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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5012119" data-attributes="member: 15538">I'd like to throw out two things that I think have been insufficiently examined. First, for high school students, the school day has been getting longer and the school year longer, while more homework is being assigned per class (test scores have still barely budged, but that's another topic). Far from being lazy, the modern teenager is far more likely to be overworked. Time to do their own thing is a commodity, and many times, I can easily imagine something fairly brainless being the focus of interest. College students, too, more credit hours each semester, more papers per class. Thus, the feeder group is really pressed for time compared to twenty years ago. Adolescence is not what it was. Let's toss in, too, smaller family sizes and kids being born later, which means kids these days are less likely to be recruited by an older sibling.The second aspect is economic. Since the mid 50s, many luxuries have become more available, resulting in greater overall wealth, but wages have relatively shrunk compared to basic living expenses. Thus, for people in the 18-24 range, single income, with little experience, their usable gaming budget, in real dollars, is likely 2/3 or maybe even just a half of the equivalent college student/grocery sacker of the 1980s. Does young people being unable to afford impulse RPG purchases sound bad for RPGs to anyone else besides me?Apart from that, I can only echo what has been said before, and expand on it. In the 1980s, Tolkien was a classic, Conan was a comic book, and the Greyhawk novels were a significantly available source of genre fantasy for fans. Fantasy itself has shifted. To someone who grew up in the late 80s to early 90s, fantasy is overflowing bookshelves at Borders stocked with recent bestsellers, and the genre itself has become more romantic, more psychological, more science-fictional, and more character-driven. As a result, D&D hearkens back to what is now a vintage flavor high fantasy. Its popularity has declined as surely as anything related to Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, or singing cowboys. 4e was able to gain some ground, I think, by catering to the more bombastic tastes of "kids these days" as well as older gamers who have started mixing manga styles, video game references, and Hollywood blockbusters into their fantasy tastes... unfortunately, that demographic is not significantly more likely to read, and hence it's a fairly finite pool of new players. I think it's no accident that stuff like CoC has gotten a revival because it parallels shifts in mainstream fiction toward urban fantasy, dark fantasy, and surrealistic fantasy and away from classic swords-and-sorcery tropes. Even the modern fairy tale has shifted, away from high dramatics and toward the psychological. As I noted in my blog (entry "The Unhappy Medium") certain genres are harder to game in, and many of these shifts are away from game-friendly tropes and toward characters talking and talking and talking.</blockquote>

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