has anyone ever met anyone who was IRL as much of an asshole as they are online?

remember -

Quote from: Melan;412444Sure. If you read into their respective blogs, they seem to have this very RPGNet sort of contempt against "gamers". They have constructed themselves a strongly negative stereotype about their audience, and by default, that's how they see almost everything in the hobby.

This usually happens when one is unable to come out of the closet as a "gamer", and so he strives to build the idea of "something different & better from a gamer" - to whom he belongs.

My two Freudcents

Quote from: danbuter;412468With regards to Hasbro and WotC, I remember reading sean reynolds stuff about how no matter how great WotC thought their sales numbers were, the beancounters from Hasbro didn't think they were very good.

Imagine if you were a store selling 10 products.  One of the products sells x10 more than it did last year.  Yeah, horray!  However, even with that boost, that amount is still 50% of your 2nd lowest selling product.

Even at its best, D&D is too small potatoes for a major corporation.  

Quote from: RPGPundit;412727Part of the problem is that the industry has become so incestuous that its done a shit-godawful job of bringing new people in for something like the last 15 years.

Zero marketing to noobs will do that.

Quote from: RPGPundit;412727I suppose to Skarka, healthy would be if there were more uber-specialty shops dedicated to uber-nerds who will pay $50 a book for stuff Skarka writes.

That would be a very healthy hobby.   In that world, you could sell F!tA and have ten times the site traffic.   All small press publishers and authors want the Skarka dream hobby.

I am hoping we see Essentials kick ass this Christmas, but I haven't seen any advertising.   So its just a box on a shelf.   That's better than no box, but Hasbro spends millions promoting toys and if they want WotC to succeed, they need to spend the marketing dollars.

Quote from: Spinachcat;413104Zero marketing to noobs will do that.

Calling people unfamiliar with RPGs "noobs" will do that, too.

Quote from: Reckall;413086This usually happens when one is unable to come out of the closet as a "gamer", and so he strives to build the idea of "something different & better from a gamer" - to whom he belongs.

My two Freudcents

That wouldn't be out of line with my suspicions. Forge designer Matt Snyder had basically the same problem: self-imposed stigma-->externalisation.

I don't follow many game blogs, so I mostly become aware of that dude when he says something "provocative" (read as: insulting and condescending), so I get why people react badly to him. Maybe he writes about neutral, interesting stuff the rest of the time. Or maybe I should pick up one of his games sometime.

What irks me is the focus that he and some like-minded people seem to have on this weird duty that gamers should have toward nurturing the "industry"*, and how RPGs are a gold-mine for extracting "IP" for "transmedia" companies, except gamers won't cooperate.

But none of that matters to me. Its like every time I hear about this guy, he's haranguing me for not doing stuff I have no interest in doing. I just want to play Lady Blackbird; I don't care if that doesn't help a stranger make money, or recruit new gamers. That shit is not on me.

* A slightly self-important term for what is more or less a loose collection of hobbyists and a couple small companies. I would barely call my field an "industry", and it is several orders of magnitude larger than every RPG company combined.

I would rather have a hobby with ten times the people currently playing, than one where I was selling ten times the number of FtA! books.  And focusing on hobby shops selling overpriced books from specialty "celebrity" authors to autistic-fanboy "Collectors" is not the way to get to either.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;413737I would rather have a hobby with ten times the people currently playing, than one where I was selling ten times the number of FtA! books.  And focusing on hobby shops selling overpriced books from specialty "celebrity" authors to autistic-fanboy "Collectors" is not the way to get to either.

RPGPundit

Someone else made an apt analogy: radio and television. Television did not eliminate radio. But it did *change* radio. We are in that transitional phase for tabletop RPGs. I have no interest in games that *require* an internet connection. Or computer RPGs at all. I may well be a shrinking, grognard demographic. But fpr me, tabletop RPGs are about sitting around a table out here in the meatspace and interacting with other people. Even with the occasional bought of gamer 'funk'. The question is, how do we keep that model alive?

I think it will keep itself alive through many small, independent actions, as it has for 30-40 years. Like, instead of one group deciding on How To Save Gaming!, we have many individuals and groups and local gaming scenes playing games, and people making their own games (on whatever scale) and distributing them.

Cool people doing cool stuff makes the gaming scene vibrant and worthwhile. Dudes trying to "monetize" my hobby time and then lecturing me on my failure to adequately comply will not.

I think that the shockwave effect coming from the Death of the Forge will clear away the detrius from the creative end of the community and allow for clearer thinking to finally take hold once more.

I think that the story-obsessed end of TRPGs should be pushed to another medium that better exploits such sensibilities, as should be the twitch-focused and build-obsessed gamers, and instead TRPGs should refocus and retrench upon the elements that the tabletop medium works best at expressing.  The old paradigm that focused on site-based exploration, on regional exploration, and the frontier-focused milieu (ala the West Marches) is what tabletop gaming is so much better at doing than any other medium where RPGs exist- vulnerable only insofar as information exchange matters, both text and images.

I'm going to pursue a personal project to see if I can get a viable model to work where I live, and if it gets going then I'll share how I did it here so other can do something similar- take what works, modify to fit their specific circumstances and do it themselves.

Hmmm. At the risk of sounding like an eternal defender/apologist for the games I prefer, I'll have to disagree with you, Bradford.

I think the indie/story/whatever movement, small as it may be in relative terms, is really healthy for tabletop gaming.

Just speaking personally, that school of games kept me in the hobby as an active participant, and that means I sometimes end up playing (or buying, or downloading) other, more traditional/classical games. Like Dungeonslayers, or the '81 Moldvay edition of D&D, or Spellbound Kingdoms, all of which I've played in the 5-6 months.
 
So I think divisions like the ones you suggest are neither useful nor accurate.

But this is an old argument here, I realize, so we can just agree to disagree on that issue.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;413774I think that the shockwave effect coming from the Death of the Forge will clear away the detrius from the creative end of the community and allow for clearer thinking to finally take hold once more.

I think that the story-obsessed end of TRPGs should be pushed to another medium that better exploits such sensibilities, as should be the twitch-focused and build-obsessed gamers, and instead TRPGs should refocus and retrench upon the elements that the tabletop medium works best at expressing.  The old paradigm that focused on site-based exploration, on regional exploration, and the frontier-focused milieu (ala the West Marches) is what tabletop gaming is so much better at doing than any other medium where RPGs exist- vulnerable only insofar as information exchange matters, both text and images.

I'm going to pursue a personal project to see if I can get a viable model to work where I live, and if it gets going then I'll share how I did it here so other can do something similar- take what works, modify to fit their specific circumstances and do it themselves.

I sure hope you're right.  I do think that the Forge basically killed meaningful game design for about half-a-decade there.  

What RPGs desperately needs is the equivalent of a Chicago School; an anti-pretentiousness think-tank that doesn't want to manipulate and change RPGs into something else to suit their dark agenda, but to allow the laissez faire of RPGs unregulated by ideology or social engineering to flourish.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;414010I sure hope you're right.  I do think that the Forge basically killed meaningful game design for about half-a-decade there.  

What RPGs desperately needs is the equivalent of a Chicago School; an anti-pretentiousness think-tank that doesn't want to manipulate and change RPGs into something else to suit their dark agenda, but to allow the laissez faire of RPGs unregulated by ideology or social engineering to flourish.

Does one really need a think-tank or "school" to do something like this?

I don't think so.

Quote from: ggroy;414011Does one really need a think-tank or "school" to do something like this?

It would let the "theory" folks fly their freak flags without throwing in agendas or cults of personality.