What Does the RPG Hobby Need Now?

[Reynard]

Here's a question: does the hobby need to be even more accessible than it already is? How accessible is "accessible enough"?

 

[Scribe]

Here's a question: does the hobby need to be even more accessible than it already is? How accessible is "accessible enough"?

No. Like you said, people can show up at a con/game night, knowing next to nothing, and pick it up and play depending on the system.

 

[Dire Bare]

This is a question I often ask myself, but now, with the release of the D&D 2024 books, I think it's a good time to ask it again:

What do we think the RPG hobby needs now? What's missing? What would make it easier for new players to get into the hobby? What makes it easier for existing players and game masters to engage in the hobby? What products do we think are missing or underserved?

And what can small publishers like myself do to help?

I don't know about the hobby at large, but I know what I'd like to see . . .

More publishers putting their stuff on web-based platforms like D&D Beyond and Demiplane. Preferably bundled with PDFs and perhaps other digital formats as well.

I'm currently running a LotR 5E campaign, and having the core book on D&D Beyond has made running the game SO MUCH EASIER AND SMOOTHER!!! I have the other LotR 5E books in PDF, and searching through a PDF during a game is a major PITA.

 

[Dire Bare]

Some kind of independent/small business creator co-op. For reasons.

What exactly are you thinking? Sounds interesting . . .

 

[Dire Bare]

I think it is time to.finally kill prep. Games and adventures should be designed such that they can be used with little to no preparation. That can mean a lot of different things, but definitely includes embracing layout and art/cartography that informs. It means ending "paid by the word" style walls of prose. And it means tearing down the explicit divide between players and GMs.

I don't know about "killing" prep, but tools to reduce prep to as close to zero as possible . . . yes.

The hobby assumption is that each group has a DM with the time to lovingly craft a world and story . . . and of course, folks like that are a lot rarer than folks who want to play!

 

[Dire Bare]

Here's a question: does the hobby need to be even more accessible than it already is? How accessible is "accessible enough"?

Reaching "full accessibility" is like reaching perfection . . . you're never going to get there, but should always be striving to do so.

Every publisher should make improving accessibility an important part of their development process. A good start would be reaching out to gamers/fans in different groups and ask, "What can we do to make our games more accessible to you?"

 

[NN]

i dont know the map but the goal :

50%+ of players in a group should be eagerly, positively, looking forward to their turn to GM

 

[dragoner]

Re: Prep, sounds like just a full setting. That is fine though personally I like world building all that. I made my setting very modular so you can play with the setting, or as someone said the other day, they just use my maps, which is cool too.

 

[NN]

More Shadowdark adventures.

And bigger ones, theres plenty of quickies

 

[TiQuinn]

I honestly don't know the answer to this but I keep thinking as we sit in the humdrum days between releases of anything from WotC - why are there so many damn D&D fantasy adjacent games? Shouldn't this be a time for publishers to be talking about anything else? Where are all the sci-fi games? The horror games? The apocalyptic future games? I feel like a lot of variety is under the surface but it just never sees the light of day.

And I'm sure the answer is that well, D&D is the 800 LB gorilla, and that's what people want to keep talking about. Which is fine, but here we are more than 6 months later, and I still can't tell you why I should choose Tales of the Valiant over D&D 2024, or Level Up over D&D 2024, or even 13th Age and Shadow of the Weird Wizard over any of the 5e games. I'm getting a weird sort of "fantasy setting/system" blindness, and I'm just not hearing or able to differentiate what the elevator pitch is for these games.

Shadowdark has done a great job I think in standing out as different. I've really enjoyed Mothership the past few months, and it is so night and day different from D&D both in theme, setting and mechanics. So what's a prep session look like for Mothership? Or Call of Cthulhu?