I see that. It's like the uber-seriousness of the non-casual gamer drips out of your report.

I must tell you I'm very impressed.

That guy doesn't look like a serious gamer; he looks like a Casual Friday gamer.

Quote from: Aos;313756That guy doesn't look like a serious gamer; he looks like a Casual Friday gamer.

Which begs the question: what does the Casual Saturday gamer look like, then?!

Same as this guy, but with a bong.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;313753

Sarah Conner? Come with me if you want to game.


(Couldn't resist. )

Quote from: Aos;313759Same as this guy, but with a bong.

Very casual gamer, then.

Quote from: Soylent Green;313715But wouldn't it be fair to say that Tunnels & Trolls is better suited to a causal player than Fantasy Hero?

They are both fantasy rpgs with proud histories and traditions but they are very much at opposite ends of a the spectrum.

Fantasy Hero isn't a good game for casual players only because hero system is complex enough that casual players seldom have a firm grasp on the why behind all the numbers. If the GM writes up the characters, it's still simple enough for a casual player to play in... just not to write up new PC's for (unless hero is their preferred system)...

T&T is simple enough to be "grab-n-go"... the entire system can be explained well enough to run it in 10 pages; everything else is equipment, options, advice, and elaborations.

And it's still in print in two editions (5.5 and 7.5).

Given a choice, I prefer to put new players into a simpler system 1st, and get them Role-playing. And when they complain about the system's simplicity, move to more complex games.

Yes, everyone needs a simple system to start with.

This is why AD&D1e, D&D3.5, GURPS, HERO, Palladium and Rolemaster were so popular, and brought lots of people into the hobby.

Because they were so simple.

This is why everyone plays chequers, and nobody plays chess. It's why Space Invaders is still more popular than Eve Online. It's why people buy corebooks, and nobody buys splatbooks that add heaps of rules.

Nobody likes complexity.

More seriously: The games that really capture people are those which you can start playing quickly, and during play you discover more complexity and detail.

Quote from: J Arcane;313676"Casual gamer" is nothing more than an invented marketing term, used to artificially segment the market and make the job of vidgame publishers easier.

The moment you start falling into that artificial "casual" vs. "hardcore" mindset, everyone suffers as a result, and a lot of shitty games start pouring down the pipe.

I call shenanigans on several levels.  Is there evidence that the term has given rise to an increased rate of shitty games in either computer or rpg games?  Has the "roleplaying industry" ever used the terms to market games?  

In roleplaying, I see the term mainly when people apply it to themselves.  It usually translates to "play occasionally, can't be bothered to learn all the rules."  The terms have utility in video games.  People playing Wii with grandma, playing cellphone games, and those online gamers at places like onemorelevel are looking for something different than those with a WoW subscription.  Individual rpg games (not rules) can be casual or hardcore games.  A beer and pretzels oneshot is casual and works best with few rules to remember and near instant chargen.  

This thread started as a made up threat to incite others to circle the wagons so that the poster could claim to shine a light on the grue.

And here I though I invented the term to explain why I didn't want to raid Molten Core.

Seriously, though, who cares? If the demographic is mythological, then catering to it will fail -- you can't sell to people that don't exist. If it's real, then it's a niche and filling it is a great idea. Either way I don't see how it affects gaming at my table one whit. I can hardly think of a less interesting thing to get flustered over.

Quote from: Nicephorus;313781I call shenanigans on several levels.  Is there evidence that the term has given rise to an increased rate of shitty games in either computer or rpg games?  Has the "roleplaying industry" ever used the terms to market games?  

In roleplaying, I see the term mainly when people apply it to themselves.  It usually translates to "play occasionally, can't be bothered to learn all the rules."

This. I used the term in a thread recently to mean exactly this. I certainly didn't use it in a pejorative sense, considering that one of the players I was referring to is my wife and another is my BFF. Most of the people I play with enjoy getting together and playing, but spend very little or no time on the game outside of the playing sessions, and mostly rely on other players for the rules.

It doesn't make them lesser gamers somehow, but it does make them different.

Quote from: Nicephorus;313781I call shenanigans on several levels.  Is there evidence that the term has given rise to an increased rate of shitty games in either computer or rpg games?  Has the "roleplaying industry" ever used the terms to market games?  

Not yet, and my post is hopefully one step in curtailing it, because I would hate to see it take hold in the roleplaying world.

