Quote from: S'mon;1079301Not entirely sure about that. They seem to be able to control distribution outlets, payment processors, and other such choke points.

Good. Force RPGing underground and make it dark and dangerous.

No faster way to make it popular with teens.

My buddy's kid is a meme junkie. Just freaking loves all aspects of meme culture, but pre-2016 no other kid at his school shared his "weird" interest. The day his liberal teachers declared Trump memes like Pepe to be racist was the day he had a dozen kids demanding to know how they could get into memes and he became super-popular across his school overnight.

Last month, he led 200 kids T-posing at lunch. It crazily freaked out the school admins into a tizzy worthy of the Satanic Panic. Hysterical.

So fuck yeah. Let the SJWs make wrongthink RPGing into a social taboo.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1079427Last month, he led 200 kids T-posing at lunch. It crazily freaked out the school admins into a tizzy worthy of the Satanic Panic. Hysterical.

What is T-posing?

Quote from: Aglondir;1079430What is T-posing?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/t-pose

Quote from: Snowman0147;1079233Can anyone even imagine a post D&D tabletop rpg hobby?

You mean, like in the countries where a game like CoC is the dominant market leader right now (France and Japan)?
Yeah, I've got no difficulties imagining it;).

That said, I actually agree with Pundit's points.

Some how I imagine CoC is a lot more weirder in Japan.

Pundit.

The comic book industry isn't dead. It will survive quite well without Marvel and DC. Should they go under.

Marvel and DC going down will force a swift change in procedure for the comic book industry. The shedding of bad business practices will become a basic necessity for individual company survival. And the books in the marketplace will actually have to sell on their own basic merits.

The world of comics will survive quite well without its two biggest bad actors.

And as for the RPG hobby? It will out-live the hipster SJW crowd. It will keep living, so long as you have dedicated independant people creating new content.

Like any destructive movement. The hipster SJWs will finally be exposed for the abject frauds they are. Frauds who do nothing but damage to the progressive causes they lie about representing.

If DC and Marvel vanished, comics would be fine.

If you don't believe me, visit a comic book shop and check out what the 2nd tier / small press are doing. Bet you find something you enjoy.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1079453If DC and Marvel vanished, comics would be fine.

If you don't believe me, visit a comic book shop and check out what the 2nd tier / small press are doing. Bet you find something you enjoy.

Indie comics have been chugging away for a long time too. And for like forever the 2nd tier publishers were pretty popular. Warren comics, Gold Key, Charleston. And later upstarts like Impact for example.

Quote from: Aglondir;1079287Short synopsis of the video:

• D&D will never die, because the OGL ensures it will survive forever. Even if WOTC collapses, or SJWs destroy the hobby, people will always be able to create OSR games.
• WOTC is trying to move the hobby from gaming to a "lifestyle brand" where people buy books to read rather than to actually game with.
• In the near future, consumers will buy D&D products to feel like they "belong to a community" rather than to actually game.
• The next edition of D&D will probably be a Woke Storygame, which will be a financial disaster.
• The SJW movement will ultimately fail, but the situation for gaming will get worse before it gets better.

I found the third bullet particularly insightful.

Except that it is bullshit.

According to Pundit, you aren't rolling dice on a table, you aren't part of this hobby. It's fucking dumb.

Pundit is just pissed that people are walking past his paleo-cave and having fun in a whole spectrum that none of us envisioned a few years ago.

Vampire: The Masquerade "gamebooks" were chock-full of blurb that the vast majority of players would never, ever, see. VTM LARP exploded, and reached far beyond the TTRPG hobbyist. D&D also had a huge community outside the tabletop, remember all those Dragonlance novels?

The rest of his whining is how this community of non-gamers will undermine the hobby, when it is clear that the hobby is more vibrant and innovative than ever before, including tabletop gaming. Oh and here's seven million more reasons why he is full of shit.

Quote from: Motorskills;1079496D&D also had a huge community outside the tabletop, remember all those Dragonlance novels?

"People who read Dragonlance novels" were part of the community? What community?

I think community is a stupid word to start with - there may be an RPGSite Community, even an RPG Message Board community, but there is no community of tabletop RPGers per se.

Quote from: S'mon;1079512"People who read Dragonlance novels" were part of the community? What community?

I think community is a stupid word to start with - there may be an RPGSite Community, even an RPG Message Board community, but there is no community of tabletop RPGers per se.

>Shared interest in the hobby, supporting the industry directly or indirectly. <

That work?

