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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WayneLigon" data-source="post: 3572698" data-attributes="member: 3649">Your experience was certainly different than mine; you might be in a larger city with more than one FLGS, though. Here, M:TG effectively killed a roleplaying community. Before Magic, you could go into our local shop and find a tabletop pen-and-paper RPG running almost every day. Two or more on the weekends. There was a large amount of table space and people used it. They bought snacks and drinks from the counter. For a lot of people, especially younger gamers, this was the major place for them to play. Many of the other common non-home venues for gaming don't exist here, are not convenient for younger (read: car-less) gamers, or would refuse to host a group of roleplayers.Magic comes along and suddenly there's no more table space at the FLGS. No-one is buying new RPG books because they're blowing all their money on Magic, so the book stock starts to dwindle. Fewer orders are made. There's certainly lots of people in the place at any one time, but they're all playing Magic. There's lots of new faces, but none of them cross over and buy RPG's. They see the various ads for people looking for gamers, but ignore them. Soon those ads are taken down and replaced with tournament news. A number of the GM's attempt to reach out to the new influx but are ignored; these people are here to play a game they can win, and have the chance of acquiring someone else's cool card.The place is too full and too noisy to run an RPG. There's not enough space, even if they allow you to have space. The shop is making money, so they don't much care. Meanwhile, deprived of a place to game, the various groups begin to disband. With no common meeting ground, no-one is getting jazzed by the cool new game they saw people playing at the store. No-one is saying 'Hey, two of my players are going into the Navy; I have two slots open', and being immediately able to fill those slots. On weekends, when before there would be two-four groups of roleplayers or minis people there, suddenly you literally can't get in the door. There are junior high kids playing Magic on the sidewalk. Half of them are smoking. At the height of the pokemon craze it's difficult to get to the door, so people stop going on the weekends at all. We used to have people drive in from surrounding towns on the weekends. No more. They're met with a store packed full of highschoolers who are there to blow allowance cash on cards.There used to be two really nice game stores up in a nearby larger city. Unable to find much in the way of new gaming material here at the time, I go there. They're gotten rid of most of their RPG stuff and are wholly card stores. When the initial CCG craze begins to contract, they close forever because they've chased off their old customers to cater to the new ones: in one case, I think fifteen years of business, ruined in less than two.That almost happened here. We still have a gaming store, but they recently moved all their RPG stock to the back of the store and all the boardgame stuff up to the front. Few of their old customers returned once the blush of card players left, remembering how they'd been treated.</blockquote>

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