Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4147065" data-attributes="member: 40961">This makes sense.This doesn't.Look.  You're right on several levels.  D&D was a pop culture (geek pop culture, admittedly) phenomenon at one point, and now its not.  WoW currently is a pop culture phenomenon.  D&D isn't going to "take back" its status as a pop culture phenomenon.And on another level, right, back before there were lots of things for geeks to do, geeks mostly did the same stuff.  When there was only one RPG on the market, no computer gakes to speak of, and miniature wargaming was primarily historical, fantasy/sci fi geeks clustered around D&D.  Now, instead of having just one option for our geekiness, we have a huge buffet of geekiness from which to select.  So D&D also will never get back that moment, when they were the first and the only, and everyone played.This has happened in all kinds of hobbies.  Back in the day, if someone read science fiction novels, you could list off a couple of authors that you loved and chances are they'd have read them as well.  Why?  Because there weren't that many.  The same was true of fantasy novels.  Now there's a lot more variety.On one hand, this causes a loss of shared culture.  Its hard to discuss books with my friends, because the first thing I have to do is convince them to go read the particular novels that I read so that we can discuss them.  That's a loss, and it applies to D&D as well as books.  Right now, if you pick 20 random people working in geek related industries, and ask them what D&D character class they played back in high school, they can answer.  That won't be true in 20 years.But its not the end of the world, and there are gains.First, geekdom is bigger these days.  There are more of us, and that means we (as a collective whole) can support more companies at one time.  Wizards of the Coast might not get to gold plate their urinals, as I'm told they have at Blizzard, but that doesn't mean they can't run a healthy business and dominate the submarket of geekdom that enjoys TRPGs.And second, well, stuff is better now than it was.  With more options on the market, more authors and companies trying out different things, there's more possibilities of high quality productions being created.  I am so glad that I live in a world where the best fantasy novels aren't Conan books.  I live in a world with Perdido Street Station and Thunderer and The Music of Razors and I am so grateful.I owe a debt to those early authors, but the possibilities that are around now are so diverse that there are so many gems amongst them that it could literally take me a lifetime to read every genuinely good fantasy book and play every genuinely good game.Now that may mean that few single books or games will ever take off  as pop culture phenoms like D&D or WoW or Harry Potter.  But does that really matter to me, given what I've gained for the cost?</blockquote>

Verification