Quote from: Armchair Gamer;921954The game was a fad, folks. Doesn't mean it was bad or outdated (although while I hold the Basic sets as models of accessibility, I'm not sure how well the core D&D model would hold up in today's mass market without some revisions), but expecting it to reach those levels again is a pipe dream.

Considering population increases (even just among English speakers), there is no reason for RPGs to equal the same number (not same percentage) of fans in the future. And that number could explode of RPGs ever take off in China, or other countries where English as a second language is popular.

My DCC player characters are known, and usually feared, wherever they go at this point. Mostly because they have a reputation for leaving a trail of total destruction in their wake.

Quote from: Spinachcat;921968Considering population increases (even just among English speakers), there is no reason for RPGs to equal the same number (not same percentage) of fans in the future. And that number could explode of RPGs ever take off in China, or other countries where English as a second language is popular.

Raw numbers? Definitely possible; it may even have happened by now if one counts all the variations. The same level of cultural ubiquity, with mass-market presence, being the Hot Toy of the Christmas Season, etc.? That's what I think was a 'perfect storm' of elements that can't (and in some cases shouldn't) be reproduced.

Quote from: Baulderstone;921789Those are some great guidelines.
It also makes for a game that grows boring quickly. It all actions are essentially handled on a purely mechanical level, everything that happens can start to feel the same.

Sorry for not responding for so long. There's a lot of stuff I really like in this post.

FATE is pretty much the poster child for this, gets really really samey after a while. My best friend and gaming buddy keeps on designing or wanting me to play games where everything is so abstracted out that HOW you do something never ever matters so I feel a bit silly giving in-depth explanations of the ways that my PCs formulate their plans when it's always a straight roll of something on my character sheet no matter what I do.

QuoteThis is one that I feel strongly about whether for board games or RPGs. I really don't like board games that are competitive group Solitaire. I understand why they exist. These kind of games are good for people that are uncomfortable with play conflict with the other people at the table. Nobody ever had to attack each other.

I am not one of those people. I play for the interaction, and I like interacting directly with other people, even if I am the one getting screwed.

Yeah, I really got annoyed with Caverna (think Agricola meets Dwarf Fortress) for this reason. As far as I could tell the ONLY way to interact with other players was to claim actions that they wanted and even that's pretty marginal. The same thing seems to be the case with a lot of worker placement games.

In games in Splendor you CAN screw over people (by reserving the cards that they're going for) but that often screws you too (by wasting your turn) and hurts you in 3 or four player games and that's a pretty indirect way to hitting people so my kids almost never use it. Even something minor like the robber in Catan is better even though that's pretty marginal in most games.

Competitive solitaire is really really boring.

QuoteIn RPGs, team initiative is on way to deal with this. I also just prefer games with fast moving combat. If each player can act in less than a minute, preferably faster, everyone feels more connected.

Yup, one of the main reasons why fast combat is very important to me in RPGs.

QuoteThis was something I really became conscious off back when I was running a lot of Savage Worlds and frequenting discussions of it. So many people would complain about the way exploding dice could result in their precious Big Bosses being brought down by a single lucky blow. I never really got the idea that a good fight had to be a long one. When players manage to get a lucky blow in, the usual mood is player elation.

On particular example stands out for me. The group was travelling on foot, and I had them encounter a very powerful dragon. It was not a monster I expected them to be able to beat. The dragon had no really interest in them and was passing by. If the players attacked, he would lay down one round of attacks and keep moving. The encounter was just to let them know the dragon existed.

One player fired an arrow, and got an almost unbelievable string of die explosions on both d6s. He brought the dragon down with a single well-placed arrow. It was fantastic, and the players talked about it for a long time. It completely derailed my expectations for campaign events as well. That isn't a bad thing. If a campaign rolls out exactly as I expected, I don't know why I bothered to let other players run around in it. I want to be surprised as much as they are.

Yup. One of my favorite movie scenes is where Indy just guns down that one guy who's flipping his sword around. Swingy combat is great.

QuoteI'd add easy character generation to this. Most people don't want to spend a lot of time doing this. If you do have a complex system, have some off-the-rack archetypes that players can use their first time out with your game.

Indeed. I like fiddling around with chargen in a lot of games (unless gaining ranks has flat costs at chargen and escalating costs when you advance a character, screw you WoD and SR!) but it's really aggravating guiding people through it who aren't interested and then having them want to tinker with or replace their character because it didn't do what they envisioned.

Quote from: Onix;921823I'm curious to hear some examples. I can think of a few ways to do this, but would like to know what games you have in mind.
Candyland gets a bad rap. It's a great game for what it's intended for. A four year old isn't going to beat me at Risk or Monopoly. They can however beat me at Candyland. A good time is had by the child when they win. They learn a lesson when they lose. The adult(s) have fun interacting with the child.

I'd say this is more a play style than a game design choice. Unless of course the game is GMless which then does require everyone to learn the rules.

