Another comment is that it is a large commitment to the person with an active life. Most people who actually would play this DO have enough time for it, most of them are simply lazy or apathetic about it.
That's an oversimplification.
Roleplaying is not a large commitment to the person with an active life. It's a large commitment by
a group of people. There's a major difference.
It's not just about the respective energy, focus and time each individual will have to put in the activity. It's that roleplaying is a punctual activity requiring synchronization by its participants.
Putting down the controller from a console game and spending an hour on this isnt a far stretch. How many hours do people spend on youtube and facebook looking up worthless nonsense?
What exactly are you gonna accomplish in an hour?
People sit down and play a console game or watch facebook on their own terms. It's whenever they feel like doing so. A roleplaying campaign is a sizable investment of time and energy. You need to plan, coordinate schedules. It's very different.
I'm not saying they SHOULD sacrifice hobbies for this, but seriously, im sure most people could easily fit the time in for the game.
It certainly can be done, although I know hardcore gamers who have problems. I've seen one of my closest friends (and a dedicated roleplayer and pretty good GM) exactly 2 times in the last 6 weeks. One of those time for a catching up dinner and the other time at mutual friend's birthday party. We just can't make a common gaming slot fit in our schedule right now.
And in a roundabout way, this goes back to what I was saying about RPGs earlier in the thread. (so the rest of this post in not addressed to you but to the community at large).
The hobby needs simpler, flexible games that are easy to learn and fast to run. Going through chargen for Pathfinder isn't fun. It's boring and stupid and the sheets are more complicated than tax forms. That's not entertaining. And the top selling RPGs wth their loooong dragging combat eat so much time out of sessions that, eventually, everyone realizes nobody got anything done unless you sat on your butt for 6 hours straight, just playing.
Newsflash: asking 5 people to fit a punctual activity in their schedule is difficult and it is pretty obvious that the longer the time slot you are asking for, the more difficult it gets. It is extremely difficult for a group of people to find common ground and fit a 7-hour session in their schedule.
The fact that a lot of dedicated gamers don't seem to bat an eye when fighting a group of lowly goblins takes over two hours is just puzzling. It goes against any logic but that's where we are. An encounter with fodder material nobody gives a crap about should take 10 minutes top.
And that way, you can actually accomplish something worthy of mention in a 4-hour session and get more people to try gaming.
o as far as I'm concerned, weapon stats and intricate details for classes and all this nonsense about how races should matter and backgrounds and feats and a thousand maneuvers and modifiers... it can all die in the fire that I would gladly lite using those useless tax form character sheets.
There's no reason you can't make a complete RPG to fit under 64 pages and once the top companies start marketing those games and stop listening to a dwindling hardcore fanbase, they'll get more people playing.
