Recap:

Discussion about using Dogs in the Vineyard with D&D, started on Pundit's blog, moved to theRPGsite:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=18803

John Morrow made this post:

http://www.therpgsite.com/showpost.php?p=422602&postcount=254

And said:  

Quote from: JohnMorrowPart of the reason I wanted to have this discussion with Ryan was not just to discuss the idea of Dogs in the Vineyard as a direction that D&D could go in but to discuss the implications of the hobby losing one or two playstyle segments forever to MMORPGs and other computer games and which elements of D&D could be weakened or discarded to improve the games overall appeal.

I want to have this discussion too, so I started this thread.

RyanD

So is the inclusion of daily powers etc. an attempt to get the lost players back as this and the battle game/skill challenge focus mimics certain aspects of Comp. games etc.?

Is the hobby better of without these players (not from the commercial aspect)? ie. what aspects would you consider the best to discard.

or are you referring to something else...?
:hmm:

Quote from: RSDancey;426246I want to have this discussion too, so I started this thread.

Can you be specific about which segments you think have largely left the RPG hobby for good for MMORPGs and what elements of game play were there to cater to them that might be discarded, in your opinion?

I'm going to copy the whole post you quoted from over here.  Also, a link to your 2000 explanation of the player segments and what they want out of a game here for reference.

Original Post:

I'm going to steal a quote from another thread to make a point here:

Quote from: RandallS;422581Generally, if "rules mastery" is a part of the game it isn't something I will run except under great duress. Most of the players who enjoy my campaigns simply aren't that into learning rules (let alone mastering them). They generally don't want to think much about rules during the game, they prefer them to fade into the background.

Part of the reason I wanted to have this discussion with Ryan was not just to discuss the idea of Dogs in the Vineyard as a direction that D&D could go in but to discuss the implications of the hobby losing one or two playstyle segments forever to MMORPGs and other computer games and which elements of D&D could be weakened or discarded to improve the games overall appeal.  And, in particular, I had "rules mastery" in mind.

D&D 3e was specifically designed to have appeal to people who enjoy "rules mastery" (see here):

Quote from: Monte CookWhen we designed 3rd Edition D&D, people around Wizards of the Coast joked about the "lessons" we could learn from Magic: The Gathering, like making the rulebooks -- or the rules themselves -- collectible. ("Darn, I got another Cleave, I'm still looking for the ultra-rare Great Cleave.")

[...]

Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.

[...]

There's a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

The problem with "rules mastery" is that, while it appeals to certain types of players, it makes the game harder to learn, harder to play casually, harder to GM, and has a hand in driving rule bloat.  

Part of what I was curious about was whether "rules mastery" was one of those things that role-playing systems could dispense with if one assumes that certain segments have been lost forever to computer games and MMORPGs and whether the traditional role-playing advocates here think that it serves a critical purpose or not.  Personally, I don't have much use for it, even though I can do it if I have to.

Ok, as I begin, I want to address two issues meta to the primary topic.

The first is "what is an MMO".  If you think all MMOs are World of Warcraft, you have a lot of self-educating to do.  WoW isn't even the biggest MMO in the world (that's a Chinese MMO called Giant Online that has 40 million players, about 4 times the total of World of Warcraft).

WoW is what the MMO industry calls a "Theme Park" MMO.  There are two basic design paradigms for MMOs.  Theme Parks and Sandboxes.  In Theme Park MMOs, the experience of play is typically all about going through various pre-planned scenario content, and the way most of these games are designed you don't usually do the same content more than once until you reach the end-game.  While there may be other things to do in between the pre-planned scenarios, those things are usually filler, designed on purpose to suck up time so that you can't rush through all the "Theme Park" content and then quit the game.

The other kind of game is a Sandbox.  The first sandbox game was the 2nd commercial MMO, Ultima Online.  UO had some Theme Park elements, but its core design was that player interaction and player choice would determine most of the game state most of the time.  A Sandbox design provides players with many opportunities to create emergent behavior, that is, unscripted gameplay synthesized by the players from the elements provided within the gamespace.  EVE Online is the largest current Sandbox MMO, and while it has "Theme Park" elements in the form of missions, they are tertiary to the "real game" of player on player activities.

