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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rodrigo Istalindir" data-source="post: 2392391" data-attributes="member: 2810">This would be the same WotC that closed all their game stores?They may not run events, but they provide places to game.  And one of the beautiful things about RPGs is you don't need much in the way of supplies.  One set of books and a couple sets of dice to share and you are good to go.I've seen more RPGs run at college game clubs and such lately than at game stores.  Most of the game stores I've been in in the past decade have been far more interested in pimping CCGs and now the minis than the RPGs, and they'd rather not see CCGs as a gateway drug to RPGs, since the CCGs bring in more money.You don't pick up hobbies retail.  You pick them up through friends, or relatives.  I got into D&D because my Dad knew I'd enjoyed reading the Hobbit and LotR.  He saw the boxcover of the edition with the red dragon at a local bookstore (not gamestore) and got it for me for Christmas.  A kid at school saw me reading it at lunch, and his Dad had gotten him into wargaming.  The group grew from there, and 25 (Christ, I'm old) years later, I'm still interested in the hobby.  The only gamestore where I grew up was a hobby-shop run by an ogre who was more interested in the models and RC stuff.  He stocked the stuff cause it sold, but I'd say even in the early 80s 50% of our gaming purchases were mail-order, and that was a lot harder then than now.To start?  No.  The first few times, they'll be using the stuff provided by their gamemaster.  But if they get hooked, they will.  Are you seriously telling me that a demographic that has changed the music and movie industries through their on-line activities is incapable of finding dice on-line, or ENWorld?Newbies don't find game stores, either.  Or hobby shops, sporting goods stores, or anything else.  The stores can nurture, but they can't create.  A kid with no knowledge of or interest in RPGs isn't going to go into a game store, any more than he's going to walk into a sporting goods store and discover baseball.If we're counting on the FLGS to save the hobby, we're already doomed.  They are too few, too unfocused, too mismanaged, and too customer-unfriendly.  The good ones are outnumbered by the bad.   The hobby needs us to teach our kids to game the way our dads taught us to throw a fastball.  It needs to ditch the stigma of the unwashed geeks playing in the basement.  It needs better marketing, better entry-level products, and better penetration of traditional retail establishments.  What it doesn't need is this attitude that customers should be grateful for the privilege of buying stuff at or above retail with nothing else offered in return, or guilt-trips that we're killing the hobby if we make informed decision as consumers.  I would cheerfully support a FLGS if there was one.  But it had better be friendly, local, and at least somewhat focused on the kind of gaming that I do.</blockquote>

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