"Community" is the wrong word. It's just a misappropriated marketing term tapping into emotionalism.  Fandom is probably a better term. We members of theRPGsite are fans of the forum experience, aka wanking about RPG related topics. Our "community" begins and ends there.

There is a Tabletop RPG fandom and its made up of people who play tabletop RPGs.

If you would like to join the Tabletop RPG fandom, go play a Tabletop RPG.

The LARP fandom are people who play LARPs. Unlike fucktards trying to make believe "video watchers = RPGers", the LARP "community" is really clear that LARPers LARP and by LARPing you are a LARPer. Not fucking rocket science.

Now, if we are talking about "D&D fandom", then we are talking about fans of the D&D brand. I guess you can be a CR watcher and declare that an aspect of D&D fandom, although its not directly part of the D&D brand (as it neither
 is part of WotC or TSR).

But the "fans of the D&D brand" =/= Tabletop RPGer as many Tabletop RPGers have no attachment to WotC or TSR.

Quote from: Omega;1079486Indie comics have been chugging away for a long time too. And for like forever the 2nd tier publishers were pretty popular. Warren comics, Gold Key, Charleston. And later upstarts like Impact for example.

Absolutely. Unfortunately, TV-movies-videogames have been dominated by Marvel and DC which gives people the impression those two are the only game in town. In the Hellboy YT trailer, I've even seen comments by people asking if Hellboy is in the DCU or MCU.

Quote from: S'mon;1079300Funny enough, the 5e design team stated that the goal of 5e was the exact opposite of this - to make a game for playing, not for 'lonely fun'. I'm not convinced this has really changed, though they would certainly like to make lots of money. The skimpy release schedule is designed to maintain accessibility, and contrasts with Paizo's very Lonely Fun based approach - lots & lots (& lots) of lavish books designed to read not use, and a system based around Lonely Fun character building.

I think the 5E team genuinely set out to design a game that put at-the-table play at the forefront. They were smart enough to recognize that hardcore char-op is its own sub-hobby that's far more prevalent on forums than in real life.

However, they know who buys their material, and they know that a shit-load of their customers do not actually play D&D. Likely more than half. They cannot afford to alienate those customers. Like Paizo before them, WotC feel they need to write books as reading material, not game aids, because the reading material customers will flat out refuse to buy a game aid, while people who actively game are accustomed to doing a lot of work to turn D&D reading material into a game aid, so they don't raise much of a fuss. Furthermore, I think the backlash against 4E led WotC to over-correct, and steer the book format away from clear rules presentation. The 4E Rules Cyclopedia is probably the most useful book at the table every published for D&D.

D&D is thriving in spite of how the rules and adventures are presented, not because of it. They only way we're going to see the formatting improved for people who actually use the books at the table is if we stop buying the books altogether. And that's not going to happen for most people, though I'm personally close to giving up on WotC. I might even switch to Pathfinder if the new, user-friendly approach to presenting content seen in the 2E playtest rules makes it way into the rest of their books. I'm through spending dozens of hours turning printed adventures - books that I paid more than $50 for - into something that's usable at the table.

Quote from: Snowman0147;1079233Can anyone even imagine a post D&D tabletop rpg hobby?

I guess that depends on what you mean by "D&D". I feel like we're already living in a post D&D world. I like D&D 5e for what it is, but after reading through the OD&D booklets I don't see how it's the same game. It's a tangentially related ttrpg with the same brand name. If you mean a post D&D brand ttrpg hobby, then I can't really imagine it. I don't think everybody is going to drop D&D and start playing GURPS or something entirely different. You would need a product to really grab a whole generation of gamers while they were young and with so many video games and other attention sucking things to play around with these days I just don't see it happening.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1079297Also, SJWs are on a path to mass suicide in the next decade. A month doesn't pass without some new survey talking about how depressed these clowns are, regardless of how many anti-depressants they chow down, especially as they love victimhood and social media cliques. It's Jonestown 2: Electric Boogaloo just waiting to happen. That alone will protect the future of the hobby.

You are sadly right about the increase in mass suicide that's coming in the next decade. I don't think most people realise how truly awful it's going to be. It's not just going to be the SJW crowd though. It's going to be their children and all their children's friends as they hit their teens. The ones that survive into adulthood will be plagued with suicidal thoughts on a scale we can't even contemplate right now. The disability system in most modern countries isn't going to be able to cope with the dramatic increase in dysfunctional adults. This has me fearing for my own future.