People who have only been exposed to Theme Park MMOs often come away thinking that the format is very limited.  People who play Sandbox MMOs have a hard time convincing those with limited Theme Park experience that there is more to the genre.  On some level it has to be experienced to really be understood.

In both forms of MMO there is extensive roleplaying.  In the Theme Park this usually takes the form of players who choose to follow along with the IP storyline and avoid anachronisms (sometimes even playing on RP-specific servers where anachronistic behavior is grounds for removal).  In the Sandbox, players often invent "roles" to play and then elaborate on them iteratively.  The "pirates" in EVE, for example, sometimes are just kids looking to gank someone and trigger emorage, but often they are adults who engage in quite extensive roleplay including the messages they exchange with their targets, their inter-Pirate alliances, their message board personas, etc.

If you are interested in the depth of RP in MMOs, I highly encourage you to spend some time reading the materials that Nick Yee has created at the Daedalus Project:  http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/

In the following discussion, be careful not to make the assumption that MMOs are all like WoW, or that there's no "true" RP going on in them - both are incorrect and you do yourself a disservice if you believe either of those things to be true.

In addition to the Theme Parks and Sandboxes there are some untyped virtual worlds like Second Life.  Second Life is more of a construction set than an actual product, but people have used its tools to create some amazing virtual worlds including a very faithful reproduction of the Masquerade era World of Darkness.  Fully explaining Second Life is beyond the scope of this thread, but if you ever find yourself saying "computer games can never do X", you should know that in Second Life, they probably can.  (The barrier to using the SL tools at that level is quite high though, and not for the code-squeamish).

And a last intro note about MMOs:  What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

Ok, now onto tabletop RPG players.

The Segmentation Study we released when I ran the D&D business at Wizards of the Coast was designed to show 2 important things.  First, it was to show that unlike what was the conventional wisdom at the time, the TRPG hobby was not dominated by people who cared more about publisher-driven metaplot rich "worlds".  It was also to show that most people who played TRPGs actually did have a "segment" of play they enjoyed most - that is, the audience was really a set of overlapping heterogeneous segments rather than a monolithic homogeneous "gamer" segment.  

People had been talking past each other for years - which was one reason we did the segmentation study in the first place - because it was obvious that different people were getting different value out of the TRPG experience but were being taught by the community that everyone was really the same which then created friction and dissonance when the segments all tried to talk about the hobby whilst assuming everyone was just like them.

Its at this point that people start asking/talking about GNS.  GNS is an analysis of games not gamers.  Unfortunately, for many people, the idea of boxing into one of the GNS segments made sense at least anecdotally.  One of the things I love about GNS at its root is that it gives designers an excellent way to talk about their games in a way that can be understood by other designers.  It just doesn't work when people try to use it to categorize people.

There have been other attempts to segment TRPG players.  One of the best well-known is Robin Law's system.  In the MMO field, Richard Bartle created a segmentation classification that is taken as the Truth by many people in that field.  In the end, these attempts are all flawed because they are based on an individual (or group) looking at what players say about what they like about games and then trying to reverse engineer segments from those reports.

The correct way to create a segmentation study (and the methodology we used at Wizards) is to try and start with as few pre-conceived notions as possible, and then give people a very wide variety of questions about what they like, what they don't like, what they play, what they don't play, what they have played, what they want to play, etc. and then search the resulting data set for clusters of people giving similar answers.  If you make your initial survey broad enough, and you get a large enough sample size, experience shows that you will find such clusters and they tend to have a high degree of correlation to reality.  We did, and we found them.

http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html

(it's important for me to note that Sean Reynolds hosts this page but the contents are mine, he's not responsible for any errors or omissions that may be contained within.)

There are some critical things to understand about the Segmentation Study.

Everyone within the domain of the study results is a TRPG gamer.  That makes them a sub-segment of the tabletop gaming population, and a sub-segment of the gaming population, and a sub-segment of the overall population.  They tend to have more in common with each other in their sub-sub-sub segment with regard to their TRPG preferences than they do with anyone in the larger segments which contain them.

