I hope you'll forgive my efforts to try and catch up with all that's gone on in the TTRPG scene since 2010!

As I was drifting away from games (mainly because of family, work, moving around the country and stuff like that), there seemed to be - in the UK at least - a pretty vibrant home-grown games design and publishing scene. At the cons I went to (Dragonmeet in London, mainly), there seemed to be new people publishing and designing every year. A lot of games were really different in design - perhaps not for me, but cool nevertheless.

My real question here is kind of twofold:

1) What have been the main developments in games design over the last decade? I know that D&D5E came out since I knocked off gaming.
2) For those of you in the UK (or familiar with the games scene here), what are the main communities for playing and designing games these days?

Edit: So in essence, what are the "big" changes you've seen in the last decade?

Cheers,
Franko

Everything has gone to hell because SJWs took over the hobby.

I agree that the SJWs have taken over the main gaming companies and much of what is presented as "the mainstream", but the elephant in the room is the rise of the OSR as not just a nostalgic replaying of old games, but as a design philosophy and a journey of both rediscovery and innovation.  One of the drivers is technological advancement, specifically digital download and print on demand.

D&D has gone "mainstream", and to a lesser extent Call of Cthulhu, similar to the overall trajectory of so called "geek" culture.  I think we're seeing something similar to what's happened in visual entertainment, with the big brands acting like the big movie studios, and the direct sales marketplace acting more like Amazon, Netflix, etc.  If you want big and flashy and endless popcorn with the masses you watch a Marvel film.  If you want quality you go "small screen".  

I suspect this divide will not go away but will continue to grow.  Hasbro D&D will become more and more a corporate property or identity, and those of us that actually love the hobby will continue to play in our basements, dining rooms and pubs.  It may occur, however, that people whose taste for the hobby have been whetted by the corporate product may seek out a more authentic experience playing with a group of dedicated hobbiests who make every game "their own".  It could also go the other way, with "Gaming Nerd Culture" eating the "gaming hobby".  The cons, I suspect, will continue to be the battleground for this.

There were a few broad things that went down in the 2010s in RPGing.

1. Quite a few "OSR" games were released and had decent success. By "OSR" in this case, I mean games based off or inspired pretty heavily by earlier D&D. A selection:
Dungeon Crawl Classics
B-X/Old School Essentials
Lamentations of the Flame Princess
Blueholme
Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea
... (the list goes on).

2010 saw the release of Stars Without Number, Kevin Crawford's 1st game, which is basically an OSR sci-fi game, but he would go on to release a lot of well regarded material over the decade, notable for a lot of his material being usable outside of his own games. His games are all based on the same chassis, covering genres such as Sci-Fi, Horror, African Fantasy, "Exalted"-like demi-god heroes, and more, all with a lot of tools for generating materials for "sandbox" style play.

2. Apocalypse World. A game by Vincent Baker, a Post-Apocalyptic game that had a delineated set of "Moves" that players and GMs could make out of "Playbooks", and a simple 2d6 die mechanic that includes a common "You succeed, but at a price" result. This game would go on to inspire a lot of people to make their own "Powered by the Apocalypse" games of varying quality covering all imaginable genres. It seems to form the center around which a lot of "Story Game" type activity grew up over the decade.

A bit later, there's a game called "Blades in the Dark", a kind of "you're a gang running heists in a dark fantasy city" game that took some inspiration from Apocalypse World that itself inspired a couple games off from it's branch.

3. Monte Cook had some success with what are now known as his "Cypher System" games, Numenera and The Strange. The books were everywhere with their high production for a while. The system never personally did it for me, but it was a thing for a while. It reached a peak with "Invisible Sun", which... I don't know much about except that it came in a giant couple hundred dollar black cube.

4. While I didn't really follow these games, there were these Star Wars games with funky dice on store shelves for a while. Somebody else can tell you about them.

5. Also, Modiphius produced a ton of licensed games using this house 2d20 system people have a mixed reaction towards.

6. This guy Daniel Fox made a more complicated clone of Warhammer called Zweihander, and due to his marketing abilities got it everywhere as well. He would show up everywhere pimping his game. It's my least favorite Warhammer, but I never played the 3rd one.

7. BRP games kept themselves alive. RuneQuest 6e (later renamed Mythras) strikes me as the core of that, but Magic World & another RuneQuest from Chaosium kept the flames alive as well.

