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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6793283" data-attributes="member: 4937">Interesting thread in retrospective.  Some of it is quite humorous.  For example, rudeness aside, yes he probably should have quoted the whole article.Paper RPGs have been failing for a very simple reason.It's just too much work for the GM.   Being a GM is a labor of love and always has been.  I can remember when we were young putting in 1000 or more hours of prep work in a year and playing in games with that sort of labor.  And that's not even counting play time, which even in the best of RPGs is occasionally laborious.  More on that in a second.Now days, it's not just a matter of who has the time for that, but the fact that there are now competitive products that deliver strongly on important aspects of the RPG experience without having to layout that sort of effort.  These days, people can jump right into a multiplayer RPG if they want the social/tactical experience, or they can play a single player RPG if they want the huge immersive world and engaging narratives.What the OP actually complains about is that many recent designs of RPGs don't feel like RPGs.  The reason for the changes in how RPGs are written is largely driven by the need to remove as much of the effort from playing and running an RPG as possible.  That's the reason for the increased codification.  That's the reason for designs as extreme as something like Dungeon World.  When people now talk about how they want 'rules lite' what they really mean is that they want effort lite.  They want the same level of fun as they get from a cRPG for the same level of effort that they put into one.  And to a large extent, that's a very reasonable and functional demand.  It's just one that is impossible to deliver on, because when you play a cRPG you are receiving 10's of thousands or even 100's of thousands of hours of someone's effort to deliver that experience.That said, failing is a relative term.  They'll probably never again take the world by storm in the way they did in the pre-personal computing era, but they'll I think remain a niche industry pretty much forever.   One thing that may change relative to the current industry is I think that we've reached the point we no longer need rules systems or rules industries.  I think in the future we'll see more of the same shift we say in the cRPG industry where developers no longer bothered to build their own custom rules engine for each game, but instead licensed a world engine, tweaked it, and got down to the serious business of making content.  Right now, the last thing that I think anyone really needs is a new set of rules.  We are drowning in high quality rules systems suitable for virtually any genera or style of play.</blockquote>

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