A quick analogy.  If you had a group of people who were segmented into a cluster called "fans of rock music", if the segmentation was good, those people would in general express a preference for a mixtape of ACDC, Motorhead, Judas Priest, and Wolfmother over a mixtape of Mozart concertos.  The existence of people who might prefer the reverse does not invalidate the segmentation; it just shows that there are outliers in any human population.  You need to think about segments as groups with diffuse edges - not hard geometric shapes with dark boundary lines.

OK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

These 8 things are the core of the overall TRPG segment.  If you make a TRPG without them, you will be addressing a completely different audience.  (Maybe a good thing, but certainly a different thing).

You can self-check this:  Have you ever played a successful TRPG that didn't have most (if not all) of the above features?  If you had a chance to play an TRPG that didn't offer these features, would you think it likely that your game group would embrace it?  If this all resonates with you, we're on the same page.

OK, now there are sub-segments within the domain described above as people who prefer tabletop RPGs.  Remember that everyone in the sub-segments inherits the need/desire for these 8 features; they are the baseline on which the segments divide.

The segments are:

A Thinker is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers Strategic/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, spending hours out of game to find every conceivable advantage available in the system to deliver maximum damage from behind maximum protection, even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. This kind of person wants to solve puzzles and can keep track of long chains of facts and clues.

A Power Gamer is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Tactical/Combat Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy playing a character that has a minimum of personality (often, this kind of person plays a character that is simply an extension of the player). This kind of player enjoys short, intense gaming experiences. The consequences of a failed action are minimized for this player, who will roll up a new character and return to the fray without much thought for the storyline implications of that action.

A Character Actor is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Tactical/Story Focus. This kind of person is likely to enjoy the act of theater; using voice, posture, props, etc. to express a character's actions and dialog. This player will have a character that makes sub-optimal choices (from an external perspective) to ensure that the character's actions are "correct" from the perspective of the character's motivations, ethics, and knowledge.

A Storyteller is a player who most enjoys the game when it delivers a Strategic/Story Focus. This kind of person finds enjoyment from the logical progression of the narrative of the scenario. There should be a beginning, a middle and an end. Characters should develop over time in reaction to their experiences. This player will look for a non-rules answer to inconsistencies or anachronisms in the game experience.

When I use these terms in this thread, I am referring to these specific segments.

There is a 5th type, who does not segment; they sit right in the middle of the domain and get value from the entire domain.

22% of players fall into one of the 4 named groups, and 12% fall into the "basic roleplayer" segment.  I often refer to "quarters" or "one fourth" when I talk about the segments which is lazy of me but its a shorthand that most people can visualize quickly so I do it anyway.  (There are of course, 5 quarters therefore in my numbers.  My maths teachers would be so proud.)

Next message I'm going to talk about what the MMOs have done to this player population and how it affects us in 2011 and beyond.

RyanD

When I talk about "MMOs", I'm going to be talking about MMOs primarily played by people in the West.  Eastern MMOs are a whole different kettle of fish.  They have a different business model, different value propositions, are played in public rather than in private, are highly segmented by nationality, etc.

I'll also note that the player segments "prefer MMO" and "prefer tabletop RPGs" overlap but neither contains the other.  Their overlaps are considerable and are the root of the problem.  They overlap so much because both share the 8 common elements.  MMOs add "community" to the mix, but its an addition not a subtraction.

Right off the bat we know that the Power Gamer segment is going to have a better play experience in general in the MMO environment than on the tabletop.  Pre-MMO, the tabletop gave this person a unique experience and they put up with the parts that bored and distracted them.  Post-MMO era, they don't have to, and they won't (at least not over any length of time).  Sure, you can get "the old group together" for a once-a-year game night, but you're going to have an almost impossible time getting any 12-16 year old kids with that segment to sit still for a tabletop experience of any length or repetition.

That's bad.  We know that TRPGs are really network externalities.  The value is external to the products - it is the combination of the product & the social network that uses the product which creates the value.  Knocking a quarter of the social network out of the mix has got to play havoc with the whole system even if all other factors were equal.

