I'm always surprised that software applications to support roleplaying games like character generators never really caught on, especially now that everything is always online.

Whether it's to created NPCs or pre-gens for a pickup game they are a real time saver. I think it's no coincidence that the two I've run the most (TSR and ICONS) both had excellent character generators applications I used again and again.

Of course D&D 3e came with a CD but it wasn't very good.

Quote from: Soylent Green;707016I'm always surprised that software applications to support roleplaying games like character generators never really caught on, especially now that everything is always online.

Whether it's to created NPCs or pre-gens for a pickup game they are a real time saver. I think it's no coincidence that the two I've run the most (TSR and ICONS) both had excellent character generators applications I used again and again.

Of course D&D 3e came with a CD but it wasn't very good.

Electronic dice came out early on and just never caught on. Too expensive and some distrusted its true randomness. Which is a suspicion oft held for any electronic randomizer.

Intigrating I-pads into board games has been tried too. So far its met with some resistance maunly as you need a costly padd first.

There is currently a designer wanting to intigrate microdot readers into a minis game. Wave the reader at the mini and get or alter its stats in play.

Charts and tables. Far easier to consult than tracking down a bunch of modifiers. d20 and Palladium, I'm looking at you two.

Random character generation, especially lifepaths.

Less concern with "game balance" and mathematical symmetries that tackle on complexity without improving the actual play experience.

More playtesting everything.

Quote from: Piestrio;706973Drop in locations for various games.

Quote from: jibbajibba;706998More toolkits but with enough examples that the lazy GM doesn't have to do the legwork if they don't want to.

Don't give me 8 playable races give me a toolkit for creating playable races and 8 examples.

Quote from: Ravenswing;707003Modularity.

Quote from: jeff37923;707008More accessibility to non-geeks or non-nerds. Tabletop RPGs should never be "members only" games.

Less creating of new RPGs and more open license RPGs to allow viable sytems to be expanded upon with new settings.

Less of this fucking "planned obselescence" and "splatbook treadmill" in publishing.

Quote from: Soylent Green;707016I'm always surprised that software applications to support roleplaying games like character generators never really caught on, especially now that everything is always online.

This. All of this. Especially SG's.

Character generation is often a stumbling block to the point that it dissuades me from running games I love to bits (MEGS DC Heroes, all things Palladium but especially Rifts, Eclipse Phase). For the love of God, if your character creation is more complex than Savage Worlds' (which has skills and Edges and Hindrances but each of these comes in a page-long chart complete with one-line synopses) you should have a free character generator online or available for download.

Hell, chargen software is fun, even for simple games. I could spend hours statting up PCs and NPCs with the old VtMChar freeware generator for Vampire: The Masquerade.

Digest-sized (i.e. LOTFP sized) books where you can open to any random page and look at it and it's something you can use right away in a game communicated quickly with words or pictures.

Less wank. More play.

Less thinking about fixing role playing games, gamers and/or their hobby. Less distrust and condescension.

More trust, more confidence that gamers are actually thinking human beings who know how to run their games better than the designers.

More stuff that's actually meant to be played by flesh and blood people with imaginations of their own.

Quote from: jeff37923;707008fucking "planned obselescence"

Quote from: Omega;707005the collective IQ of the gaming community had dropped and dropped and dropped.

Does anybody else see a connection?

Quote from: MatteoN;707046Does anybody else see a connection?

The splat books and expansions meet the need that used to be filled by hobby magazines - people want new rules to drop in as-is, they want ideas to use in their own campaigns. So long as splats are modular and optional they don't cause a problem.

The "dumbing down" of the hobby is simply that there are more people in it. I bet many of us started playing at an early age with people just like us, and played in college with people just like us. Now WoW and Will Wheaton and The Big Bang Theory and every other "cool geek" thing out there have brought our hobby to lots of new people, some of them great, some of them not so great.

(BTW I'm not advocating a TBP "safe space" pc hive mind, but I do think we have to be welcoming to people who aren't exactly like us if we want the hobby to grow and if we want a hand in its future)

Quote from: therealjcm;707073The "dumbing down" of the hobby is simply that there are more people in it.

Er, I have the distinct feeling the opposite is true...

Quote from: The Ent;707075Er, I have the distinct feeling the opposite is true...

I thought between D&D and Pathfinder we still have a few million people playing.

Quote from: Omega;707005Intelligent players and DMs.

No really.

In the last 13 years it is like the collective IQ of the gaming community had dropped and dropped and dropped.

Try over the last 20 years.  :rotfl:

Seriously.  It degraded precipitously when it started attracting the computer gamer generation.   I hear adults (who have supposedly finished at least 6th grade) state that they lack the ability to perform basic arithmetic problems and thus can't play RPG's like Traveller.

 But, nothing to be done about it. They spend $ and help keep RPG companies alive.  

What it needs is broad marketing.

Quote from: therealjcm;707077I thought between D&D and Pathfinder we still have a few million people playing.

That's certainly what the companies want us to think, anyway.

For my part, I just don't see it.  If there are a million tabletop players in the United States -- a total that'd be lowballing the estimates I've seen, then based on that demographic Massachusetts' share would be twenty thousand.  (This presumes, per capita, that tabletop gaming in Massachusetts is no more popular than in, say, Montana, a presumption I doubt many people would make.)  The share of the county seat in which I live, of that total, is 400 tabletop gamers, and our county would run a couple thousand.

No.  There's not that many, not remotely close.  If that were the case, there'd be gaming clubs at the college and the high school and the junior high.  The FLGS (the only one in the county) would be roaring full of tabletop business rather than board games and Warhammer and CCGs.  The online game finders would have many dozens of players within the city limits, instead of, well, me.

I'm willing to believe a fifth of that, maybe.

Quote from: therealjcm;707077I thought between D&D and Pathfinder we still have a few million people playing.

Oh there's a bunch of folks playing D&D and Pathfinder, no question, but compared to the 80s, or the 90s for that matter? Very few.

Role playing.

I'd like to see more modern games with a complexity between Spycraft 2e (overkill) and Mini Six (not quite there).

Tits.