Other stuff happened, but I guess the OSR games and Apocalypse World strike me as the 2 top areas that spun out the most material during the decade.

I forget the timeline, but there were a few other systems that saw action during the last decade as well that I overlooked.

1. The "Cortex Plus" system (2010) was used for some licensed material "Marvel Heroic Roleplaying", Smallville, Firefly, Leverage.
2. Further iterations of FATE resulted in a glut of material for it over the decade.
3. Savage Worlds continued to produce a lot of material and maintain its popularity with a lot of folks.

Quote from: Brendan;1128145I agree that the SJWs have taken over the main gaming companies and much of what is presented as "the mainstream", but the elephant in the room is the rise of the OSR as not just a nostalgic replaying of old games, but as a design philosophy and a journey of both rediscovery and innovation.  One of the drivers is technological advancement, specifically digital download and print on demand.

D&D has gone "mainstream", and to a lesser extent Call of Cthulhu, similar to the overall trajectory of so called "geek" culture.  I think we're seeing something similar to what's happened in visual entertainment, with the big brands acting like the big movie studios, and the direct sales marketplace acting more like Amazon, Netflix, etc.  If you want big and flashy and endless popcorn with the masses you watch a Marvel film.  If you want quality you go "small screen".  

I suspect this divide will not go away but will continue to grow.  Hasbro D&D will become more and more a corporate property or identity, and those of us that actually love the hobby will continue to play in our basements, dining rooms and pubs.  It may occur, however, that people whose taste for the hobby have been whetted by the corporate product may seek out a more authentic experience playing with a group of dedicated hobbiests who make every game "their own".  It could also go the other way, with "Gaming Nerd Culture" eating the "gaming hobby".  The cons, I suspect, will continue to be the battleground for this.

Thanks all for such detailed and informative replies. I really appreciate you being willing to answer the vague questions of a newcomer.

I'm really curious about this SJW thing as it relates to gaming. While I'm fully aware of the connotations outside of games, what with being out of the 'scene' for a while means that I'm not sure I get how it relates to games and gaming, what effects it has had on games in general. It seems from what you say that the hobby has widened out to include a lot more people (bigger even than in the 1980s? That would be something!). From my POV, that would seem to be a good thing.

Cheers,
Franko

Quote from: Franko77;1128152Thanks all for such detailed and informative replies. I really appreciate you being willing to answer the vague questions of a newcomer.

I'm really curious about this SJW thing as it relates to gaming. While I'm fully aware of the connotations outside of games, what with being out of the 'scene' for a while means that I'm not sure I get how it relates to games and gaming, what effects it has had on games in general. It seems from what you say that the hobby has widened out to include a lot more people (bigger even than in the 1980s? That would be something!). From my POV, that would seem to be a good thing.

Cheers,
Franko

With D&D, the only changes are that certain adventures casually toss in one-sentence SJWisms like gay gnome kings that can be easily ignored. AFAIK, there aren't any adventures where prejudice actually plays a role in the plot. To the contrary, you're still killing orcs and goblins and other mainstays like they're going out of style. In the Ravenloft module, for instance, the Vistani are depicted as being so apathetic and moronic that they'll accept a beer keg after they ask you to find a lost child.

Chaosium did write adventures where they added new rules stating that all white people in the 1920s were pathological frothing racists who turned into lynch mobs at the drop of a hat, but it's so crudely tacked on and not actually integrated into the rest of the text that you can easily ignore it.

White people suffering white guilt is hilarious. It's like they've never talked to a woman, a person of color, or an alphabet person in their life.

Critical Role happened. Actors playing DnD online. Many new payers want to replicate CR with very thespy style and they buy CR game stuff.

A guy called Matt Colville is big on Youtube and gives solid GMing advice in a sandboxy style to the new generation.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1128155With D&D, the only changes are that certain adventures casually toss in one-sentence SJWisms like gay gnome kings that can be easily ignored. AFAIK, there aren't any adventures where prejudice actually plays a role in the plot. To the contrary, you're still killing orcs and goblins and other mainstays like they're going out of style. In the Ravenloft module, for instance, the Vistani are depicted as being so apathetic and moronic that they'll accept a beer keg after they ask you to find a lost child.