Maybe the damage could be limited if we ended up with a 3-segment player base, with some odd and unknown number of Power Gamers who are too old, too set in their ways, or too stubborn to play MMOs sticking around for flavor.  That might be addressable (somehow) by just tweaking existing games.  But I don't think we even get that much luck.

There's another group that's being seduced by the MMOs: The Character Actors.  These people are getting tremendous value out of the current generation of MMOs.  I've seen people who have filled up every available character slot on every available server with City of Heroes characters, for example.  I know people who have produced (and I kid you not) tens of thousands of message board posts in character, about their character and interacting with others also in character.

These people are getting crack cocaine in the form of a mutable, controllable graphic representation of their character.  For tabletop RPGs the best they could hope for was a hand-drawn "character portrait" and maybe a metal miniature, which might or might not be painted.  In the MMO realm they get a living, breathing, 3-D avatar who moves, dances, emotes, and does all the other things these people can dream of.  And, not to keep hammering this point home, the technology about to come on-line will blow these people's minds.

With the Power Gamers out, and the Character Actors leaving, that leaves us with a 2 segment audience, plus the "generic RPG players".  Basically, the Storytellers and the Thinkers.  It just so happens that the tabletop RPG format is nearly perfect for these people.  The MMO format is not good at all for the Storytellers (they won't get their needs met probably for 1 and maybe 2 more generations of software, so around 2020 or so when they can begin to easily create virtual content for others to interact with).  The Thinkers can get their needs met in many different ways, but one downside to MMOs is that all the secrets are revealed in near-realtime.  There's very little joy of discovery or thrill of success when you know that some 12 year old in Minot North Dakota did the same thing in a fraction of the time and then posted a step by step walkthrough.  On the tabletop Thinkers still have the ability to shine in real-time, without being worried about the FAQ.

That's too much damage to do to the audience of tabletop RPGs to continue with the games in their current format as anything other than an aging hobby with dwindling numbers.  We could easily see TRPGs turn into the model railroad hobby, which has become primarily a rich-man's hobby focused on expensive, highly accurate reproductions, and large track & terrain setups that fill whole rooms.  Or we could see it become like stamp collecting - a hobby where the underlying business has all but evaporated and along with it support systems like periodicals, community organizations & gatherings, and recognition.

The fact that Pathfinder, which is at heart a tuned up D&D 3.5, is selling about as well as D&D 4th Edition should scare the hell out of all of us.  We know that there's very little new player acquisition into the 3.x family of games.  We know that the game is aimed at a market of pre-existing 1e and 2e D&D players who are in their 30s to 60s.  While it's a great game, it still can't regenerate an entire hobby.

4th Edition is in my opinion, an even bigger problem.  It's basically a game designed to be attractive to Power Gamers and Thinkers, while de-emphasizing Character Actors and Storytellers.  In other words, its a game primarily focused on only a quarter of the audience (because the Power Gamers have already left).  No wonder its not selling well.  It may be the best Power Gamer/Thinker tabletop RPG ever created, but that's like saying it's the best prop-driven fighter aircraft ever made:  A technically great achievement with zero chance of being successful in the market.

It's late, I'm tired, and I've now got a decent head start on this topic.  I will write more tomorrow.

What I'd like to know, and I don't recall seeing in the study, is how exactly a person was put into one of the four groups.

For example, I've seen a very poor study (not the WotC one) where players were basically asked to rate their agreement with the statement "I enjoy a good sense of story". The problem with this approach is that, first, it recapitulates the confusion over "story" which has appeared repeatedly in gaming, especially TRPG. An interest in "story" can mean many things not only in terms of content (it might mean having a beginning/middle/end, it might mean NPCs with real personalities, it might mean non-combat oriented activity), but also in terms of approach to content (it might mean scripted plots, it might mean GM-centric improv, it might mean player-distributed improv with lots of out-of-character input).

Second, it basically violates the idea of single-blind evaluation, let alone double-blind evalution, of survey results.

Third, it doesn't really provide much guidance for addressing the putative groups' interests, if they're expressed in ambiguous terms which will mean different things to different people.