For outside skill pretty much what Zak is talking about here: http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2012/05/kinds-of-player-skill.html?zx=b51a182c0b2efb88

In RPGs you can gain advantage by using the rules tactically and engaging in smart resource management but there's a whole other realm of skill that's having your character do smart stuff in the game world that has nothing to do with the rules.

Imagine you have a group that knows ZERO rules (do this all the time with my students due to time constraints). You still get smart players and dumb players. The smart players do stuff like throw rocks into the next room to see if anything happens before stepping in and note that the floor's probably an illusion when the rock falls through the floor. The dumb players don't pay attention and blunder into the room and fall through the illusion of a floor and onto a bunch of spikes after the smart players have already figured out that the floor is an illusion. Nothing in that sequence has anything to do with manipulating the rules but the smart player is still alive and the dumb player is still a kebab.

For Candyland it does have its uses and I've certainly played it at least a hundred times and taught my kids useful things with it but it's not a game.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;921832I don't know. All the classic success stories seem to break one or more of what I think should be basic tenants of good design philosophy. Two of the most classically successful games, Monopoly and Settlers of Catan, both strongly favor gaining an early lead and it is very unlikely that someone who is behind will catch up. You would think people would hate playing those games. So obviously my understanding of what should make a successful game doesn't work.

Yeah that's kind of what I'm getting at. A lot of popular games with real staying power have real and important design flaws. For example late game stalemates in Monopoly are brutally boring. So what a lot of people do is just dismiss them as "bad games that we can't learn anything from."

That's stupid.

If you have a game that's popular and has been for decades after decades and kids really enjoy playing despite MASSIVE design flaws then there must be something good about that game that attracts people and wants to make them play again and again despite those glaring design flaws. That's well worth learning from.

Quote from: DavetheLost;921838As  GM who has players who never RTFM, at all, not for background, not for rules, not for anything, let me say this "if you are going to design your game with this assumption make it simple and straightforward so the poor GM can easilly keep track of it all."

There are games I seldom run because they depend too much on the interaction of many moving pieces for game play. FFG Star Wars, Fate of the Norns, D&D 3+  If what it does doesn't fit on the character sheet it's not going to work for my group.

Better to design a game where players don't need to RTFM because they can be taught how the game works quickly and in play. Consider tht the rules of the most enduring board games fit on the box lid, and most popular card games are transmitted orally.

Yup this is the biggest reason that Story Games have never caught on. Most people don't have that much of a problem with how they're designed its just that most every group has this one guy who never ever learns any rules and just says what he's doing in character and then has to be told what dice to roll. In a lot of games that's just fine and often he's one of the best members of the group even though it's a bit aggravating to have to tell him for the twentieth time what dice to roll for his axe's damage. But he just can't play a story game or a game like 4ed where you NEED to express what you're doing in rule terms. When I brought this up on rpg.net I had a bunch of people get angry at players like that and denounce them as stupid and lazy. Pretty much every group has one guy like this and when it's a choice between giving my friend the boot and giving your game the boot it's an easy choice to make.

Quote from: Tod13;921843To me and my players, RPGs should reward role playing and in game problem solving. The "outside skills" are coming up with plans or ideas that act as force multipliers or remove the need for combat entirely or that otherwise reduce the workable-but-naive-and-dangerous approach to problem solving. Sometime these problems are combat related, or social, or mechanical.

Bingo.

Quote from: Daztur;922876Yup this is the biggest reason that Story Games have never caught on. Most people don't have that much of a problem with how they're designed its just that most every group has this one guy who never ever learns any rules and just says what he's doing in character and then has to be told what dice to roll. In a lot of games that's just fine and often he's one of the best members of the group even though it's a bit aggravating to have to tell him for the twentieth time what dice to roll for his axe's damage. But he just can't play a story game or a game like 4ed where you NEED to express what you're doing in rule terms. When I brought this up on rpg.net I had a bunch of people get angry at players like that and denounce them as stupid and lazy. Pretty much every group has one guy like this and when it's a choice between giving my friend the boot and giving your game the boot it's an easy choice to make.

This is one of the reasons the "system matters" GNS crowd got it totally wrong.

Quote from: Daztur;922876Yup this is the biggest reason that Story Games have never caught on. Most people don't have that much of a problem with how they're designed its just that most every group has this one guy who never ever learns any rules and just says what he's doing in character and then has to be told what dice to roll. In a lot of games that's just fine and often he's one of the best members of the group even though it's a bit aggravating to have to tell him for the twentieth time what dice to roll for his axe's damage.

In my experience, most causal players play like this given a choice. They aren't interested in the rules, let alone studying them to be able to manipulate them like some RPGs seem to require. They just want to play their characters and do stuff in the game world. I've been playing since 1975 and most of my players have fallen into this group. They are often quite invested in the campaign and very active at the table. They just don't have any interest in dealing with the rules and will not play in games that seem to require them to know the rules and/or interact with the rules instead of simply saying what their character is trying to do in game world terms.

