Quote from: RSDancey;741126I'm always very careful to not say that 4e is a bad game.  Many people I really respect think it's an incredibly well designed game.  It just wasn't the game that the market wanted.

I am curious, what game do you think the market wanted at the time?

I can't speak for others, but i was definitely ready for something new, that didn't have some of the extreme optimization issues 3e (it was a great game, I was just getting tired of some of the table debates that kept happening). So I was on board for a new system, and guess I just was expecting it to be 4E. Do you think something other than 3.75 could have succeeded?

^ Yeah, very interested in this note. I for one found the big character optimisation focus to be a big barrier to getting into 3E and I thought the time was well and truly ripe for an edition which took as an axiom "It's what you do in the actual game that's important, not what you do in character generation/levelling up".

I also think that the character optimisation focus would increasingly make 3E/4E vulnerable to MMOs over the years, because MMOs are basically character optimisation games with all of the mechanical heavy lifting handled for you by a computer, and so delivered the charop side of the game far more efficiently and easily than a tabletop RPG ever could, and I'm very much of the opinion that tabletop RPGs can only survive by emphasising their unique selling points, rather than the stuff that actually a videogame can actually handle more easily and less stressfully.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;741199I am curious, what game do you think the market wanted at the time?

I can't speak for others, but i was definitely ready for something new, that didn't have some of the extreme optimization issues 3e (it was a great game, I was just getting tired of some of the table debates that kept happening). So I was on board for a new system, and guess I just was expecting it to be 4E. Do you think something other than 3.75 could have succeeded?

Similarly, I wanted a 3e that was not so labor-intensive to DM and play, while still feeling like (and compatible with) TSR (A)D&D.

4e was definitely not that, and I suspect I'm not the only one who felt this way.

Quote from: JRT;740202To be fair, by releasing such a permissive license, WoTC basically did most of this to themselves.  I have to wonder if there will be a case study 20 years from now on this taught in business schools.

I've been trying to keep up with this thread, but I may have missed some posts so I apologize if the point I'm about to bring up has already been discussed.

I don't think the OGL was the big mistake by WOTC. Instead I think it was kicking Paizo to the curb at the launch of 4E. It has been brought up that there are other companies that could have tried to launch a Pathfinder-like product, but I think they also had more of an eye at the beginning g of working with 4E for the most part. With Dragon and Dungeon magazine being taken away from Paizo it seems like WOTC was basically telling Paizo to curl up in a ball and die.

I think it should have occurred to someone at WOTC that the owners of Paizo, rather than lose their income, or try to work for someone else in the game industry, would instead decide to compete with WOTC. Beyond their regular customer base they had contacts with many writers and artists (who also wanted to keep earning), and they had very good experience with producing material on a regular schedule.

I think that if WOTC had continued their partnership with Paizo for 2-3 years after the launch of 4E, and then cut Paizo off then 4E would have done better in the market. Instead they created a near instant competitor that would hold up the banner for those who wanted to stay with 3E.

The above is what I think a case study could be made of. I will always wonder if whoever came up with the strategy for WOTC to fire Paizo sufferred any repercussions, if it was scapegoated onto an underling, or if this is something the WOTC bosses just don't talk about.

(I'm saying this not as a Paizo fanboy, but as someone who:
1. Is more of an OSR/Savage Worlds gamer
2. Never has played or even read Pathfinder
3. Only bought those Paizo Dragon magazines that had the large Greyhawk maps.
4. Only played 3.x, never could find the time to DM 3.x.
5. Could never get past reading the 4E PHB (it was a soul sucking experience for me), but was still surprised that 5E was announced so soon, and that, at least commercially speaking, 4E wasn't a success - I figured I was just being a grumpy old codger and that most everyone else had happily shifted to 4E.)

I'm in the 'grumpy old codger' camp. I want:

An updated BECMI line, using the NEXT mechanics stripped to the bone and presented in a way that is pleasing to the eye, doesn't cost a fortune, is easy to learn and fast to play, and is supported with adventures and sourcebooks. It needs to be easy enough to teach the kids and be split into levels, yes like the original BECMI stuff. Start with Basic up to say 5th level, Expert up to 10th, Companion to 15th, Masters to 20th and 'Legendary' from 25+. Put it in thin softback books, not bullet stopping tomes. By splitting the game into levels you give a low starting point for tryout and options for those who want more, along with the potential revenue extra box sets bring.