The best approach is to ask a variety of questions which may or may not contain overt reference to high-level concepts like "story" (e.g., some questions could ask about preferred frequency & length of combats, acceptable rates of character death, etc.), and then to identify objective clusters of respondents who are broadly similar. Only then should the clusters be given names--and then the characteristics of the clusters can be generalized from how they answered the question.

Now, it could be that this is how the study was done, and either I just don't remember, or the detail has been missing in public reports. But it's really crucial to seeing just how valid any conclusions we draw from the study might be.

Quote from: John Morrow;426263*snip*
The problem with "rules mastery" is that, while it appeals to certain types of players, it makes the game harder to learn, harder to play casually, harder to GM, and has a hand in driving rule bloat.  

Part of what I was curious about was whether "rules mastery" was one of those things that role-playing systems could dispense with if one assumes that certain segments have been lost forever to computer games and MMORPGs and whether the traditional role-playing advocates here think that it serves a critical purpose or not.  Personally, I don't have much use for it, even though I can do it if I have to.

If the assumption is true that those segments are "lost forever" then "rules mastery" and the resultant "bloat" for the sole purpose of in-game "rewards" is a paradigm best left to wither...playing the game for the rules is a bore IMO and defeats the spirit of RPGs as originally concieved and at the highest level of play.
I would add that the propensity for designers to include their setting materials in the "core book" is a trend that has at it's heart commercial underpinings and has damaged the creative aspects of the hobby.

If folks are finding their fix with other mediums great. Lets not have RPG's cater to those segments in an attempt to remain a viable commercial interest. Nothing wrong with a "cottage" industry especially in this age of print on demand and self publication. With inovative designs and compelling supplements I think the hobby has many robust years ahead. More is by no means better in all regards.

Did you have a chance to check out the link that showed the middle schoolers playing AD&D 1ed.? Will try to locate the thread...

Quote from: skofflox;426286Did you have a chance to check out the link that showed the middle schoolers playing AD&D 1ed.? Will try to locate the thread...

I think that is what you are talking about, from this post and that thread prior to it.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264And a last intro note about MMOs:  What you see today is not what you will see in the next 3 years.  The MMO field is about to undergo a massive graphic & AI upgrade driven by Moore's law.  The "immersion" of the MMO will soon start to approach Turing Test levels - you'll never be sure if the NPC you're interacting with is a human or an AI.  And the visual experience in terms of lighting, shadows, clothing, physics, skin tones, etc. is all going to become so much better that you'll soon think of the current generation of MMOs the way we think about the old Kings Quest adventure games.  Its going to be that big an evolution.

I find this incredibly difficult to believe. MMOs have always lagged off-line games in terms of graphic quality - for this to be true we'd have to be seeing the levels of quality you're talking about already in single-player games, and we're not. Sure, things are improving, but I think you're overselling it here.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264The Segmentation Study we released when I ran the D&D business at Wizards of the Coast was designed to show 2 important things.  First, it was to show that unlike what was the conventional wisdom at the time, the TRPG hobby was not dominated by people who cared more about publisher-driven metaplot rich "worlds".  It was also to show that most people who played TRPGs actually did have a "segment" of play they enjoyed most - that is, the audience was really a set of overlapping heterogeneous segments rather than a monolithic homogeneous "gamer" segment.  

So the survey was designed to show what it showed? You make it sound better when you talk about it later, but beginning a survey with an expected result is a fairly classic error in statistics.

QuoteOK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

One of these things is not like the others... I wonder how the "active gamers" were selected for this survey, considering you've come back with a bias towards people who are buying new products.

Quote from: RSDancey;426264...
Its at this point that people start asking/talking about GNS.  GNS is an analysis of games not gamers.  Unfortunately, for many people, the idea of boxing into one of the GNS segments made sense at least anecdotally.  One of the things I love about GNS at its root is that it gives designers an excellent way to talk about their games in a way that can be understood by other designers.  It just doesn't work when people try to use it to categorize people.

Firstly, I'm fairly sure you are wrong about the purpose of GNS:- Edwards himself has used it to classify gamers, as well as games (I've followed links to the Forge which demonstrated this). At its most fundamental, GNS is about what drives decisions during play - a decision, on Edwards' model, can be G, N or S, and a repeated tendency to do one of those makes a gamer G, N or S, and a game set up to encourage one of those is G, N or S and any other game is "incoherent". Whatever.

