Folks, I said what I said for a reason--one argued by Matt Colville, who's got more of a stake than I do--and that reason comes down to two things: the youth aren't seeing tech the way we do, and the tech that's now in development (which will be mature enough shortly) make this sort of model viable.

I look forward, then, to the coming dominance of Linux, OpenOffice, and all the freeware computer games there are available.

I ain't holding my breath, though.

Amazing how people can ignore evidence right in front of them if it lets them keep their little philosophy going.

Futurism is soooo boring.

Quote from: J Arcane;314257Futurism is soooo boring.

And so yesterday.

It's fun in retrospect. Like the retrofuture website.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;314268It's fun in retrospect. Like the retrofuture website.

Which is fundamentally ironic for a movement wanting to leave the past behind and move "forward... to the future!", when you think of it.

Well, the fun comes from laughing at the wrong predictions of the futurists. The futurists like to tell us that this or that future is inevitable. Me, I'd be satisfied with "possible" or even "likely", but nope - it's INEVITABLE!

Then of course it doesn't happen, and so... we all get to laugh.

In my other hobby of worrying about the future, about peak fossil fuels and climate change, we get a lot of people who reckon they can be very certain about exactly what the future will be like. They break down into "cornucopians" - those who believe The Market! or Science! will give us a world of plenty for all for all eternity - and "doomers" - those who believe any and all efforts are doomed to failure, and the future is something like Mad Max.

These guys give us lots to laugh at, because they like to put dates to things. Electric cars will be ubiquitous by 2000, or there'll be worldwide permanent blackouts by 2007, and so on. But they sort of have to put dates to things, because a common challenge is, "if X is inevitable, when is it going to happen?" and if they refuse to give a date, then we still get to laugh at them for being vague.

The idea that the near future will look more or less like the present, but with just a few things different, that they find quite distressing. Our own Bradford seems to be one of those.

Again, if free stuff could "revolutionise" an industry, then we have to ask why youtube and p2p have not destroyed the film and music industries, why free pdf rpgs have not destroyed Wizards of the Coast, why Linux is much less popular than Windows, why fan fiction has not destroyed the writing industry, and so on.

Quality of product is part of it, but it's not all. What it comes down to is that people value what they pay for (in money, effort or time), and don't value what they don't pay for. You can argue whether this is something intrinsic in human nature, or part of our capitalist culture - but either way, there it is for the near future.

I'd be happy to be wrong. A culture where people produce what they love to produce, and give it away for free to everyone else, that sounds nice in a happy-clappy dreamy Christian kind of way. But it does seem unlikely. Essentially, the gift economy is part of the mainstream economy, not independent from it.

The future is a mathematical inevitability.

The future as predicted is mathematically less likely both the further it is from the present in either time or quality.

I do agree: people don't value "free" near as much as even $1.00 product.

I would've thought "casual roleplayers" wouldn't play role-playing games, but games like Talisman or its more recent equivalents. Talisman was intended to be "a way we could have all the excitement of a role-playing adventure without all the hard work of creating characters and drawing maps." (reference)

Mind you there are people who are quite intense about Talisman, and some of the more recent games of this type are comparable to lighter RPGs in their complexity, so maybe that's an over-simplification.

If you honestly think that the cheap or free alternatives haven't had an impact, then you're not paying attention.  They are; Jeff Jarvis lays out why in his recent "What Would Google Do?" book, which is really an old-media distillation of what he's on about at his 'blog Buzzmachine.

The model is changing, greatly, but the shockwaves aren't so far spread as to be ubiquitous and obvious just yet.  However, you're seeing some of them manifest now; the slow transition away from print as the default medium of TRPGs, in part due to the rise of social networking technology and the add-ons and adjuncts meant to work with it (virtual tabletops, for example), is one such shockwave that you're seeing more in the emerging generation than amongst we adults that grew up without it.

There are already companies and institutions that, as part of cutting costs, are either moving to Open Office or Google Docs and from Microsoft Office.  (Indeed, I suggested just this to my state and federal delegations just the other day.)  This is because the network externalities behind the established leaders in respective markets are being successfully undermined.  If you can do something just as good as the leader, but do it cheaper or give it away, you're going to take over in time; that's what's going on here.

On the other hand, the big internet businesses are reconsidering their models:

The end of the free lunch - again

So Brad, how much are you investing in this grand new future?  How much of the free lunch are you going to pay for?  How much money do you have riding on a wave of magically paid for free content?  

I'll hazard a guess and say it's nothing.

Shrug.  I guess I'm the enemy, then.  I consider myself a casual gamer.

I play once or twice a month, tops, using old systems I'm well familiar with, with a group consisting 60% of people I've been playing with for multiple decades.  My "setting" is the setting of World of Warcraft, ripped out entire, with Rob Kuntz's "Dark Chateau" plopped in, and various adventure hooks I've been using for years laying about.  I've averaged less than 5 total hours of prep for the six or seven sessions I've run.

Gaming is not my primary hobby, or even my secondary, tertiary, or quadernary.

The RPG industry could vanish tomorrow and it would not affect me at all; the odds of me ever buying another RPG are virtually zero.  If RPGs themselves went away, I would find another way to spend time with my friends.  In fact, this has already happened as we have discovered sailing.

I am a casual gamer.  Vilify me.

Quote from: J Arcane;314444So Brad, how much are you investing in this grand new future?  How much of the free lunch are you going to pay for?  How much money do you have riding on a wave of magically paid for free content?  

I'll hazard a guess and say it's nothing.

Right now, no cash and about 10 hours a week in content creation, as I have other interests competing for my attention (such as getting into graduate school and civic involvements); can't give it away if I have nothing to give.  I expect that this will last through the rest of the year; in addition to a ruleset, I'm working on both fiction and nonfiction writing.  All tools for this project already exist: Google Docs, Google Sites, Lulu, etc. so all I need to do is work my contacts and schedule time appropriately- I focus on what I do best and link to the rest.

The plan is simple.  All offerings are PDF-only initially, optimized for online reading first and then a second version optimized for printing; POD versions will be offered only if demand warrants it.  As the rules alone aren't worth a damn, giving them away is smart; the value comes from the content that you have to have the rules to make use of it- races, classes, encounters, powers, etc.  The gaming world is increasingly comfortable with publishers using micropayment models; why not make it work for me?

Finally, I remind you all that before Scott Lynch became a fantasy author he was a RPG designer.  He owned and ran Cryptosnark Games, through which he published Deeds Not Words and--had the novel thing not come along--would've become a second GMS style of success in short order.  That was about six years ago, well before Facebook and Twitter and Google being the de facto lords of the Internet Age, when Napster was still King of the Pirates and today's ubiquitous networking wasn't yet in existence.  Same idea, but just before its time- and he made it work.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;314557Finally, I remind you all that before Scott Lynch became a fantasy author he was a RPG designer.  He owned and ran Cryptosnark Games, through which he published Deeds Not Words and--had the novel thing not come along--would've become a second GMS style of success in short order.  That was about six years ago, well before Facebook and Twitter and Google being the de facto lords of the Internet Age, when Napster was still King of the Pirates and today's ubiquitous networking wasn't yet in existence.  Same idea, but just before its time- and he made it work.

Scott Who? Crypto-who?

Never heard of him nor anything he's done. Perhaps he made it work... but he's still a relative nobody...