Why RPGs are Failing

[d4]

BTW, what's wrong with alienating some of the people who play? Would you let in anybody who wished to participate? Didn't think so. There are some types any hobby is better off without.

Now I grok you...the hobby should simultaneously become more exclusive and more inclusive. In other words, it should suck and blow at the same time.

seems to me that what he wants is for RPGs to be more inclusive of the types of people he likes, and more exclusive of the types of people he doesn't like. seems that right now, it's the types of people he doesn't like that he's encountering in RPGs.

that's a really bad strategy, IMO. most products do not suddenly grab huge new audiences by changing so much that they alienate numbers of their loyal fans.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Because D&D's following could be better. For all my disagreement with how the game is currently, I still like it and I would like to see it have a larger presence. You see, I'm not convinced we need to keep D&D to ourselves, only letting others in if they pass the test. This could be a more open hobby, and I intend to help open it up.

and

BTW, what's wrong with alienating some of the people who play? Would you let in anybody who wished to participate? Didn't think so. There are some types any hobby is better off without.

Hmmm, big contradiction here. You want the game more inclusive, opened up. You intend to do it (although I STILL have not seen anything demonstrating how you propose to do it), and yet there are some types the hobby is better off without? Who are these people? Min-maxers? Power Gamers? People with bad hygiene? People with annoyingly large dice?

So are you trying to say that D&D should be open to everybody who plays the game the "correct" way, your way, and the others who don't should be excluded by rewriting the rules to make them hate it?

 

[Zappo]

People with annoyingly large dice?

I kinda like people with large dice. It's the people with small and transparent dice that bug me. I can't check whether they cheat.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I kinda like people with large dice. It's the people with small and transparent dice that bug me. I can't check whether they cheat.

True, but its not fun when that big honkin' d20 goes rolling across the battlemap, crushing minis and leaving dents in the kitchen table.

 

[I'm A Banana]

True, but its not fun when that big honkin' d20 goes rolling across the battlemap, crushing minis and leaving dents in the kitchen table.

Unless you're rolling it to simulate the area attack of a meteor....maybe that just happens to often in my campaigns though. ^_^

 

[barsoomcore]

I think, despite believing most of his arguments are wrong, that MM is doing us a service. I think every now and then the RPG world needs to be shaken up a bit, and also that 3.X (for some at least) needs to smell the fresh winds of change.

Snicker. If you think mythusmage is "shaking up the RPG world", you haven't been to the "D&D Rules" or "House Rules" or any of the other forums on this discussion board, where exactly the sort of stuff he is bemoaning the lack of has been going on FOR YEARS.

People are everyday thinking up new and better ways to model/abstractify/record/play every aspect of RPGs. They do it all the time. It's called, "Having new ideas."

To ascribe this behaviour to any one person on a discussion board is pretty absurd.

If anyone thinks they have a "magic bullet" solution that will immediately turn the industry into something many times the size it is now, they're sitting on a gold mine and presumably will make their fortune exploiting it. I don't believe there is one. I think the industry is probably more or less the size it's going to be for the foreseeable future. Can the individual games that comprise the industry get better? Sure, and they will, and they'll fragment, and people will disagree on what's an improvement and that's the way it works in the real world, where "revolutions" of style and thought have little to do with actually making money and paying the rent.

But to insist on the one hand that NOBODY is working at transforming the industry or the games within it is just nonsense, plain and simple. And to post here, wondering why nobody is doing so, just reveals an inability to browse a discussion board.

I guess.

 

[woodelf]

This is one reason why I don't like the psionic feat "Up the Walls" which states that a character can run up and down a wall as long as he begins and ends his "turn" on the ground. It goes on to say that if the character "ends his turn" while on a vertical wall, he falls to the ground. Problem is, as you stated, the characters do not stop moving at the end of their turns. Although as a player your turn ends after a set number of actions, your character continues to move and be active just as if it were real life. That is a poorly written feat because it seems to imply that the character stops moving at the end of his turn (and therefore falls to the ground).

Actually, there are quite a number of feats and other rules (mostly in the combat section) that behave in roughly this way, which reinforces the stop-motion feel of D&D3E combat. Up the Walls is not unique, just perhaps more blatant than some of the others.

 

[BASHMAN]

The Prescription for RPGing Again!

Hey, if you think you have been doing a little too much "rule-playing" or "roll-playing" lately, I recomend you try Castles and Crusades, which is coming out this summer. This game will take you back to what it is about-- roleplaying!

PS, there are also many other rules lite systems for that matter, like FUDGE, and Barbarians of Lemuria that are free.

Go to http://www.geocities.com/simonwashbourne/barbarians.html for barbarians, and http://www.fudgerpg.com/fudge/ for Fudge!

Roleplayers of the world, Unite!
You have nothing to loose but your AOOs!

 

[scott-fs]

How do you do a full attack? How do you make multiple attacks in one round?

To keep it simple, I'd let multiple attacks be done during the same phase. Splitting up attacks can lead to wierd situations that would require reworking combat from the ground up to be done properly.

Wish I'd gotten to this sooner. Been away from the boards for a few days, and I see the thread has gone 8 pages.

 

[Faraer]

The group of people who like, or would like, games that stress competition, and finite system and possibilities is finite.

The group of people who like, or would like, games that stress imagination, story and character is finite.

Far fewer of the second group have been exposed to roleplaying games than the first. Marketing of D&D, which is the only game that's ever been marketed to speak of, has always been directed at players of wargames, board games, and video games, rather than adult and precocious-child readers, cinemagoers, theatregoers, etc. I don't suppose RPGers would double overnight if Wizards targeted this group, but it's the main avenue for expansion of RPGs and Wizards is the only company with the ability to try, and I wish that it would.

(Of course, the whole idea of a 'gamer' and gamer culture is a big barrier to people taking up a roleplaying as a medium rather than as a hobby or a lifestyle...)