I need hardly add that I fucking hate GNS, but I think I have cracked where it went wrong. Edwards is a scientist and presumably therefore is used to approaching things empirically via externally observable evidence - he talks in his essay about how you have to game with someone for a while and watch what they do in order to categorise them, and disregard what they say about their own preferences. (Possibly contrast your segmentation study which, though it did not rely on high-level questioning of subjects, plainly DID rely on low-level questioning of subjects.) So GNS bears the hallmarks, IMHO, of an approach based on observation of the subjects, rather than on feedback from the subjects (possibly unlike your segmentation study). GNS might be passably OK (though not brilliant) as a bland external model of how roleplayers appear to behave; what it does not satisfactorily address is why people appear to show those preferences, or what their internal experience of the game is, or how to enhance that experience. For starters it tramples on the idea of immersion, which is fundamental for many people here. Now, GDS may have been a far better theory, but the D is GDS is broader than the N in GNS, and the S in GNS is broader than the S in GDS. I suspect I might be a D in GDS, but I don't think I fit GNS at all. I am not G, I am not N, and I would feel insulted to be called S. It's an incomplete theory.

I have also seen GNS misapplied and misdescribed by people who get caught up in some broad general meaning of "story" as "anything which isn't combat-focused or rules/randomisation-focused" and then think that any game where the characters and tensions between them are interesting is somehow an N-game. That's not how N is meant in Edwards' actual essays, at least not the ones I've read.

My next post may be slightly more interesting, however...

QuoteThe correct way to create a segmentation study (and the methodology we used at Wizards) is to try and start with as few pre-conceived notions as possible, and then give people a very wide variety of questions about what they like, what they don't like, what they play, what they don't play, what they have played, what they want to play, etc. and then search the resulting data set for clusters of people giving similar answers.  If you make your initial survey broad enough, and you get a large enough sample size, experience shows that you will find such clusters and they tend to have a high degree of correlation to reality.  We did, and we found them.

I suspect that considering the vast set of conceivable RPGs and storygames as a whole, the VAST majority of players have only been exposed to a small segment of those RPGs, and NO-ONE has been seriously exposed to them ALL, not even to all the ones currently in existence. Network externalities as well as marketing will be a massive factor in this; also, many conceivable RPGs, which might have the ingredients of success if written and marketed properly, may have no close analogue among the RPGs which have so far been written. This means that no matter how good your methods, a careful statistical analysis is always at risk of producing flawed results. There are also at least two things in your results which suggest inherent bias in your methodology, of which more later. But the impossibility of satisfactory statistical sampling means that ultimately we are thrown back on a scientifically unsatisfactory combination of personal judgement, anecdotal evidence, individual feedback, empathy and intuition in attempting to fathom what players really enjoy or in future may enjoy about games, and how to enhance their experience. I would rather go by my gut and acknowledge that that's what I am doing than convince myself that I have found some scientific method which is somehow valid and then use it as a guide which may lead me up the wrong path entirely.

QuoteOK, so from the Segmentation Study we know that most people who are within the classification "prefer tabletop RPGs" have 8 things in common that they prefer to find in the games they play:

*  Strong Characters and Exciting Story
*  Role Playing
*  Complexity Increases over Time
*  Requires Strategic Thinking
*  Competitive
*  Add on sets/New versions available
*  Uses imagination
*  Mentally challenging

And... face-to-face socialising??? - or to be facetious - you've missed the tabletop in tabletop roleplaying...