I don't want:

A condescending introductory game that points me towards buying into the full fat version of the game and nowhere else. If someone wants 'full fat', they can go ahead and buy that. I don't want to subscribe to an online service to get the best out of my game. Maps and minis should be optional, not a requirement. Most of all I don't want 'more of the same'. That is, three core hardback books, a mountain of splatbooks and optional rules tomes, a massive commitment in terms of time to learn and play the thing, blank looks from the kids as I try to teach it to them, and a potential £75-£100 investment just to get me started.

Yes, BECMI is available in PDF again. I know that, I have bought all the PDFs and own the original game. That all still works, thanks. What would be nice is a modern day equivalent, using 30 years of extra know how, excellent unified art and offering a license for 3rd party developers to create adventures and sourcebooks for it without wondering if the license will be pulled. Plus, maybe, an option that a stamp of 'approved by WOTC' or some such could be shown in the corner along with standard across the board cover art (with a unique illustration in the box section middle showing some adventure detail) to keep presentation levels high, whether it's been cooked up by Wizards or not.

Do the stuff I ask for and you can aim for:

1) The kids
2) The old farts with disposable income and happy memories of times when games came in 64 page pamphlets
3) The parents looking for an easy to buy present for xmas/birthdays, plus relatives who need present ideas 'Yeah, he's been after an 'Expert Set'. $15 from Toys R Us' as opposed to 'Players Handbook 4. It's got a picture of a guy with tentacles coming out of his face and you can buy it from a shop 40 miles away or online or... the hell with it, just get 'em a gift voucher'
4) People returning to the hobby who have no idea about what happened to D&D since the 80s
5) Anyone else for whom the idea of stumping up for a game line that will be cancelled in 5 years is unappealing.

In other words Basic and Advanced versions of the game. It worked before, quite well if I recall.

@APN

I think your wants list sounds good to me as well. However, I'm not sure even if the game really needs a structure above 15th level or so except as something that is 'super' optional. I've never ran or played in a game that has gone beyond 13th level or so. I guess that's why I see the scope of levels in ACKS appealing, while still allowing the truly high level spells as costly and rare rituals.

ACKS does come in a bullet stopping tome, but I think WOTC would be better served by splitting the game up into more digestable chunks. Maybe these days the equivalent to hold levels 1-5 would be a 96 page softback.

Sadly, I doubt that's going to happen.

Quote from: wmarshal;741214I think that if WOTC had continued their partnership with Paizo for 2-3 years after the launch of 4E, and then cut Paizo off then 4E would have done better in the market. Instead they created a near instant competitor that would hold up the banner for those who wanted to stay with 3E.

There's a good chance that, if Paizo hadn't done Pathfinder, somebody else would have done a "v3.6". There was clearly demand for it.

To be fair, Paizo had the advantage of having turned their list of Dragon and Dungeon subscribers into Pathfinder customers, which undoubtedly gave the Pathfinder RPG a bit more traction than anyone else would have enjoyed but I'm sure that, had someone like Chris Pramas or Monte Cook decided to do a v3.6, it would have been a success (although maybe not as big a success as Pathfinder has been).

In some ways, I think Wizards were disadvantaged by the fact that they (a) owned D&D, and (b) were part of Hasbro. Both those factors probably bred a bit of overconfidence, whereas Paizo, being smaller and under an existential threat, were probably a lot more focused on understanding what the market actually wanted.

One of the advantages of the OGL is that all new D&D must compete with old D&D directly.  4E just couldn't.  I played it and enjoyed it, but it was OGL B/X products that out competed 4E for me.  And for most other people it was OGL Pathfinder products that out competed 4E for them.

This thread is also about whether or not Hasbro/WotC has ever (or can ever) attempt to put the genie back in the bottle with legal bullying.  So will D&D Next be able to compete with old D&D directly without legal bullying to knock out it's potential competition?  And will WotC/Hasbro resort to it if they need to in order to sell D&D Next?

Something tells me that Paizo would have been the target of this kind of litigation in the early days of PF if it was possible at all.

Quote from: Warthur;741138I know you've addressed this point in passing before, but how much of an impact do you think the collapse of the D&D Insider/virtual tabletop side of the 4E strategy had in the failure of 4E in the market?

