Quote from: thedungeondelver;741596They're as much a "role playing games" as Black Tiger.

ooooh. Black Tiger! I still hold one of the top records on that game.
Definitly not an RPG.

Cadash on the other hand had some RPG elements. And a story.

Back on topic.

Its odd in a way how Games and IP use is seen by fans.
On one side you may have people cheering when a game gets bootlegged and the parent company goes after them.
On the other hand you have people going ballistic when a company goes after a fan site or their personal favorite bootleg.

Quote from: RSDancey;741606I have to conclude that Wizards internal data (which I suspect is quite illuminating) showed them that MMOs, not other tabletop RPGs, were the source of their problems, and they attempted to redesign D&D to counterattack.

In doing so crippled its appeal as a tabletop roleplaying game. They drew the wrong lessons from the data. Trying to make tabletop strong where MMORPGs are strong. Which was ludicrous in hindsight.

What they should have figured out is where tabletop RPGs are strong and where MMORPGs are weak.

Without that data my best guess is that it is flexibility and immersion is where MMORPGs are weak. The human referee is unparalleled in his ability to create material on the fly to adapt to what the players are doing.

Quote from: RSDancey;741606The release of 4e and the treatment of the 3rd party publishers, and the stress the 4e release put on the community should all be case studies.  I think we can all see that Wizards thinks they made mistakes since the 5e strategy seems almost totally built around the idea that unification of the D&D community is Job Number One.  The first stage of getting healthy is admitting you have a problem, and Wizards is admitting they have a problem.

It your fault, you and your Open Game License.

Before if a company took the toys away, the customer choice was either to buy into the new, or stop being a customer.

With the Open Game License, the customer had a third option; fine you don't want to support the game we like, we will support it ourselves.

Quote from: RSDancey;741614Ok, last comment:  If you have not, I really suggest you read some of that stuff at the Daedalus Report.  If you're a skeptic that there's "real roleplaying" going on in MMOs you will find it eye-opening.

I think what a lot of people miss is the fact "being yourself" but in a fantasy world is just as much roleplaying as adopting a funny voice and a different personae.

The essence of roleplaying is acting as if you are really there as your character. Players of MMORPGs deliver that by the bushel. Oh boy they take the game personally.

For a long time I ran sandbox campaigns with lots of NPCs to interact, politics to deal with and places to explore. However I want to make sure that it worked for every person that sat at my table. For a period of time I thought the height of tabletop RPGs was to be somebody different. A different voice, look, and personality. So I tried to teach that to newcomers to my campaign.

And it didn't really take. I wasn't obnoxious about it but despite inducements and pleas it was not happening for a lot of my players. Indeed not happening for the majority of my players.

So what wound up working was simply accepting the fact that reacting as if they are there was more than sufficient. If they are good actors and throw on a different personality like a cloak great! I liked having those players. I made damn sure there was a place for the guy who just wanted to be Jim the Barbarian rather than the Jim the Clerk.

What I did find out is that what players like the most about my campaigns was their ability and my willingness to let their characters have a meaningful impact on my setting. That they could choose exactly what that meaningful impact is.

And the more I played MMORPGs, CRPGs, and LARPS, the more I realized how they compromised in those two aspects of the game. Which is why I still play tabletop more than the others.

Quote from: estar;741620In doing so crippled its appeal as a tabletop roleplaying game. They drew the wrong lessons from the data. Trying to make tabletop strong where MMORPGs are strong. Which was ludicrous in hindsight.

What they should have figured out is where tabletop RPGs are strong and where MMORPGs are weak.

Without that data my best guess is that it is flexibility and immersion is where MMORPGs are weak. The human referee is unparalleled in his ability to create material on the fly to adapt to what the players are doing.

It your fault, you and your Open Game License.

Before if a company took the toys away, the customer choice was either to buy into the new, or stop being a customer.

With the Open Game License, the customer had a third option; fine you don't want to support the game we like, we will support it ourselves.

@Ryan

Thank You.

Quote from: RSDancey;741606But the reason Wizards of the Coast did the 4e project was because D&D had declined in volume precipitously.  In fact, it had been experiencing problems internally for quite some time.

I have a confidential source who was one of the people making the decisions about strategy for D&D who confirmed to me that 3.5 was put into production because sales of 3.0 were "unsatisfactory".  I don't really know what that means, tbh, but this person's view was that the business was declining year over year (which is not surprising, as that is exactly what 1e and 2e had done)

Hi
I just wanted to ask whether Pathfinder products share the same fate or is the line more resistant?

Pathfinder is in a temporarily unique situation of recapturing 3.5 market share and the decline of 4E causing a flight to quality.  I think they'll have the exact same issues, but got their initial sales bubble spread out over a full edition cycle worth of years rather than up front like with 3.0 and 3.5.

I think Pathfinder is a permanent fixture now, with its own niche and a stable of players who will not desert it no matter how shiny the next new thing is.  It's one of the small number of RPGs that are akin to Gibraltar.

I would agree. I don't think 5e will pull away too many Paizo fans.

Quote from: Warthur;741548I know literally no gamers in my extended circle of gaming acquaintances who are really keen on the idea of playing with total strangers online; a substantial number of the gamers I know aren't really keen on playing with total strangers at cons, after all.