In other words, you missed the Cheetos off your list, Mr. Dancey. And that shows a huge flaw in your study - or it might be fairer to say, your study is only really about TTRPGs, and you can't therefore use its results to consider other media of entertainment. Of course, it was understandable at the time, back in 2000. World of Warcraft was announced IIUC in 2001. Back in the late 90s there were text-based MMOs and probably graphics-based ones, but the whole landscape was vastly different to today. Would questions about "roleplaying without your friends present in the same room" even have been valid back then? (PBM games being perhaps fairly niche.) Now, I appreciate that people CAN socialise online. In a manner of speaking, here we are doing it now. But I refuse adamantly to believe that it's the same thing as face-to-face socialising. What about body language, human contact, all those subtle cues which enhance human interaction? Sure, in WoW you can presumably hook up your mic to the computer, and you might know your fellow gamers offline. People also play TTRPGs by Skype, frequently. But to me, that has far less appeal than playing face-to-face. Even playing on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise loses part of its appeal if there are not other real humans involved in face-to-face contact with you (or TBH I suppose humanlike androids like Mr. Data, at least if they have continuous offline personality and you can get to know them offline so it has a social purpose of sorts). A holodeck generated mask for your face or voice, etc. might be OK, I will concede that.

FWIW in terms of your segments I'm probably either a general roleplayer or a character actor.

QuoteA Thinker ... is likely to enjoy min-maxing a character, ... even if the min-maxing produces results that are seemingly illogical/impossible. ...

What you have described is not a thinker, but a munchkin. I refuse to believe that 22% of people are munchkins. I have in me an element of what I suspect the survey really identified as "thinker". Possibly a big element. But for me, if the game is a credible one (and not a hack-n-slash munchkinfest), the results have to make sense - min-maxing can be OK, but the results must not be "illogical/impossible". E.g. Str 3, Con 18 - WTF. And this, from someone who will spend hours poring over the rules to identify optimal combinations of abilities. Not at the expense of ruining the credibility of my character if the wider game has roleplay credibility! And if the wider game lacks roleplay credibility, that makes it far less shiney for me.

QuoteA Storyteller ... Characters should develop over time in reaction to their experiences ...

Is this really a trait of storytellers rather than character actors? How can you be a Character Actor and not have a tendency for your characters to develop over time in relation to their experiences? I know that mine do, without any conscious desire to show some narrativistically interesting development in their personalities. It's called roleplay. It partly comes from a developing and changing wealth of IC knowledge and experience, and a more intimate understanding of your character.

Quote... 22% of players fall into one of the 4 named groups, and 12% fall into the "basic roleplayer" segment. ...

Clue number two to the bias in your survey. The results seem to be too good to be true. They seem to be too symmetrical.

Now perhaps you can prove me wrong by showing me your scientifically valid data, but the way it comes across, you might as well say:-

50% of people are more Tactical than (median) average, and 50% are less Tactical than average, but we'll cluster the middle 34.6% as approximately averagely Tactical.

50% of people are more Story than (median) average, and 50% are less Story than average, but we'll cluster the middle 34.6% as approximately averagely Story

These two factors are independent of each other.

Hey presto we've got 12% of people being averagely Tactical and averagely Story, and of the 88% of people who are left, we can divide them equally according to whichever one of their 2 axis tendencies is more pronounced compared to the average.

Now, I'm not insinuating that this is what you actually did. Plainly it's not. But I suspect that there may have been a certain subconscious bias in what questions you asked and how you correlated the answers, what weight you gave to each answer, etc. - based on your own preconceptions. This tallies with your notion that the results seem intuitively right for you (which is what I understand by you saying that they fit reality).

You see, obviously in a relative sense approx. 50% of people are going to be more Tactical than bang-on median average, and approx. 50% will be less Tactical than bang-on median average. Likewise with Story.

But that doesn't mean that for instance elements of story or strategy are irrelevant to powergamers. Plainly most powergamers like their powergaming to be framed in some kind of a story which makes some basic minimum kind of sense and they like to keep a character from one game to the next. They're not playing Chess or Go. It doesn't mean that elements of story are irrelevant to the thinker. An avid love of min-maxing does not preclude an insistence on roleplay-credibility parameters to constrain that min-maxing.

I don't know very much factually about your study. I don't know whether you've proven me wrong on this point to your satisfaction, empirically. But I know from my personal experience that even people with a strong tendency in one direction or another generally have a limited tolerance for neglecting things unrelated to their predominant tendency. Power gamers and thinkers who appeal to realism. Character actors who want to be where the action is and don't like suboptimal characters. Storytellers who like tactical combat. This is not the exception. It's the norm.

