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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackelope King" data-source="post: 4109516" data-attributes="member: 31454">The issue has already been identified: a D&D game involves interaction between several people who have school, jobs, lives, family, friends, television, and other entertainment all competing for their time. I've read and been astounded by tales of gamers trekking 200+ miles for a game of D&D.That's not going to cut it anymore.And there's definitely an untapped market for gamers out there. Go browse around on random message boards aimed at teenagers and tweens and you'll see people playing all sorts of little roleplaying games sans rules, taking turns posting on message boards what they're doing. My younger sisters played these sorts of things on message boards for games like NeoPets and Gaia Online.D&D cannot and will not ever compete with the bells and whistles of WoW or the successors to WoW. Similarly, WoW cannot and will not ever be able to compete with the openness of D&D or other pen and paper RPGs.Where D&D can compete is accessibility, which is what WotC is trying to do with Gleemax. Currently, finding a group and a DM is the bottleneck in getting into the game.  D&D spreads very slowly, with an existing group occasionally welcoming newbies. The viral method of spreading the game from person to person has sustained the game for decades, but the group nature has also tended to shut out people already on the outside (often for very practical reasons: a group of 30-somethings is treading on thin ice if they invite a 14 year-old girl into their weekly game).The goal of any such online access model should be to provide anyone anywhere a table and a chance to play at any time. If I've got insomnia, I currently can't go drive to my friend's house, pound on the door, and ask if he wants to finish up the adventure in D&D. But I can hop on WoW or a similar game and go do something there. So far, their success in creating this accessibility is debatable at best (since we're told this version of Gleemax is "pre-Alpha"). WotC should be aiming at replicating something like the old "BattleNet" system, where a player can log on, check to see what games at what levels are open and looking for players, pick one, and jump right in. And then a community needs to be built around those virtual tables to support them, with elements that encourage gamers to be, well, gamers. Host wikis and blogs for campaign management. Get the RPGA together and have them set up "Living Campaigns", and possibly even provide adventure paths for players to join in. The Living Campaigns in particular provide an excellent opportunity to develop a new setting (probably very points-of-light-esque) which caters to a large volume of characters constantly moving around from one area to another, one adventure to the next. Provide a good way to store characters online so that the player can provide a portfolio of his or her characters easily to any DM whose table he or she sits down at.In short, the hobby needs to look at how they can create not a virtual kitchen table that they and their friends will gather around, but a virtual table in the Friendly Local Gaming Store, that interested potential players might wander by and ask about joining in. And then it needs to figure out how to build a community around that virtual table to support gamers, new and old alike. This community needs to emphasize the openness and freedom that traditional RPGs have over games like WoW, and of course, help gamers find gamers.The kitchen table games are never going away (and thank goodness), but until the hobby makes the leap into a digital format which allows for accessibility and plays to its strengths, growth is going to remain stagnant.</blockquote>

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