What it has done in the videogaming world is, in my book, abominable.  They've taken a hobby that was once intended for everyone and artificially segregated it, and used it as an excuse to produce some of the most dismally mediocre shit in the history of the medium.  Games of unimaginable condescension that are nonetheless devoured by an audience that has willingly submitted to unnecessary classification, largely out of the human impulse to belong to specific categories.

It is the same as the "genres" of music, nothing more than bogus labels invented by marketers to try and create sets of consumers out of whole cloth.  By creating a "alternative rock" genre, you can greate a group of "alternative rock" fans, who will then go out and buy everything with that label on it, regardless ofwhether it's actually any good.

It is also the root of the bogus Big Model/GNS theory that this site has spent so very much time lambasting, and for good reason.  

It's marketing.  Creating demographics out of whole cloth, drilling them into the targets heads, and then pandering to the resultant body.  

Ten years ago the terms "hardcore" and "casual" didn't even bloody exist, and yet somehow gaming not only survived, but blossomed into a multimillion dollar industry, all while being composed of everything from my grandparents playing a bowling game on their NES, to my mother's dedicated consumption of everything with the word "Sim" attached, to my burgeoning love for sandbox RPGs in the form of the Ultima games.

The PS2 rose to prominence as the most successful video game console of all time, despite being marketed towards neither "casual" or "hardcore" gamers, and a seemingly incoherent selection of everything from FPS games, to JRPGs, to platformers, to $10 crossword games sold on discount racks.  

Now in this generation, all three of the major gaming consoles combined have yet to approach the incredible sales of the prior generation, in large part because they've painted themselves with a corner, with their various reputations as "hardcore" or "casual" systems.  Game libraries are dominated by cookie cutter games that consist largely of mediocre developers marching through tick boxes of what their respective demographics are "supposed" to like.  "Casuals" get insultingly brainless minigames, while "hardcore" gamers are spoonfed one railroaded actionfest after another.  

Now I ask you, is that really what you mean to imply?  Is that the baggage you want to bring to the world of tabletop RPGs?  Is such insulting and condescending marketing speak really welcome in your hobby and mine?  

Because it sure as shit isn't in mine.

I've always understood "casual gamers" to be a term invented to describe the Wii demographic, meaning grandmas and toddlers who aren't interested in fiddly controllers but can pick up a kinetic Wiimote and make sense of a game.

I haven't really heard it in other contexts, but then I'm not much into vidgaming news.

I can't think of any recent commercial games that target "casual" gamers, and 4E definitely doesn't count.

I think that the only problem with the term "Casual gamer" in RPGs is that there are hardly any of them around anymore. And yes, that might be because certain mouth-breathers have come to give a negative connotation to that term, when in fact "Casual Gamers" is what the hobby desperately, desperately needs.  Unfortunately, the lawncrappers don't like them because they tend to be people who'd not approve of their lawn-crappery, and the gaming companies don't make games that are friendly to the casual gamer, because they'd rather sell $300 gold-leaf rule-intense hardbounds to to a handful of aging, drooling fanboys.

RPGPundit

Quote from: J Arcane;313803Ten years ago the terms "hardcore" and "casual" didn't even bloody exist,[...]

Wrong. I've heard both terms used since the mid 1980's... I know my friends and I were referring to ourselves as hardcore gamers, and several peripheral occasional players as casual gamers, in 1986-1988.

They may not have been used in your neck of the woods, but they have been around a LONG time, and their use predates my friends' use by at least a decade, albeit in the wargaming crowd, in very much the same connotations.

Hardcore gamers take time to learn detailed rules.

Casual gamers tend not to like detailed rules unless they can be explained during play, or they don't have to deal with them.

@kyle: I cut my teeth on AD&D... but the way we played, it was dumbed down and simplified, simply by our ignoring 75% of the rules. I'd rather start people off with simple and migrate them up in complexity, than overload them with complex off the bat. And generally, I start with T&T, WFRP1E, Star Wars, or  Trek...  games with unified mechanics, simple to learn, simple to play, but with great depth available.

I genuinely don't get people's deep abiding lust for AD&D 1E... We were always looking for a better game than AD&D... and finding it EVERY FREAKING WHERE. My last time playing AD&D 1E before 2000 was 1985... a 1 shot game... and once in 2000, I tried it again. 2E faired better... 1996, and then again this year. Never again. (My AD&D 1E&2E collection is for sale... several cubic feet...)