much smaller minority. I rmember a Dragon article saying that readership was about 5% female. This is something that needs to be addressed if you want the game to become mainstream.

When 95% of gamers are male, it's going to be pretty hard to expand without winning over some of the other side. A considerable effort has to be made to attract female gamers.

I've never been in a gaming group without girls/women--and much of the time more than half the group has been female. That includes having as many as 6 female regulars + drop-ins in my highschool group, and 3 steady female players in my primary college group. And there was the recent group that was me, one guy, one veteran female player, and 3 newbie females. Most of the female players i've played with (not counting convention games) have been fairly new to the hobby--often i'm there for their first game. Most of them have gone on to become permanent, if not always hardcore, gamers. Based on this thoroughly unscientific sample, here are my conclusions:

I think D&D, not RPGs, is the problem here. A much smaller percentage of the female players [than of the male players] i've known have been real powergamers, interested in every nuance of the rules. And a much higher %age have been utterly disinterested in the mechanics. To the degree that my experiences are representative, i see no evidence to support the notion that female gamers are any less combat-oriented than male gamers. But i see a lot of evidence that female gamers are generally less interested in the math side of the game. As such, even those that are otherwise interested in RPGs are often not interested in learning the rules sufficiently to participate in a many groups. And this isn't just the girlfriend syndrome: one couple in the group right now consists of the gamer, and her husband who was initially dragged to the games. Nonetheless, he (the latecomer) is really into the mechanics of the game, while she (relatively experienced, and has played more game systems than he has) just can't wrap her head around the mechanics. And, of course, D&D3E is considerably crunchier than (1) previous editions of [A]D&D and (2) most other RPGs currently on the market.

And this isn't just a gender-specific issue, though i suspect it skews the demographics. There could well be a ton of people out there who're very interested in the genres RPGs emphasize, and very interested in the idea of RPing self-created characters in those genres, but who're put off by the mechanical emphasis of most commercially-visible RPGs out there right now. If the sort of RPG that would appeal to you is something more like Dust Devils or Universalis--or even just Fudge--you likely will never even know it exists without first spending a fair bit of time playing something like D&D or Storyteller. And if the latter completely turn you off, for reasons unrelated to the nature of RPGs itself...

Think of it like this: D&D3E is fairly non-representative of RPGs as a whole in a number of ways. And yet it is the public face of RPGs--until you're actually a gamer, it is likely that you equate RPGs and D&D, and assume that all RPGs are fairly similar (just differences of genre, or minor mechanical differences, rather than radically different structures). What if cricket were the only face of sports as a whole? How many people would never discover they loved tennis, or bicycle racing, or football, if they first had to play cricket for a year or 5, and get really seriously into it, participating in online chats with hardcore cricket players, before they encountered someone who mentioned these other sports? And then still probably couldn't find anybody else locally who was interested in playing any of these non-cricket sports?

And then, of course, there's still the possibility that we're simply hitting the natural ceiling on the number of people both interested in the basic premise of RPGs (collaborative creation with role assumption and rules) and with sufficient time. Though i personally doubt that--i think it much more likely we're hitting the natural ceiling of people interested in the particular flavors of RPG that D&D3E and Vampire (and family) provide. But with those as the functional gateway from the outside world, a lot of people are choosing not to even give it a try, or are turned off early on. After all, if you don't enjoy playing D&D, but have never played any other RPG (and, indeed, have essentially zero exposure to the existence, much less details, of any other RPGs), what are teh odds you'll assume that what you disliked about it was unique to D&D, rather than general to all RPGs?

So, in conclusion, i think the biggest change we need is to have a spectrum of play experiences be roughly-equally well known to the non-gaming public. Just as Joe Random is likely to be sufficiently familiar with ball sports to realize that just because he doesn't like football doesn't mean he won't like baseball, it should be easy to discover the variety of RPGs. I think a practical step in this direction is for RPGs to explicitly recognize the variety of playstyles under the umbrella of 'RPG', and make this clear in the obligatory introduction bits. Currently, probably as much to avoid sowing confusion amongst newbies as for any other reason, most RPGs are written as though the particular style of play they engender is synonymous with RPG.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

It might help if the books were cheaper and geared towards a younger audience.

Cheaper books won't happen unless there are a lot more players. In fact, given that they are full color, WotC books are already among the cheapest on the market. Other publishers simply can't afford books of that physical quality...