None.  I'm not a believer in virtual tabletops.  I think they aren't a compelling technology.  If you want to play an RPG online, play an MMO.  If you want the experience of having friends sit around a table, play a tabletop RPG.  The hybrid on-line / tabletop experience just doesn't make sense, in my opinion.  

There is a small audience of people who have a socially strong gaming group that can withstand the pressures of distance, who want to keep playing their tabletop game but can't physically meet.  For that small audience, virtual games are a great solution.  I just don't think there are enough such people to make a business that makes sense.

I have believed for decades that there is a value in hybridizing the computer with the tabletop experience.  That's the reason there was a character generator shipped on CD with the 3e PHBs, for example, and why I pressured Wizards to do the Master Tools project.

The age of the hybridization is rapidly approaching.  I don't buy physical RPG products anymore.  I exclusively use electronic books.  I think that there will come a time when we will abandon the "book" metaphor completely.  You shouldn't buy a "player's handbook", you should buy a character generator, and it should have a micro-transaction driven business model to let you customize each character with content.  You shouldn't buy a monster bestiary, you should buy an app that helps you construct interesting encounters, and the library of monsters you can use can be extended by MTX, etc. etc. etc.

You should have a computer help manage the battlespace.  Instead of asking a GM to "fight the monsters", the computer should do as much of that work as the GM desires.  The battles would get more interesting (and a lot harder).  

There's a limit to the complexity of the environment that can be simulated on the tabletop.  Humans just can't process too many variables at once.  I would argue that 3e/3.5/Pathfinder have already passed that point so that few people actually run the rules as written.  With computer assistance a lot more complex factors can be added to the game without increasing the processing demand on the human players - which would add a lot of richness to the experience.  It's the difference between the battle of Helm's Deep on a sunny day, and Helm's Deep at night in a driving rainstorm.

Within that context there is probably a "virtual tabletop" appliance that isn't designed to let people play the game when not physically present, but rather a way to visualize the encounters for everyone physically present.  That's a whole different kind of "virtual tabletop" than what people talk about when they use that term today.

QuoteI know you weren't responsible for anything going down in D&Dland at that point in time but do you have any insight into what was going on with the skill challenges and why they seemed so sloppily implemented as originally written?

I cannot speak to any part of the 4e design, I was not involved at all.

I can speak from a general publishing perspective.  To deliver something as complex as a new edition of D&D, you have to pick some hard dates long before you have finished working on the product.  To have a book on  shelf on a given day, that book has to be in warehouses at a certain date, and to get into those warehouses it has to go on boats from China on a certain date, and to get on those boats it has to be shipped from the printer on a certain date, and to be shipped from the printer the files have to be delivered to the production facility on a certain date.

You can't wait until the game is finished and then send it to be produced.  Nobody has that much money and no business can operate with that much uncertainty.  Remember it's not just your own staff who are on the hook, it's the distributors and retailers who all need time to do their own marketing and promotion as well.  So there's always content in any large project that isn't as done as you would like it when you have to send the files to the printer.  

The complexity of the 4e project was probably 10x the complexity of the 3e project because they tried to synchronize the printed books with a suite of on-line tools.  The tragedy that struck the on-line tools team derailed that synergy and the 4e project never recovered but I'm certain that there were all sorts of interdependencies that drove the 4e team crazy.  When that happens, you triage.  I'm guessing, based on what you and others in this thread have said, that this particular system got triaged so far down the priority list that it just couldn't be fixed in time to meet the production deadline.

Quote from: Bradford C. Walker;741188Dancey:  (1) If your presentation is recorded, will you put it up online for others to watch after the fact?  (2) In your consideration, what was the impact of the MMO market upon TRPGs since WOW went online in 2004?

Call me Ryan, we're all friends here.

1:  I don't know if Pax records and broadcasts panels.  They totally should.  It's beyond my purview to manage that, but I bet that even if Pax doesn't, there will be shakycam footage from the audience.


2:  It has been immense.

Here's my theory.  If we take the segmentation study we did in 1999 as valid (http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html), I believe that the MMO experience provides a better and more rewarding experience for two of those groups - the Power Gamers and the Thinkers than the tabletop game ever can, and I think that the Character Actors have been receiving the benefits of a lot of attention over time which has been pressuring them as well.

