Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6849149" data-attributes="member: 996">It can be a tough one to think about clearly from the insider PoV, but D&D, at least, has followed the general pattern of any fad.  It made a splash, was huge for a little while, drew some controversy, then faded away to a sort of hard-core fandom for decades - and is now enjoying a comeback.  From inside the hobby it looks a lot more dramatic and complicated than that, with TSR going under and 3.0 going open source and so forth, but that's forest for the trees sorta stuff.  Endlessly fascinating, very real and compelling for us, obscure trivia outside the hobby.Indie design, per se, appeals to the segment of the hobby that's moved beyond D&D, and D&D is still the biggest thing in the hobby, so you wouldn't really expect that aspect of it to /draw/ new people.  Whether it's the indie feeling Inspiration system in 5e or whatever was supposed to be indie about 4e.  More likely, the main thing that draws new people to D&D is name recognition, so you couldn't really expect it to draw more players in the few years it was around than any other ed did in a few years.  What astounded me about 4e was the way it retained new players.  The D&D crowd at the FLGS where I play Encounters grew from 1 or 2 tables to 4 to 6 or even 8, driven by new players trying the game, some liking it, and some even becoming DMs - the owner opened up a new larger space to accommodate gamers (though, really, /that/ was driven more by card & board games, but RPGs got to ride the coattails).   Today, some of those who started with 4e have dropped out, two tables continue to play 4e, and the rest are happily playing 5e, as are a large new group of players, who have returned to D&D, some from 3.5, most from a longer hiatus.  I've gone from generally the oldest guy at an event to merely one among the older set.  I'm seeing faces every week that I only used to see at a convention once a year.  It's really kinda awesome.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />3e 'back to the dungeon' also brought a lot of lapsed players back to the game (I was one of them, having been playing Hero and Storyteller for the last few years of the 20th century).  But not the way 5e seems to be doing. I'm hearing "I haven't played D&D since the 80s" or "my brother and I tried to play this game when we were kids."  It was an outright, almost mainstream fad for a while, and the Satanism scare didn't exactly hurt, either, when it came to attracting teens to the game in the 80s.  After the fad died out, yes, we hangers-on gave it a very nerdy vibe, but, well, that's not such a bad thing anymore, things nerdy, like video games and comic book movies, have gone mainstream.  D&D, though, is still hovering at the edge, with mainstream name recognition, but not a lot of mainstream adoption.  I do think it has something to do with both the community and the system.  Both are currently welcoming to returning players, but not so much to completely new ones - there is, as you mentioned above, a certain elitism among fans who have stuck with it between the fad and comeback periods...  Then again, it may just be that the technological/cultural window for TT RPGs was narrow and is rapidly closing.  With MMOs taking up potential new players who might have been interested in the hobby, for instance. Even if that's the case, the comeback we have now is nothing to sneeze at, and could be parlayed into lasting growth for the hobby, depending on how WotC handles that 500 lb gorilla....</blockquote>

Verification