General_Tangent
Adventurer
I'd argue that Dogs in the Vineyard is dead after the publisher withdrew the game from sale.
For me, I typically thought of an RPG as being dead when it was no longer in print. But what does it mean to be out of print in the age of PDFs? I have easier access to AD&D's Oriental Adventures today than I did in 1994. Now I think of an RPG as dead when no new books are being published for it. Someone, somewhere, is playing Cyborg Commando. I don't know why anyone would play Cyborg Commando, scientist and philosophers have yet to answer that question, but I still consider it a dead game because nobody is going to publish anything new. Will it rise like a phoenix from the ashes one day and experience a rebirth? Almost certainly not, but maybe.So what does it take for an RPG to die in this hobby?
"Dead" is probably a regional thing. I haven't seen a Champions game at a Con in years, and would be hard pressed to put a group together. But, I bet someone somewhere is turning potential players away from their Champions table right now.What do you think?
More like digital ghosts that haunt the internet, until a publisher decides to force them back into a new body by printing a new edition!So, is the question then at what point to games become zombies?
So many! And as many as you block, more keep springing up. It's so frustrating.We've seen various clickbait titles that "D&D 5e is dead!" or "is the OSR dying?" which, I know, is just there to get a reaction.
I think that's fairly reasonable. Though, while groups like mine exist, #6 will never be true. We'll play anything any of us wants to run.I think its actually a spectrum. Here's my indicators ordered by the least impactful to the true death of an RPG to the most impactful.
- A game's popularity (sales, search popularity, games played, or other metric) goes from a steep incline to leveling off.
- A game's main publisher no longer publishes material for it.
- Third party publishers no longer publish material for it.
- It's hard to find groups playing it at conventions.
- It's hard to find a group to join as a player anywhere.
- It's hard to put together a group and run it as a GM.
- It's hard to find the core material for the game at all.
I think of it like a "dead" language. There are no native speakers of Latin, but there are still people speaking it. It's still a dead language.So "out of print" to me doesn't mean death of a game. A lack of community or fanbase does.
I don't think there are people actually using it to talk to each other though? i.e. for its intended purpose.I think of it like a "dead" language. There are no native speakers of Latin, but there are still people speaking it. It's still a dead language.