Quote from: JRT;686608What I've never understood is why people want the industry to die.  It's like instead of saying "I don't like this stuff, so I won't buy it", it's akin to "I don't like this stuff, so I want it to go away completely, because I can't stand other people liking what I don't like."  I don't like most movies lately, but I don't want Hollywood to die, for instance.

Do people think the lack of major publishers will improve anything?  All that will end up doing is accelerating the hobby's decline.

You see this all time on RPG forums. In a thread about a publisher or publishing, people chime in with contempt for the very act of commercial publishing. Why give a fuck about something you claim to not give a fuck about?

The answer is the haters do give a fuck. They give a fuck that what is popular is not what they like. And that hurts their feelings.

Quote from: robiswrong;686618That's a position I hold to a *certain* extent.  I think monetization of power is a terrible influence on the hobby, and I think that linear "adventure paths" are also a bad influence on the hobby.  But I wouldn't go so far as to say "I hope they go out of business".

Okay, take adventure paths. If Paizo stopped publishing them, would AP fans wake up one morning, give their heads a shake, and start writing their own sandbox adventures? No. They won't. They'll just stop playing/buying because, for various reasons, they don't want their RPG to be that much work.

Quote from: TristramEvans;686639I don't want less games. I don't see how there could be. Everyday gamers are writing their own, and the Internet means that it's very easy to share those games with the hobby as a whole.

It's easy to share them with people who are already in the know, who spend hours a week on RPG forums clicking around and looking for PDFs. But you won't grow the hobby that way, or even stem the natural attrition and decline. Some 14-year-old isn't going to out of the blue decide to visit Dragonsfoot or some other dusty corner of the web and start downloading an RPG supplement hacked together by an underemployed book store clerk in his spare time.

You know how I found out about D&D? An interview with Gary Gygax in People magazine.

Quote from: J Arcane;686643Kill the big publishers, and that dies.  The motivation perishes, because there is no pay off for success or talent, just more poverty and obscurity.  You can't maintain a creative field like that, you just can't.  Even penniless painters might be able to count on posthumous respect and fame.

When you remove all incentive for success, quality suffers, and then dies, because anyone with any talent finds something else to do that will at least feed and clothe them.  We've been seeing this for as long as RPGs have existed.  Most of the Lake Geneva crew went into insurance or some other equally boring shit. Warren Spector and dozens and dozens of others went into video games. I've talked to at least one or two who went into scriptwriting, and of course there's always those who give up making a published game of their campaigns and modules and write novels or manga or comics about them instead.

Everyone of any real talent leaves the industry sooner or later, because it's not feasible to keep with it. Making games is a shitload of work, for no pay, and when you tell people that maybe that isn't so hot, or try some other way to fund that work like Kickstarter, for every one person that ponies up there's another dozen entitled jerks who take offense to the idea that games shouldn't just come flowing freely to their eyeballs out of the goodness of a designer's heart.  

OP's 'dream scenario' is already happening, and the mess that's left is what comes of it, and its only going to get worse.  There's such a brain drain now that even the big publishers have stopped giving a shit whether the actual words or rules of their games are any damn good: look at how lovingly 'edited' FFG's games are.

And hey, I don't blame them. Barring a major sales push on release I'll have made less than a penny a word on Arcana Rising. I made less on the Kickstarter than I would've collected in unemployment. You can babble all you want about 'well you shouldn't go into RPGs to make money!' but FFG is. WOTC is. WW is. It's just not going to the people doing the work.

And as long as that's the case, it's only gonna go downhill from here.

Bingo. I hate to be all uncool and traditional, but you get what you pay for. 99 per cent of free shit you find on the net is worthless. My time has value. I'm willing to exchange money - real money - to not have to spend hours and hours sorting through ugly, badly-designed, amateur PDFs in the hopes of finding a diamond in the turd. Most commercial stuff is crap as well, but at least it has gone through some sort of vetting process (unless you're Goodman Games), and the writers and editors have some sort of semi-professional track record. And maybe it has even been designed and layed out in a manner that recognizes it's not 1993 anymore and presentation is inseparable from usability.

The people who don't need a viable publishing industry are the hardcore DIY gamers and those with more time than money. That's not a population that can sustain the hobby in the long run. If you don't think a once-popular hobby can shrink into being a non-viable, largely solo endeavour, just take a look at historical wargamers. Their big annual convention attracts about 200 guys, and almost every one has grey hair. And for a lot of them, that weekend is the only time they can actually play face-to-face, because the network of players has collapsed.

What business model should RPGs adopt? Whatever makes them the most money. Because that will mean:

A) People like their products enough to pay for them.

and

B) They will be profitable enough to employ professionals.

Quote from: RunningLaser;686660There's a lot of truth in your statement here.  How many new people interested in rpg's went to rpgnet and recoiled in horror and dropped a potentially new hobby like a hot rock?

Yeah, like we're so much nicer.

Quote from: Haffrung;686665You see this all time on RPG forums. In a thread about a publisher or publishing, people chime in with contempt for the very act of commercial publishing. Why give a fuck about something you claim to not give a fuck about?

The answer is the haters do give a fuck. They give a fuck that what is popular is not what they like. And that hurts their feelings.

I think there's also a bit of 'People are getting paid to make RPG things and I'm not, therefore those people should lose their jobs and everyone should have to work for free like me.'

You get those people in other writing fields too.

QuoteIt's easy to share them with people who are already in the know, who spend hours a week on RPG forums clicking around and looking for PDFs. But you won't grow the hobby that way, or even stem the natural attrition and decline. Some 14-year-old isn't going to out of the blue decide to visit Dragonsfoot or some other dusty corner of the web and start downloading an RPG supplement hacked together by an underemployed book store clerk in his spare time.