I believe in network externalities.  That means that I believe that the value of a game is external to the game itself, and resides in the network of players who use it.  The fundamental network unit of a tabletop RPG is the group who meets regularly physically to play it.  If that unit starts to break down, the externality of the network degrades in value rapidly.  As it loses value, the game loses value - and in this case "value" is a proxy for "activity".

After World of Warcraft shipped in 2005, everything changed.  MMOs up to that point had been a curiosity.  Ultima Online peaked at about 250k players.  EverQuest peaked at about 400k.  (http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-2.png).  This was at a time when our data showed there were more than 5 million people who played a tabletop game at least once a year, and more than 2 million who played monthly.  But World of Warcraft blew that model apart.  It generated nearly 5 million players in about a 4 years (http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png).  World of Warcraft was a game that lots of tabletop RPG players deeply engaged with.  

At CCP we did some market research on EVE players, and a huge percentage of them (I think the number was 80%) had played a tabletop RPG in the past, but only about 20% of them were currently playing one monthly.  EVE is a niche game far from the ground zero of high fantasy that World of Warcraft is, but even if the same numbers applied it would still suggest that World of Warcraft had connected with a vast tabletop RPG audience.

The market effects of that change are undeniable.  Sales of RPGs from all publishers cratered after 2005.  The market today is, I would estimate, less than half the size, and maybe as little as 1/3rd the size as it was in 2003.  It was an even more catastrophic collapse than the mid-90s meltdown that lead to TSR's sale to Wizards of the Coast.

Today, the player network for tabletop RPGs is broken.  With a lot of Thinkers, Power Gamers and increasingly Character Actors switching to MMOs and playing less (or no) tabletop RPGs, the types of groups that used to exist are malfunctioning.  D&D, Pathfinder, and most tabletop RPGs are designed around the assumption that there are players who can and will fill those various "roles" in the group.  But if all the Power Gamers are gone, suddenly there are lot fewer people who want to play Bob the Barbarian who hits hard but doesn't solve puzzles.  The puzzles used to be solved by Sally the Sneaky, but she's not showing up anymore, so the clues the GM weaves into the narrative go unnoticed.  The frustration that Gary the GM, a Storyteller experiences are massive.  Gary's irritation level is high and that makes him less and less willing to go to the trouble to host and prepare for the game.  

The old assumptions about who will play these games, with what intensity, and how often, are broken.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;741199I am curious, what game do you think the market wanted at the time?

See my above post about the collapse of the tabletop RPG market driven by MMOs.  That's the context for my answer to this question.

During the collapse, I believe the players engaged in what I call "a flight to quality".  This is an effect common in shrinking markets where everyone but one producer dies, but the surviving producer may become larger and stronger than it was before the die-off.

As the network degraded, players who wanted to remain active had two choices.  They could recruit all new players to join them, or they could switch games to join a network that had enough nodes to permit them to remain active players.

Starting new groups is hard.  Some folks do it without even realizing that they're working miracles, and they look around and wonder why everyone doesn't do what they do.  Most people just can't.

So, with the collapse under way, what did most players do?

They gravitated towards the largest and most valuable player network, which was D&D.  But D&D had broken with it's network externality.  4e was different enough from all previous editions that it was essentially a "new game".  It didn't have a strong player network.  The strongest network was the 3.0/3.5 network, which in context wasn't even that old.  (Unlike say the 1e network compared to the 3e network in 2000).  Pathfinder squarely established itself as the new root for the 3.0/3.5 player network, and it got big enough quickly enough to displace other potential challengers (via leveraging the Dragon and Dungeon customer base).

So the flight to quality lead to Pathfinder, not 4e.

My answer to the question is "they wanted the 3.5 game", and they picked the best available option.  But my larger point is that the "they" had changed radically between 2000 and 2005.

Quote from: Dodger;741135Ryan - With hindsight, do you wish you'd made the OGL more restrictive?

No.  And now I'll actually bring this massive digression back on point of the thread.  {magic!}

First, I have to remind people that if the OGL had had meaningful restrictions is is very doubtful that it would have worked.  People at the time were absolutely convinced it was a secret plot by Wizards to destroy all competition in the category, to steal everyone's intellectual property.  It was, in their minds, the One Ring to Rule Them All.

