Quote from: Kyle Aaron;315516.

Also, I've said it before and it's still true: rpgs were just a fad and were going to die in the 1970s, they were hated by parents and were going to die in the 1980s, they were not CCGs and were going to die in the 1990s, and nowadays they are not WoW and are going to die.

Roleplaying games have been dying for so long if they were a person we'd all just want to pull the plug for some relief.

30 years isn't so long in the general scheme of things. It's about the lifespan of the model rocket hobby. These things stick around for a generation, maybe two if they're really popular.

Many of the passtimes that a young man in the 60s took for granted are moribund, ridiculed, or simply vanished today. It's nothing more than hubris to think the hobbies of your own youth have enduring appeal.

I doubt many niche hobbies today will still be around in 20 years. Given the competition from MMORPGS, I would be astonished if PnP RPGs proved to be a special case.

Given that most of those MMORPGs are developed by tabletop nerds, many of whom have progressively, with each generation, done more and more to try and make them more like tabletop games, I don't think we have much to worry about really.

If the idea of the RPG is so irrelevant, why is it so frequently imitated?  The Japanese have basically been remaking OD&D with house rules for like 20 years now, the Westerners for longer.  And yet in all this time, the average CRPG is still woefully behind in mechanical depth compared to the innovations that take place within the tabletop sphere, which is why so many tabletop designers get poached by vidgame companies.  

With the ever continuing rise of player created content, the RPG is more relevant to the video game world now than ever.  Tools for creating your own adventures for your friends are becoming more and more widespread and even easier to use.  NWN, CoH Architect, Ryzom, LittleBigPlanet, Spore Galactic Adventures, the list goes on.  And with the exception of LBP, all of them with RPGs as their chief inspirational model.  NWN and Ryzom (and possibly COH, I don't know first hand) even have GM'd modes.  

If anything, MMOs aren't going to "kill" traditional RPGs, they're just going to become another way to play them.

Quote from: Haffrung;31556130 years isn't so long in the general scheme of things. It's about the lifespan of the model rocket hobby. These things stick around for a generation, maybe two if they're really popular.

Yeah, I know. "This time they're dying, really. I know all our predicted dates for previous apocalypses passed without event, but this time..."

Definitely.

I don't claim to know if rpgs will survive for yet more generations. I just say that nobody else knows, either, and that so far all predictions of their demise have been wrong.

Quote from: aramis;315517J:
I don't know where YOU were in the 70's and 80's, but I know where I was, they were VERY separate groups... And still are. Most of the guys playing wargames looked down their noses at the guys with "the toy soldiers", and the Minis guys made loads of sport about "tweezers and cardboard"... The overlap was present, but they sold to very different crowds.  I was a cardboard type, myself.

Even their locations in stores were different... and that was true in Oregon, Washington and Alaska... in all three, the wargames were usually back aisle, and minis at the counter or otherwise well apart.

A quick look through the stats on boardgame geek also shows a tendency for minis gamers to dislike board wargames, and vice versa.

As a wargamer from the 70s, I concur.

Quote from: HaffrungMany of the passtimes that a young man in the 60s took for granted are moribund, ridiculed, or simply vanished today. It's nothing more than hubris to think the hobbies of your own youth have enduring appeal.

As a youngster of the 60s, I must inquire: which passtimes are these?

I think there's some people who might want a small salary or small profits. I know that if someone told me "We'll pay you $500 a month to write a daily blog about RPGs", I'd be pissing my pants with joy.

RPGPundit

Quote from: OneTinSoldier;315566As a wargamer from the 70s, I concur.




As a youngster of the 60s, I must inquire: which passtimes are these?

Rioting and shooting kids in Ohio? Competitive lavalamp collecting? Deciphering Bob Dylan lyrics?

Quote from: RPGPundit;315382I disagree. If there's no profit in the business of RPGs, then there's no future for the hobby, in the long term, besides being a dead game played by a handful of dying old men.

RPGPundit

Hmm, if that were true, the industry would never have taken off in the first place - the hobby existed and was doing decently before game companies, and that same potential would still exist even if all the existing game companies and publishing went down in flames.

Think of it this way - those 'dying old men' were younger and interested in having fun, not really in concocting a huge industry with mega-profits when the industry was born. Taking everything else away other than the advancements in IT and communications, how hard would it be for that same hobby to take off these days?

Gaming companies haven't really driven useful innovation in the field, the interest, drive and motivation of countless fans have.  The industry has just been the embodiment of the fruition of that interest until now.  It can well be in times to come, but if you sweep all of the jobs and companies, IP and dollars away, people still want to do what it is we've been doing, plain and simple.

The future of the hobby ultimately has no dependency on profit.  It has, however, been quite convenient so far.

For the record, this is what Scott said in DNW v1.1, which is now up at the Grand OGL Wiki (in part; everything for DNW ain't up yet).

Quote from: Scott Lynch, April 2003, before he got the seven book deal with GollanzIn late July of 2002, I released a 318-page commercial PDF called Deeds Not Words– my treatment of super-heroes for the d20 system. I spent nearly a year in the research and production of DNW, and on the eve of release I was a nervous wreck, half-convinced that nobody would spare half a glance at the darn thing. As it turned out, DNW attracted more attention and praise than I had ever thought possible (in fact, more than I think it even deserved considering how obvious the inexperience of its writer and designer was), making it possible for me to support the game with three supplements and even branch out into other PDF game releases, which have since become my primary means of making a living.

If nothing else, this is a testament to the forgiveness and generosity of DNW’s online fan base, and to the unexpected power of the PDF format to turn ambitious goofballs into profitable online micro-publishers.

It was doable then to do it.  It's more than doable now.