Chaosium did write adventures where they added new rules stating that all white people in the 1920s were pathological frothing racists who turned into lynch mobs at the drop of a hat, but it's so crudely tacked on and not actually integrated into the rest of the text that you can easily ignore it.

White people suffering white guilt is hilarious. It's like they've never talked to a woman, a person of color, or an alphabet person in their life.

Hah, Ravenloft was the first ever D&D module I played way back when! I have very fond memories of that, even though I had no idea what was going on as I'd dropped into an ongoing campaign.

Cheers,
Franko

Quote from: Franko77;1128152I'm really curious about this SJW thing as it relates to gaming. While I'm fully aware of the connotations outside of games, what with being out of the 'scene' for a while means that I'm not sure I get how it relates to games and gaming, what effects it has had on games in general.

Right now, on this very forum, we've got a couple active threads dancing around various aspects of the assertion that "(inherently evil) fantasy orcs are a racist stand-in for black people", which is a long-time favorite of the SJW wing of RPGing.

Their other main darling at the moment is the "X-card" - basically, you put a card with a big "X" on it in the middle of the table and, if anyone starts to feel uncomfortable about the direction the game is going, they touch the card and, in theory, the game changes course away from whatever it was that made the person uncomfortable.  However, the rules of the X-card state that it is absolutely forbidden to ask the person what made them uncomfortable, so everyone else has to guess what topic to avoid and may guess incorrectly.

I also see occasional complaints about various companies/products going out of their way to draw attention to a particular NPC's (non-straight, white, and/or cis) sexuality, race, or gender, but I don't buy enough products to have personally encountered that, so I can't say how widespread it actually is.

Virtual Tabletops are a thing and unlike CRPGs like Elder Scrolls or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, they work seamlessly with RPGs which some groups flipping back and forth between a VTT and face to face.

Solo, co-op and GM-less playing is blowing up thanks to the IronSworn RPG.

Quote from: estar;1128225Virtual Tabletops are a thing and unlike CRPGs like Elder Scrolls or MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, they work seamlessly with RPGs which some groups flipping back and forth between a VTT and face to face.

That's certainly something that we'll need to get to grips with.

Quote from: TimothyWestwind;1128230Solo, co-op and GM-less playing is blowing up thanks to the IronSworn RPG.

Oh, that's really interesting. I recall playing a few GM-less games at cons back in the day and having a lot of fun. They seemed ideally suited to that kind of environment. I think Polaris was one of them (played as session of it at Dragonmeet sometime in the  2000s, I think).

Cheers,
Franko

Quote from: Franko77;1128152Thanks all for such detailed and informative replies. I really appreciate you being willing to answer the vague questions of a newcomer.

I'm really curious about this SJW thing as it relates to gaming. While I'm fully aware of the connotations outside of games, what with being out of the 'scene' for a while means that I'm not sure I get how it relates to games and gaming, what effects it has had on games in general. It seems from what you say that the hobby has widened out to include a lot more people (bigger even than in the 1980s? That would be something!). From my POV, that would seem to be a good thing.

Cheers,
Franko

My pleasure. IMO, there's good news and bad news. On the one hand, I love seeing the hobby grow. On the other hand, the larger cultural battles have no found their way into the tabletop space. Thankfully, there's nothing stopping you from picking up a copy of a cool new OSR game, finding some players, and just rolling dice. I find the political stuff interesting and fun to tease apart - as do many of us here, but if you just prefer shop talk to politics there's nothing wrong with that.

Quote from: S'mon;1128209Critical Role happened. Actors playing DnD online. Many new payers want to replicate CR with very thespy style and they buy CR game stuff.

What S'mon said. There's a cultural bifurcation between (usually) older hobbyists, whose early play experience was grounded in small, culturally unique, play networks and (usually) younger gamers whose expectations have been shaped almost entirely by TV shows ( including Critical Role and Acquisitions Incorporated), pop-culture tropes, and "nerd culture" as a whole.  I don't know what the scene is like in England really.  S'mon might be able to weigh in on that.

Quote from: TimothyWestwind;1128230Solo, co-op and GM-less playing is blowing up thanks to the IronSworn RPG.

Um, no. Solo play kicked off a resurgance of interest with Mythic and FU. Which inspired many imitators and new approaches. Solo modules have been plugging away at about an even keel since the get go with Flying Buffalo pretty much spearheading the idea.