What Do You Think is the Future of RPGs?

[MerricB]

As for RPG's, IMHO I see them declining until someone finds a new paradigm. Based on my own limited experience, we're seeing a steady graying of the hobby, and older players have too little time to devote to gaming. (The typical problem - when we were young, we had time and no money; now we have money, and no time.)

Here's an interesting quote from the Twilight Struggle rules (it's one of the top "wargames", designed by a company that does very good modern wargames...):

Like most freshman game designers, we spent many years putting this game together. Twilight Struggle, more than anything else, is a game designed to meet our needs. We are both huge fans of the card driven wargame, and how it has breathed new life into wargaming in general. Like a modern day Lazarus, card driven wargames have brought our hobby back from the grave. Yet even five years ago, when Ananda and I first decided we wanted to try our hand at design, the writing was on the wall. Card driven games were going to become less and less like We The People, and Hannibal, and more and more like Paths of Glory and Barbarossa to Berlin. That is not a critique of Mr. Raicer’s work. In fact, we think that it took Paths of Glory to demonstrate just how rich a card driven game might be. But it conflicted with another reality. We were getting older. Our lives were less like the gaming rich days of college, and more like the work-a-day world of the “nuclear” family. Eight hours for a single game was becoming less and less likely. So selfishly, we designed a game to fit our schedules. You can play Twilight Struggle from beginning to end in the same time it takes to play the “short” scenario of many other games. Heck, you can switch sides and play the Cold War from both angles if you are really ambitious. That is a long way of saying the number one constraint on the design was time.

Twilight Struggle takes about 2 to 2-1/2 hours to play. So, it's quite achievable as an evening's entertainment.

D&D has one advantage in that the session length is mutable. So, even busy people can normally find one evening a week where they can devote 3-4 hours to an ongoing campaign. The trick is with the DM, who needs more preparation time; prepublished adventures help markedly there, so do monster manuals and other such tools.

Where the current edition fails - at least for most people - is in the length of combat and the preparation time for NPCs. The former is more significant. I am astonished by the reports of what should be simple combats that take over an hour, and, not having experienced this, am not sure of the cause.

Cheers!

 

[Scribble]

Where the current edition fails - at least for most people - is in the length of combat and the preparation time for NPCs. The former is more significant. I am astonished by the reports of what should be simple combats that take over an hour, and, not having experienced this, am not sure of the cause.
Cheers!

Based on my own experiences... The Game itself doesn't scale well. In that if you have more then the recommended 4 players + DM you start to see lag.

Any less then the 4 players, however, and you see the opposite. My current group is only 2 players + DM... (We're kind of sad ) But the games FLY by. Combat, even at high levels, hardly takes any time at all.