Quote from: Tamelorn;315681Hmm, if that were true, the industry would never have taken off in the first place - the hobby existed and was doing decently before game companies, and that same potential would still exist even if all the existing game companies and publishing went down in flames.

Think of it this way - those 'dying old men' were younger and interested in having fun, not really in concocting a huge industry with mega-profits when the industry was born. Taking everything else away other than the advancements in IT and communications, how hard would it be for that same hobby to take off these days?

Gaming companies haven't really driven useful innovation in the field, the interest, drive and motivation of countless fans have.  The industry has just been the embodiment of the fruition of that interest until now.  It can well be in times to come, but if you sweep all of the jobs and companies, IP and dollars away, people still want to do what it is we've been doing, plain and simple.

The future of the hobby ultimately has no dependency on profit.  It has, however, been quite convenient so far.

So well written it's hard to disagree with any of it. I think there'll be pen and paper RPG players for a long time to come, because its different. Real people, face-to-face, social gathering. I like some videogame RPGs but it's going to be a while before they can match the mix/ imagination of eight interacting brains.

Bullshit. What people? What people will there be if no one young and new is ever brought into the hobby?!

It will be a tired group of old men on forums, slowly dwindling away to nothing.  And you're an idiot if you think otherwise: consider the evidence of the wargamers. They once DWARFED RPGs as a hobby; and now they've vanished. And why? Because board wargames stopped being profitable.

You can spew your marxist bullshit all you like, and dream your dreamy dreams of how if we could just get rid of WoTC then there'd be a flowering renaissance of hipster RPGs that millions would play. But it wouldn't be that. What you are wishing for is nothing short of the death of the hobby.

RPGPundit

I'm not marxist, and I'm not a hippy hipster or anything of the sort, and I don't believe there would be a miraculous Renaissance if WotC went under, but at the same time, at this point, I know the hobby would survive for me.

I introduced many people to RPGs, and I'll still do it years down the road. I don't need the "industry" or "organized play" or anything like that to keep my games alive. This is all smoke and mirrors, really.

You know what's funny, though? That's the sort of BS we were talking about 15, 20 years ago in local game stores. Now, twenty years later, what do we do? We talk about the exact same BS on internet forums. The hobby's still there.

Quote from: RPGPundit;315941Bullshit. What people? What people will there be if no one young and new is ever brought into the hobby?!

It will be a tired group of old men on forums, slowly dwindling away to nothing.  And you're an idiot if you think otherwise: consider the evidence of the wargamers. They once DWARFED RPGs as a hobby; and now they've vanished. And why? Because board wargames stopped being profitable.

You can spew your marxist bullshit all you like, and dream your dreamy dreams of how if we could just get rid of WoTC then there'd be a flowering renaissance of hipster RPGs that millions would play. But it wouldn't be that. What you are wishing for is nothing short of the death of the hobby.

RPGPundit

Naturally, you missed my point entirely.  Young people are being brought into the hobby by a multitude of avenues that have absolutely nothing to do with the gaming industry.  Absent many of those, the same conditions that created the hobby in the first place still obtains and will for any forseeable future.  

It isn't the 'old dying men' that would resurrect the hobby should the companies go away, it's the young folks who continually recreate it anyway.  Whether or not they have an established industry ready to take and publish their ideas is relatively irrelevant.

Quote from: J Arcane;315489Just because it works in one market, doesn't mean it works in every market.

And let's face it, we're talking about fucking tabletop RPGs here.  While they're hardly "dying" as so many Mohicanists would have you believe, they're not exactly some massive and inapproachable diaspora.  It's a bunch of fucking nerds on internet forums and in comic shops buying books about playing gay ass elves and vampires.

Trying to forcibly split that market further just because you want to feel more elite than the guy at the shop who just buys a D&D book now and again is fucking suicide when you're talking about a market barely big enough to be profitable to begin with.

But you don't get it, you never will.  Just another Internet MBA trumpeting yet more banal dogma he heard in an econ 101 class in community college.  

I may not be satisfied with what they resulted with, but the one thing I won't knock Wizards over is that they've done their due diligence towards making 4e more, not less, accessible.  And last I checked they make a shit load more money than some podunk PDF publisher with 400 sales to his name.

Yes, Wizards is the biggest publisher on the block.

And? No one gets to have a say but them?

And you of course!

How many RPG books do you have in print? How many have you sold?

How many econ classes have you taken? At community college or otherwise?

On amazon right now with my name on the spine:

Buried Tales of Pinebox

Modern20

Blood and Space 1

Legends of the Samurai

Blood and Guts 1

Blood and Space 2

Legends of the Dark Ages

Blood and Relics

Blood and Guts 2

Legends of Excalibur

Blood and Time

Blood and Circuits

Modern Mayhem

Blood and Fists True 20

Blood and Fists

I've been working in this business full time since 2002.

I don't claim to have all the answers.

But I do actually have experience in the industry to back up my claims, not just my "internet MBA".

And the point of my post sails right over your head, yet again.  Bravo.

Have a good life Mr. Hardcore, I'm done with you.

Quote from: RPGPundit;315941Bullshit. What people? What people will there be if no one young and new is ever brought into the hobby?!

It will be a tired group of old men on forums, slowly dwindling away to nothing.  And you're an idiot if you think otherwise: consider the evidence of the wargamers. They once DWARFED RPGs as a hobby; and now they've vanished. And why? Because board wargames stopped being profitable.

You can spew your marxist bullshit all you like, and dream your dreamy dreams of how if we could just get rid of WoTC then there'd be a flowering renaissance of hipster RPGs that millions would play. But it wouldn't be that. What you are wishing for is nothing short of the death of the hobby.

RPGPundit

Bioware or WoW seem more likely to mortally wound WoTC than Karl Marx. Be worth keeping an eye on those hippies all the same.