Any appearance that the license had trap doors would have scared off the vast majority of potential publishers.  Look at White Wolf - they created a whole new division to make D20 projects, just on the off chance that somehow we had cleverly hidden the dagger behind our backs.  Some companies, like Palladium, have NEVER done an OGL product, even though a "d20 RIFTS" book could have saved Palladium a lot of heartache.

Second, we had no ability to do anything with a review & approval process anyway.  There was no mass of talented and trained brand managers sitting around my offices at Wizards with their thumbs up their asses waiting for something to do.  Everyone was heads down busy every minute of every day.  60 hour work weeks were not uncommon.  If we'd tried to dip our toe into the stream of new products and assert some kind of authority, we'd have drowned, the process would have been totally arbitrary, and we'd have been litigated into a smoking crater.

Thirdly, and by golly on topic, restrictions on content kind of defeated the whole intent.  For the same reason that Wizards doesn't care if people do retro clones, they didn't care if people published a lot of nonsense for D20.  Because at the end of the day, if you are sitting on the most valuable player network, all the activity in the whole market will eventually accrue to your benefit.  No team of managers sitting in isolation in Renton south of Seattle could possibly know what niches and itches waiting to be scratched existed in the global market for tabletop RPGs.  Central planning, as 80 years of Soviet economics proved, doesn't work.

If there's a meaningfully large number of people who will jump through hoops to play an "old school" retro clone of 1e, that's critical information that Wizards wants.  There's very little Wizards could do to uncover that information short of letting people just make whatever the hell they wish, and then seeing what sells and what doesn't.

Wizards should have the "retro-clone" market under a microscope, at least to the extent that they can figure out if it's real, or just a small group of really loud people.  If it is real, that is something worth knowing.  And if it's just a small group of really loud people, that's something worth knowing too.

If the company threw cease & desist letters around at anything it found offensive or "dangerous" to its intellectual property, it would squash the kind of innovation required to explore all the market niches, and scratch all the itches.  And it wouldn't likely sell one more D&D book, or generate one more dollar of D&D license revenue.  It's all downside, and no upside.

Eventually I think Wizards will want to clear the ground and fight to define its rights to copyright roleplaying game materials.  The recent string of court cases in the US that are expanding the concept of copyright to "worlds" beyond "works" is all in their favor.  But they're not going to fight that battle over OSRIC, for goodness' sake.  They're going to fight over something worth tens of millions of dollars.  The target for that fight doesn't even exist yet, but if it arises, Wizards wants to keep its powder dry.  Remember that copyright, unlike trademark, does not lose enforceability if it is not defended.

Quote from: RSDancey;741257There is a small audience of people who have a socially strong gaming group that can withstand the pressures of distance, who want to keep playing their tabletop game but can't physically meet.  For that small audience, virtual games are a great solution.  I just don't think there are enough such people to make a business that makes sense.

I think you are broadly correct. I think there's scope for a small business to succeed running a virtual tabletop - Roll20 seems to be riding high - but nothing on the scale that it was ever really worth Wizards dabbling in that business.

In particular, your take seems to fit my personal experience - I'm currently running a Roll20 game, but it's specifically to let folks who previously gamed together some years ago to play together despite geographic distance, and we each have at least one face-to-face games going on as well, and I'm reasonably sure that if a scheduling crisis came up which made one of us have to pick between one of our face-to-face games and the Roll20 game I don't think there's a single one of us, myself included, who wouldn't sacrifice the Roll20 game first.

I think hybridisation at the table has potential for games with a strong combat component. I think they'd be of lesser utility for games with less of a combat focus; though I do use computers for such things, it's almost exclusively to keep notes organised and do stuff which I'd otherwise do on paper, rather than running game mechanics which would be awkward and cumbersome to do without a computer.

Re: Skill challenges

QuoteWhen that happens, you triage.  I'm guessing, based on what you and others in this thread have said, that this particular system got triaged so far down the priority list that it just couldn't be fixed in time to meet the production deadline.

Heh, given that they related to a non-combat aspect of 4E I think that's almost certainly the case.

Quote from: RSDancey;741260Here's my theory.  If we take the segmentation study we did in 1999 as valid (http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/BreakdownOfRPGPlayers.html), I believe that the MMO experience provides a better and more rewarding experience for two of those groups - the Power Gamers and the Thinkers than the tabletop game ever can, and I think that the Character Actors have been receiving the benefits of a lot of attention over time which has been pressuring them as well.