Well, I did, but I fully admit two things: 1. I'm weird, and 2. the internet, believe it or not, was easier to find shit like that on in those days.

I could spend 5 minutes Googling and find lots of fun shit for free, because the hosting options were more accessible, and you weren't competing for as many eyes. Of course, a lot of the free shit wasn't actually very good, and some of it was maybe not even playable, but oddly despite everyone crowing about how amazing it is now for free fandom made stuff, I just am not seeing it.  

And the reason we're not seeing it is because the means of commercial distribution have become as democratized as free distribution was in the old days, and people want to be paid for their work.  And I refuse to believe those people are wrong for that.  I used to complain about it, but then I wrote an RPG.  Now I wonder what the hell anyone in the 90s was thinking, putting up whole books for free like that.

Quote from: J Arcane;686656Well, I'm curious to hear P&P's response since if he's who I think he is, he's basically the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design.

Wow.  Well, that's really rather flattering and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by it, but the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design is Ryan Dancey.  And the Linus Torvald of roleplaying design is Matt Finch.  I'm the Who-The-Fuck-Is-Stuart-Marshall? of roleplaying design; I'm just a fan.  I come here to argue about silly elf games and call the RPGnet mods a bunch of wankers.

I'm afraid you'll be disappointed in my response to ggroy, which is just:

Quote from: ggroy;686650Can the same be said about individuals who write open source software (using the GPL or BSD licenses)?

I really wouldn't know, I'm afraid.  I'm a Linux user, but I'm definitely an end-user sort of person, not a tech industry sort of person.  I presume that software coders get paid somehow but I've never been interested in the details.

But ask me how musicians make money, and I can tell you the answer: they don't.  A musician is someone who packs £2,000 worth of kit into a van and drives 100 miles to play, in return for a fee of £50 and a rider.

Quote from: Ladybird;686671Yeah, like we're so much nicer.

We're less nice to the kind of freewheeling bullshit that is hard currency on rpgnet, but more nice to everyone else, with a few exceptions. Which is a real, significant difference.

Quote from: Rincewind1;686662If I wanted to hang out with the proletariat, I'd have picked up football.

These days and in the future:  the population depicted in the movie "Idiocracy".

(ie. More "Ow! My Balls!", monster trucks, etc ...)  

 :rolleyes:

Quote from: The Traveller;686658Boardgames are undergoing a great renaissance right now, a resurgence in popularity. Just like happened back in the 80s and 90s, people are deciding that boxes going 'bing' are less interesting than their fellow human beings.

Why aren't RPGs leading the charge there?

There's a deeply dysfunctional culture associated with RPGs which brings a stigma of its own, to a certain extent.

Indeed. Why aren't RPGs getting lift from the tabletop gaming boom?

Part of it is that boardgamers tend to actually play games - a lot - and this makes them quite happy and enthusiastic. This enthusiasm is infectious, and attracts other happy, socially literate people. RPGs dirty little secret is how many people in the hobby aren't even playing. It's why forums are so rife with bitter-non-gamer syndrome.

Many of those who do play are twitchy hardcores who aren't exactly great ambassadors for the hobby. Even the most popular RPG in the hobby is dominated by hardcores to the extent that the publisher is sustaining atomic nerdrage over proposed efforts to make the game more accessible.

Quote from: P&P;686673Wow.  Well, that's really rather flattering and I'm actually slightly embarrassed by it, but the Richard Stallman of roleplaying design is Ryan Dancey.  And the Linus Torvald of roleplaying design is Matt Finch.  I'm the Who-The-Fuck-Is-Stuart-Marshall? of roleplaying design; I'm just a fan.  I come here to argue about silly elf games and call the RPGnet mods a bunch of wankers.

I compared you to Richard Stallman because in a previous G+ convo you basically took his philosophy and applied it to RPG writing, and because you've both made your name by cloning someone else's work.

Ryan Dancey had a goal to increase both his company's profits, and allow other people in the industry to profit from their work too, work that couldn't have been easily published without the OGL he created. He's batshit too (his ideas on game design are just lunacy), just not batshit in the Stallman 'hacker ethic/everything must be FREE, man!' way.

Quote from: The Traveller;686664the frustrated late thirties early forties academic for whom life didn't work out the way they had planned.

Would these be the frustrated professors who feel they have to win a Nobel Prize in order to be completely fulfilled and whole in their lives + careers?

Quote from: Haffrung;686677Part of it is that boardgamers tend to actually play games - a lot - and this makes them quite happy and enthusiastic. This enthusiasm is infectious, and attracts other happy, socially literate people. RPGs dirty little secret is how many people in the hobby aren't even playing. It's why forums are so rife with bitter-non-gamer syndrome.

Agreed. They come to this hobby looking for something other than gaming and if it doesn't fit their expectations they'll by god form their own hug-circles where it's all okay, shrieking at anyone not part of their mental construct until they go away.

As unofficial anything, I would like to send them this message: please fuck off.

Quote from: ggroy;686679Would these be the frustrated professors who feel they have to win a Nobel Prize in order to be completely fulfilled and whole in their lives + careers?

If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated. Most of these people are completely unemployable.

Quote from: The Traveller;686682If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated. Most of these people are completely unemployable.

As in adjunct lecturers or postdocs?

Quote from: ggroy;686684As in adjunct lecturers or postdocs?

As in graduating at all would be a step up.

Quote from: J Arcane;686685As in graduating at all would be a step up.

Correct.

Quote from: The Traveller;686682If they were professors they wouldn't be frustrated.

There's plenty of frustrated professors too.

Especially individuals who work in highly theoretical and/or mathematical areas.  They can't all be Einsteins or Hilberts.