Sure, power gamers who get pissed off at excessive character acting and who have no patience for broader story - I know people who fit that mould. But they still appeal to realism. Likewise dedicated character actors who will complain like Hell if the game stagnates and the story doesn't develop, and who don't like being diddled into suboptimal CharGen choices. This kind of synergy of tendencies is not the exception. It is the norm, with differing areas of emphasis.

Most importantly of all:- MMOs cannot currently compete with tabletop RPGs for the shared face-to-face social experience. I don't see them competing with tabletop RPGs in that regard in the near future. A wider audience they may have, but people who like that kind of socialising will be drawn to tabletop games. This includes people from all 5 of your segments.

I can see MMOs gaining ground in this regard as the experience becomes more and more immediate, but not completely catching up. For instance, with a webcam taking players' images and transforming their facial expressions into the expressions of their characters, the illusion of face-to-face contact could be created. Computers could of course one day become a critical component in tabletop gaming played in a kind of holodeck environment.

To some extent, the position of LARPs is stronger than tabletop games in this regard because they involve physical activity.

Overall conclusion:- the rate of uptake of Power Gamers to TTRPGs may be reduced by the availability of MMOs which may be better suited to SOME of them. The same is potentially true to a lesser extent of ALL the other segments IMHO. Thinkers may enjoy optimising in the more complex environment which a vast computer system can provide and may be happy to ignore how-to guides posted by 12-year-old kids from North Dakota, or there may be a way to vary the options available to each player so that easy cheat-guides cannot be produced, if that's desired. Storytellers may be able to enjoy more complex narratives on dedicated RP-type servers because of the vast number of players and vast landscape. Character Actors may get something from it too.

Speaking as someone who is primarily a character actor myself, I can't personally imagine getting ANYTHING from WoW which would REMOTELY compare with my experience of character acting in LARP, as as for tabletop, whatever the strict analytical comparison, its the face-to-face social contact which wins out.

All this said, I think MMOs are and will remain a far larger hobby than ours. IMHO that's because they suit people who want immediate, easy entertainment and because you don't have to have likeminded friends to play an MMO, nor to reveal your interest in gaming to anyone you know. I'm not denying the tens of thousands of IC posts people post. I have done similar on IC forums supporting LARPs I play. But the ease of access of play is there in MMOs in a way it isn't for TTRPGs. You don't have to read a load of rules. You don't even have to have a friend who reads a load of rules. And you have snazzy graphics. But for the essence of what Character Actors really enjoy? No thank you. You have too much faith in the "science" of your methods and in taking it to its logical conclusions. Character Actors like the feeling of immersion. It's a feeling which is cultivated by the social environment. It's not an abstract thing to do with the depiction of a character. It's how you feel inside when you are playing the character. And your social environment is IMHO YMMV a critical aspect of that.

I'm not saying there aren't loads of people effectively Character Acting on MMOs. But they are getting a different kind of buzz IMHO. The social-immersive buzz of Character Acting in TTRPGs/LARPs is more powerful - or at least the social aspect augments the immersive buzz itself. Online immersion in a character's perspective may be not quite a contradiction in terms but there's a tension there I think. The pay-off for doing it online is you get there far easier, and with better graphics; the pay-off of doing it socially is the direct face-to-face human feedback which heightenes your immersion.

Another thought:- aged in my 30s, I'm a busy guy. My time for socialising is limited. My time for playing games is limited. I don't want to waste time playing games if it means less time spent socialising. But playing games and socialising at the same time? It's a win-win situation. I'm sure I'm not alone in this view. Some people even like to use TTRPGs or LARPs as a crutch for their inhibited socialising. For instance I know one girl who LARPs who complained about the immersionists in our LARP insisting on a minimisation of "out-of-character" interaction during games because the LARP simply WAS her social life as far as she was concerned. It's a shame she doesn't feel more socially able generally (she vastly underestimates her social abilities), but she and people like her (if not all quite to her extreme) ARE a part of the market. They may also be responsible for any "geekiness" of its image, although she doesn't seem geeky to me (but she would probably claim to be - whatever).

Apologies if the bloviations have increased beyond the socially acceptable norm...