I enjoy playing with strangers (strangers when I met them) in my Dragonsfoot text-chat games a lot. They give me a different experience from my tabletop games, and do some things better, eg romance - to do romance in a tabletop game we'd often end up playing it out in Facebook posts anyway, although I did play out an NPC proposing marriage to a PC not long ago in a tabletop session. That was pretty tough doing it live, much easier to type it third person.

Ryan: I appreciate that you think content limits, or content reviews and controls, would have harmed the usefulness of the open content licenses.

But I think the more important limit, and I suspect the one that was on people's minds, was the indefinite nature.  Why not put in a 15 year expiration on it (or some other, perhaps longer, number on it)? Do you really think companies would have stayed away from producing content knowing that they only had 15 years before the license ended? I don't.  I think, given the mentality of 90% of the d20 publishers, 15 years would have been viewed as so far down the road as to not matter anymore.

Quote from: estar;741608...
But the heart of these games is the focus on the playing of a individual character over a particular scenario. That what makes all of these roleplaying games.

Quote from: estar;741628I think what a lot of people miss is the fact "being yourself" but in a fantasy world is just as much roleplaying as adopting a funny voice and a different personae.
...

I couldn't agree more.

I mean no disrespect, but I'm detecting a bit of "No True Scotsman"* in what activities people are (not) calling roleplaying here.  Playacting in a mutable world might be roleplaying, but I don't think roleplaying requires playacting or a mutable world.  I've had lots of players at my games who never playacted their character and I've even had a few only use 3rd person to describe their character's actions.  I don't think that made them no longer roleplayers.

Hey, Ryan, because it isn't said enough: thanks for the OGL and entire open gaming revolution you helped spawn.

Quote from: Brander;741851I couldn't agree more.

I mean no disrespect, but I'm detecting a bit of "No True Scotsman"* in what activities people are (not) calling roleplaying here.  Playacting in a mutable world might be roleplaying, but I don't think roleplaying requires playacting or a mutable world.  I've had lots of players at my games who never playacted their character and I've even had a few only use 3rd person to describe their character's actions.  I don't think that made them no longer roleplayers.

I think you are missing the point here or at least mixed up in what others are meaning.

In most TTRPGs you are playing a personal character in a dynamic world that reacts and changes based on what you do. These changes might be a little, or alot. It varies greatly. The characters actions have impacts and repercussions. What person tense they use is utterly irrelevant because everyone does it differently.

The argument many have against RPing on MMOs is that the people arent RPing unless you really stretch the term. "Lets form a group and raid instance 12" is not RPing. Standing around a guild room and chatting in character is more or less RPing. Varies a-lot and it has little impact on the game world. but can impact the group.

Even MMOs based on RPGs like Champions tend to be appallingly lacking in actual role playing.

Quote from: Omega;741893...
In most TTRPGs you are playing a personal character in a dynamic world that reacts and changes based on what you do. These changes might be a little, or alot. It varies greatly. The characters actions have impacts and repercussions. What person tense they use is utterly irrelevant because everyone does it differently.

The argument many have against RPing on MMOs is that the people arent RPing unless you really stretch the term. "Lets form a group and raid instance 12" is not RPing. Standing around a guild room and chatting in character is more or less RPing. Varies a-lot and it has little impact on the game world. but can impact the group.
...

What I'm saying (and I think agreeing with a couple other people here) is that the "playing a personal character" is what makes something roleplaying, not the mutable world part.  It also has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's a solo or group event and nothing whatsoever to do with speaking in character.

I get that some people are rejecting this position, but I think they are very much setting a (too strict) standard that would exclude a lot of people who do indeed feel like and think they are roleplaying.

I'm as deep a roleplayer at the table as I think you can get (and I have larped and really like to fight larp (in character) when I can too) but when I'm playing one of my characters in Guild Wars 2 (and back when I was playing WoW), I get a lot of the same rewards out of it.  And I do 90% of my MMO gaming solo*.  Sure I miss having a real impact on the world, and I miss dynamic NPCs, but I'm still playing each character as a personality; i.e. they have "real" names and I do ascribe a small bit of personality to them (more than many of the 3rd person players in my TT games).  Am I not roleplaying?  Yes, I think I am, even if I still want a TT game to get the other bits as well.


*If I don't know you in meatspace or one of the people I know in meatspace doesn't know you then I have almost no interest in playing with you.  I very rarely make exceptions to that.

Quote from: Brander;741899What I'm saying (and I think agreeing with a couple other people here) is that the "playing a personal character" is what makes something roleplaying, not the mutable world part.  It also has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's a solo or group event and nothing whatsoever to do with speaking in character.

Playing a personal character is a big part.

IE: in the FF games Im controlling "that guy" or "That group" and they are going to do and say things that arent what I'd do or say. As said, its more an interactive story or movie.

Some people will try to define RPGs as playing ANY character. Over on BGG someone went so far as to claim reading a book was role playing. I wish I were joking.

Exactly where though one places RPG where you are playing more than one character or handling henchmen? You still created the PCs but may not have created the henchmen.

None of which has anything to do with the topic really aside from how some view MMOs and role playing.

I agree some have too narrow a spectrum, but others have impossibly broad spectrums to the point that everything by their definition is role playing.

Its an old argument and its never going to be resolved.