I think you're 100% right about the Power Gamers and the Thinkers, there's more or less nothing a tabletop game can offer character optimisers and combat tacticians that a computer game can't equal or do better at.

I think the Character Actors will only ever be partially satisfied with MMOs, by and large. The thing about an MMO is that the gameworld can't really change in response to your actions; you're inevitably a very small fish in a very big pond, and whilst you can have a storyline unfolding in them (as in Star Wars: The Old Republic), no particular storyline outcome can get the benefit of being "canon" because for however many people choose option A, there's just as many people choosing option B. (And if it actually makes more sense for your character to choose option C and the designers didn't code it in, you can't take it.) So if you're the sort of Character Actor who wants anyone other than the player characters in your immediate vicinity to actually respond to and riff on your acting in an organic fashion, you're screwed.

It's that reactivity and ability of a tabletop referee and player group to flip the script in response to unexpected decisions which I think is the key advantage of tabletop RPGs. You really can't ever replicate that in a computer game unless you first invent a true AI capable of exercising genuine heuristic decision-making and creativity, and develop it to the point where that AI can be a GM for a player base of millions. (In other words, you'd need to come up with an invention whose implications are so staggering, its impact on our hobby would really be kind of irrelevant in the face of the radical reshaping of our society it'd spur).

That's where I think RPG publishers need to find their new segmentation breakdown - find out what different people specifically want from that unique advantage, and make those things the heart of your marketing and the basis for how you work on growing your network externalities. A customer might have a Power Gamer itch which tabletop RPGs can't scratch to the extent that WoW can, but they may (for instance) have a "Thought Experimenter" or "Storyteller" motivation which your marketing could better target. If you focus on that and the small-group activity aspect (contrasting to the rather faceless experience of MMOs, where either you're completely lost in an ocean of millions of strangers or, at best, you're in a drama-ridden guild of dozens of people of whom you only really like a fraction), then I think there's scope for traction.

Quote from: Warthur;741291It's that reactivity and ability of a tabletop referee and player group to flip the script in response to unexpected decisions which I think is the key advantage of tabletop RPGs.

Yes, I agree strongly.  This is why I think that Ron Edwards hit the nail on the head when he started asking questions about why RPGs didn't give narrative authority to the players.  

The ability of the tabletop game to alter it's rules, it's environment, it's characters and it's challenges on the fly to tell great stories collaboratively is something the MMOs are decades away from achieving.

It is also a good place to stand if the network is reduced to Storytellers, some Character Actors, and a greatly reduced contingent of Power Gamers and Thinkers.

Quote from: RSDancey;741257I just don't think there are enough such people to make a business that makes sense.

I think Ryan Dancey is missing the point.

Tabletop roleplaying games are a specific thing.

1) A group of players
2) One is a referee
3) The others are players playing individual characters
4) The referee describe the setting in which the character are in.
5) The players describe their actions and the referee adjudicates them.
6) The effects of the previous session are generally carried over the next if playing same the campaign.

Change these elements you have a different game.

I think it boils down to whether a person thinks that tabletop roleplaying games as described above will exist at all in 20 years.

I think it will in the same way that theater survived despite movies. That movies survived despite television.

Ryan Dancey accurately states there is a limit to the complexity that the human referee can handle. Also that through the use of computer technology, that human referees will be able to handle more complexity.

Which is fine except the point of the game isn't complexity. The point of the game is to develop the sense that you are actually there in another place and time as that character.

Peter Jackson's rendered the Battle of Helms Deep in fine detail in the Lord of the Rings Two Tower. It was a vivid spectacle enjoy by millions.

Yet, Shakepeare in the Prologue to Henry V wrote this.

QuoteSo great an object: can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?

And later his implores his audience to let their imaginations go to work in bringing the conflict of two monarchs and the battle to life.

And today Shakespeare is still performed, often with the latest in technology

I think roleplaying, entertainment where people actively play individual characters, it going to expand in many new ways that will be fun and exciting.

But just like Shakepeare continues to bring excitement and enjoyment to many today as it did in the 16th century. I think Gygax's and Arneson's game in its original form will continue as well for a long long time.

Can you build a business off of that? There are companies whoes business is to perform Shakespeare. No where near the size of Warner Brothers, Disney, or Paramount. But then their point is to perform Shakespeare.