A lot of players I see on online forums seem to loathe such players. I prefer such players to those overly focused on the rules (and I don't just mean rules lawyers here) and I never seem to have an trouble finding enough players to have a game. On the other hand, I notice (at least from posts on online forums) that those who only want rules experts at their table often seem to have trouble finding enough players if they need to start a new group. Personally, I believe that the move from games designed around "manipulating the game world with the rules only used when needed to determine results" to games designed around "mastering the rules and and manipulating the rules to affect the game world" is one of the reasons RPGs have become less popular with the average person -- most people who might be interested in playing RPGs have little time to learn rules  -- and not enough interest in learning rules to bother to make time to learn them.

Quote from: Daztur;922874Yeah that's kind of what I'm getting at. A lot of popular games with real staying power have real and important design flaws. For example late game stalemates in Monopoly are brutally boring. So what a lot of people do is just dismiss them as "bad games that we can't learn anything from."

That's stupid.

If you have a game that's popular and has been for decades after decades and kids really enjoy playing despite MASSIVE design flaws then there must be something good about that game that attracts people and wants to make them play again and again despite those glaring design flaws. That's well worth learning from.

This is definitely one of my gripes with a lot of the online 'good design' articles I see. A year or two ago there were a bunch of monopoly is bad design articles/posts popping up on my feed. To me those articles say more about the writer's ego than monopoly.

The only thing I've learned after years of watching these debates and seeing people try to implement different design philosophies is 'people like different things and like being able to choose a game that fits their taste'. Any time you come up with a grand theory that limits what should be made, then you are fighting against that. Not that niche games shouldn't exist or that games shouldn't have design philosophies behind them. Just that any design philosophy that has a 'one-true-way' approach is bound to piss off the gamers who like the stuff you are taking off the table, or who hate the stuff you are saying must be on the table.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;923431This is definitely one of my gripes with a lot of the online 'good design' articles I see. A year or two ago there were a bunch of monopoly is bad design articles/posts popping up on my feed. To me those articles say more about the writer's ego than monopoly.

I think I'd have to see the articles before I agreed. I think it's truly perplexing that Monopoly is so popular, and (over-,re-, obsessively) analyzing that is something you'd expect from every newly minted 'student' of game design. Just like every college freshman invents a new persona or every first year grad student thinks they'll make a field-redefining discovery, every newly self-professed game designer probably has to answer the question of "why are games with what appear to be massive flaws also very popular?"

tl;dr - I think it's probably not the most brilliant thing ever, but I also don't think it's necessarily ego at play.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;921858Make an RPG that is:
Quick to learn
For all ages
Has trademark brand/logo
Brightly colored
Includes playing pieces and board/map
Sold at Target/Walmart/Sears (Ha! Remember Sears? They used to sell blue and red box by the thousands)

Making an RPG that's easy to play isn't too hard at all, making an RPG that's easy to GM, now that's a bit more of a challenge. Kids make fine players but it's HARD to teach yourself to GM if you never even played a game.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;921954Arguably has as much to do with the Satanic Panic and the press coverage as the sales.

But I imagine a lot of them were played with ... during Christmas vacation ... or for a few months or a couple of years.

The game was a fad, folks. Doesn't mean it was bad or outdated (although while I hold the Basic sets as models of accessibility, I'm not sure how well the core D&D model would hold up in today's mass market without some revisions), but expecting it to reach those levels again is a pipe dream.

Well the best potential it has to make a comeback is how social media is making it so much easier to organize groups. We could have another bubble once video chat with groups stops being such a pain in the ass.

Quote from: RPGPundit;922585My DCC player characters are known, and usually feared, wherever they go at this point. Mostly because they have a reputation for leaving a trail of total destruction in their wake.

Yeah having NPCs really know and care about the PC's reputation is a great way to make stuff matter and make the game feel different as the PCs advance. Too many adventures treat even pretty high level PCs as trained professional instead of people who'll stop traffic just by walking down the street.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;922863Raw numbers? Definitely possible; it may even have happened by now if one counts all the variations. The same level of cultural ubiquity, with mass-market presence, being the Hot Toy of the Christmas Season, etc.? That's what I think was a 'perfect storm' of elements that can't (and in some cases shouldn't) be reproduced.

I think eventually someone will hit the on special sauce to make RPGing + internet work out at fad levels. Might not be D&D, might not look anything like D&D, but there's enough interest around that someone will eventually find a good way to harnessing it and go from there.

Quote from: David Johansen;921765So, I have these players who generally want to be evil bastards so I set my 5e campaign in an area dominated by evil kingdoms who worship evil gods.  At one point a warlock PC used magic in the sight of a bunch of commoners.  They started shouting "A WITCH! A WITCH!" and a mob started to form.  As the PCs got nervous the crowd started cheering "HORAY!" and guided them into town with girls throwing flowers in their path and everything.  In these lands Warlocks are heroes to the common folk because they're a lot more reasonable to deal with than the official endorsed lawful evil churches.  My players were gobsmacked.

That's a great piece of DMing: Well done!