Why RPGs are Failing

[Telperion]

What about presentation? How do you present the game? I've been in campaigns where it was all combat, and it was tiresome. Do you show or tell?

I mostly tell, but the way I do it keeps the pace fairly quick. The main problem is not that people have a boring time in my sessions. The problem is that the NPCs don't sit around waiting for the players to make up their minds. There is a conspiracy plot going on (overthrowing a King) and they are on a deadline. Those players who have stuck with me are giving me thanks for running a good game, but they are really the only one's who are handling rush of information and seeing a bigger picture that I'm painting with fragments of information. Sure, there's a map, but that doesn't really show much at all.

Most of the stuff that is happening can be followed with some notes and taking a look at the political / genealogy tree that anyone can study to their heart's content. It's all there, really, but the big picture is just now starting to clear up from all the jumble. Its like having this really detailed map and only after starting to know the places and understand how everything works in the world that the map portrays that you begin to see the map in all its detail. After a few months of looking at that map it becomes easy to read and thus the players are able to make decisions based on gossip, news, rumors and information they have gathered themselves.

The one thing that some people don't like is that I write stuff between sessions and then I email some of that stuff to the group as a whole. I don't expect anyone to reply to me, but the characters do get more things done if the players throw me an email once or twice between sessions (we play once every two weeks).

 

[Maggan]

Huge pointy point!

I agree entirely and although your anecdote makes an interesting argument, it may well have been that you tapped into what people are after at conventions, rather than from D&D as a whole. It isn't normally 'casual' gamers who frequent the cons.

That's a very, very good point. I can't use an experience at a con to explain causal gamer behaviour. Darn...

Cheers!

Maggan

 

[Telperion]

How many other ways can you think of to play D&D®? How would you implement them? How would you handle characterization, combat, interpersonal relations? How would you detail, describe character creation or conflict resolution? (Conflict in this case involving the question, "Does he succeed or fail at a task?" Conflict at its most basic form.)

D&D® doesn't appeal to enough people to replace those that leave the hobby for one reason or another. I submit that's its because D&D® as presently constituted has nothing to offer those people. It needs to be reinvented. Become more an exercise in imagination and less an exercise in gaming.

As currently devised D&D® doesn't appeal to the prospective player's imagination. Not as fully as it could. For D&D® to gain the larger base of prospective customers it must change.

Could this changes result in some leaving the hobby? Yes. Would this be a bad thing? No, for many who are holding the hobby back with their insistence that it must be done thus and so would be among those leaving.

How do I propose these changes be made? I have ideas. On which I shall say more later.

I have been considering this issue myself for a little while now. D&D has, IMO, a huge amount of playability and expandability to offer. Yet, this seems to be a fairly hard game to approach. I actually wrote a small rant about this in a World of Darkness forum today, and it basically came down to these comments: too many books to read! Too high a step to get to the DM chair! Too much work before the fun begins for everyone! I'm not saying that other RPGs do it better, but some seem less prone to suffocating the inspiration of a fledgling GM than others.

I have been struggling with the concept of how does one teach a newbie D&D. The basics are very easy, but it seems that all those small exceptions that the rule books are really filled with cause a problem. I read trough sections of the PHB every now and then to refresh my grasp on the basic rules, and it's tiresome reading! That's a problem.

White Wolf is coming out with WoD 2.0. I honestly tried running a WoD 1.0 Chronicle last year and it failed. Not because the mechanics and ideas weren't easy to grasp. It was just the overwhelming amount of background material (or canon) that hit me. Now WoD 2.0 is coming out and I'm waiting for it with a great deal of expectation. 2 - 3 books should be all I need to run a very compelling game of supernatural horror.

D&D 3.5 was a good revision, but it was really nothing new. I'm waiting to see if WoD 2.0 has something new to offer to a GM who missed the WoD 1.0 train by nearly a decade.

 

[diaglo]

Originally Posted by Psion

Originally Posted by hong

Come back PMS, all is forgiven.

Fixed yer typo...


Sorry.

fixed it for ya

 

[alsih2o]

The whole point is moot.

RPG's aren't failing as long as people are playing them. And people are playing them.

Sales mean crap, it isn't about sales. Age means crap, it isn't about age.

Sittign around a table, or sitting at your computer BSing with friends and bashing bad (or good) guys is a success. This is happening.

Arguing over why RPGs are failing is not an argument that can make any sense.

 

[Tom Cashel]

But, it isn't really a game, as game, that we are playing, but an imaginary life in an imaginary world with rules to keep things from getting out of hand.

What exactly is the difference between these concepts? Can you clearly enumerate the ways they are different?

(This thread reminds me of the Forge, starring Mythusmage as Ron Edwards. Enlighten us, oh demogogue!)

 

[alsih2o]

Check into sales and average player age.

Burden of proof is on the presenter. What are sales like? What is the average player age? Please present fresh information, nothing a year old or older.

What information do you have that the rest of us don't?

 

[alsih2o]

I could be cruel and quote Paul Simon, but I shall refrain.

The dominant theme I'm hearing here is, "That's how it's done." With a few exceptions I don't see anybody stepping back and asking, "How else could it be done?" From the examples given here one would have to conclude that the D&D® community is a conservative one, and very conservative on a number of subjects.

I see a community here full of some 17,000 exploring how else it can be done, and this community is centered on D20. There is a huge and thriving group who are constantly askign how else it can be done.

You are going to have to start providing answers instead of snarky retorts if you wish to maintain a debate/prove your point.

 

[Faraer]

A roleplaying game is defined by a closed set of rules.

They obviously don't have to be closed.

If you're asserting that a more free-form, less rigidly-defined game system will appeal to the mass market, I don't think you could be more wrong. The mass market likes rules. They like thick, thumbable rule books with top-notch artwork, something they can browse off the shelf and admire in their collection. To return to the videogame: if we assert that computer games have achieved a mass market that RPG's haven't (as I would), then you couldn't imagine a more closed system. The accumulated logic of CRPG's is inviolable. The programmer says it is thus, and thus it shall be, no matter what the player does (bugs not withstanding). This is comfortable for gamers. I have seen the confusion in their eyes when presented with a P&P RPG, and I have seen the many hours of play it takes before the sweet epiphany of understanding about what 'roleplaying' *really* is comes to them. Those long hours right there are the difference between the mass market and the niche.

Everyone knows how to imagine and how to roleplay; it's a basic human function, however much it's frustrated in many people after childhood. Literate and film-literate people also enjoy taking part in stories. This is the big contingent of potential roleplayers, far more important than the CRPGers, and they react to big RPG books -- and the expenditure of effort and memorization they imply -- with aversion. It's the existing 'gamer' contingent who likes those books, not any kind of mass market.

The new D&D basic set will once more take the tack of selling D&D to children as a super board game. That's fine, that can work, but no wonder people who come to roleplaying this roundabout way need time to adjust to its real potential; and it isn't how you sell the medium to imaginative adults.

 

[alsih2o]

Traditional games should be fair, the better to give two players of equal skill an equal chance of winning.

Wrong again, Traditionally, most gaming is gambling, adn this is done against the house with a bias towards the house. Surely not fair.

Aside form this, most other gaming is sports, where almost always one team has home field advantage.

There is nothing about fairness that is traditional in games. Fairness is a very recent idea. The Christians didn't get lions on their side, Vegas has the odss on its side. Fair is an elementary school concept.

Perhaps you need to look back at the history of gaming, fairness is as rare as hens teeth.