Quote from: HaffrungRyan brings up 'nodes' of player groups. In my experience, those nodes are DMs. DMs tend to be the most creative and motivated people in a group. In fact, I'd say a typical group consists of one, or maybe two very motivated and creative enthusiasts, and a few more casual players.

Now, I can't see how this shared-authoring model of RPGs is going to take off it it's going to require several especially motivated and creative players to not only form as a group, but co-operate in a creative endeavour where none of them have more authority than the others.

You know, this makes me wonder... what percentage of Story-Game players ARE Gamesmasters?   And in particular Gamesmasters who are Game Designers... in the Forge Community... My Hunch-o-Meter is registering towards: High Percentage.   Do we have any statistics on that?  I would think that would make for an interesting survey.

- Mark

That particular ad was also in the Dragon magazine...can't remember the issue, but one of the recent ones; i remember thumbing past it and smiling in the bookstore.  (and yes, i agree it's a fantastic ad that gets to the point many are trying to make...)

Quote from: StuartThe first place I saw it was on BoingBoing.net -- a (VERY) popular blog/news site:

Anti-MMORPG ads from D&D - Boing Boing

It was linked on tons of other sites, eg.

http://www.wilwheaton.net/2005/09/brilliant_dd_advert.php
http://www.acidlabs.org/2005/09/30/awesome-dd-ad/
etc.

The general consensus was:

1) It's a great Ad
2) It plays to RPGs strengths -- they offer something cool that you can't get from an MMORPG

Not to sound like a broken record, since I have brought this point up before, but this is an old argument wrapped up in a new reasoning.

We all know that D&D dominates the TTRPG market. Let's make a ballpark guess and say that about 90% of people playing right now are playing D&D (the number is totally out of thin air).

Now, if Ryan is right and Powergamers and Thinkers are leaving for MMOs, that leads us to two possible situations. The first is that it was the Powergamers and Thinkers who were pushing D&D. The Character Actors, Roleplayers and Story Gamers were mostly busy playing other games. In that case, the exodus will include the vast majority of the hobby and really, there is little point in continuing this discussion; Ryan's new type of game will save the hobby, but who cares about those 13 guys anyway?

The second situation is that 90% of gamers aren't Powergamers and Thinkers. Instead, D&D is distributed throughout the various classifications of gamers fairly equally so that 90% of Powergamers are playing D&D, as are 90% of Character Actors, Story Gamers and Roleplayers. In this case, the numbers lost to MMOs is more reasonable and instead of some terrible tabletop crisis, you will have a subtle demographic shift in the makeup of game groups.

So what does that mean? It means in terms of percentages, we have more Character Actors, Story Gamers and Roleplayers in our groups... and 90% of them are willingly playing D&D. For Ryan's revolution to take place, we have to assume that some large percentage of gamers aren't currently being served by their game of choice.

We've heard this argument before, haven't we?

Quote from: VBWyrdeYou know, this makes me wonder... what percentage of Story-Game players ARE Gamesmasters?

This question keeps coming up; it's been raised at story-games and probably here, no doubt other places as well.

I think the answer arrived at by various means has generally been "quite a large percentage". But since most of those means are, essentially, polling the net, you get the problem that, quite possibly, a unrepresentatively high percentage of the people who bother to chat about RPGs on the net are GMs.

Quote from: Elliot WilenThis question keeps coming up; it's been raised at story-games and probably here, no doubt other places as well.

I think the answer arrived at by various means has generally been "quite a large percentage". But since most of those means are, essentially, polling the net, you get the problem that, quite possibly, a unrepresentatively high percentage of the people who bother to chat about RPGs on the net are GMs.

Well, I recall that Ryan did a massive (truly massive) survey of Role-Playing Gamers in 2000 (iirc it was they surveyed some 65,000 RPGers) and I'm thinking... isn't it time WotC or Hasbro or *someone* in the game industry run the Survey again to see where things stand?    It would be great to know and I think we'd all benefit by having Real Data, rather than all this speculation and guesswork.  But ... I won't hold my breath.  Seems like there's no will for it.  I just don't really understand why not.  I guess maybe the answer is that it's too expensive given the relatively low profit of RPGs in general?  

- Mark

Quote from: VBWyrdeWell, I recall that Ryan did a massive (truly massive) survey of Role-Playing Gamers in 2000 (iirc it was they surveyed some 65,000 RPGers) and I'm thinking... isn't it time WotC or Hasbro or *someone* in the game industry run the Survey again to see where things stand?    It would be great to know and I think we'd all benefit by having Real Data, rather than all this speculation and guesswork.  But ... I won't hold my breath.  Seems like there's no will for it.  I just don't really understand why not.  I guess maybe the answer is that it's too expensive given the relatively low profit of RPGs in general?

Here's a recent study:

http://www.wargamer.com/articles/gama_survey_1/Default.asp

QuoteWe conducted an online survey, hosted by Ohio State University, and partnered with GAMA and The Wargamer to assist in distribution. The survey was live from 28 April to 31 May. We registered a URL used to redirect to the survey, to make the web address easier to remember. Ultimately, we received a worldwide response (see statistics) and found over 35 separate unique sites linked to survey. Our final number of participants was 3551.

Some key points:

QuoteWithin those 3551 respondents, we had four big groups who responded to our request to list their favorite game:

Fantasy RPG, 841
Miniatures War, 658
Board War, 484
Board Euro, 428

No other type/genre combination had more than 200 respondents. Conspicuously absent were the Fantasy Collectible Card game players (ie. Magic: The Gathering).

Motivational Factors and Uses & Gratifications

* Factor 1: The Challenge of Playing, having a sense of accomplishment over a hard task being overcome and completed
* Factor 2: The Exciting Alternative, seeing game play as a stimulating way to spend time, divert from less interesting tasks
* Factor 3: The Discovery Narrative, having an interest in the game's narrative elements that allow a level of wish fulfillment
* Factor 4: Competition with Peers, having some skills and abilities to compare with others, prove self as better
* Factor 5: Catalyst for Socializing, playing the game as a reason to spend time with others
* Factor 6: Creative Control, enjoying the ability to manipulate gaming elements
* Factor 7: Pleasurable Immersion, feeling present in the game to the exclusion of other thoughts, worries

Quote from: cmagounThe second situation is that 90% of gamers aren't Powergamers and Thinkers. Instead, D&D is distributed throughout the various classifications of gamers fairly equally so that 90% of Powergamers are playing D&D, as are 90% of Character Actors, Story Gamers and Roleplayers. In this case, the numbers lost to MMOs is more reasonable and instead of some terrible tabletop crisis, you will have a subtle demographic shift in the makeup of game groups.

Your stats are off here as expressed. Not that it really matters, but 90% of each subcategory could be playing D&D, yet D&D players might still be 90% Powergamers and Thinkers. (But if so, that'd mean either that D&D failed to capture the center of the market, or that the market itself was already skewed more to Powergamers than was claimed in the published WotC market research results.)

In any case your point is a good one except for one thing: the D&D 3.x marketing argument as I've understood it, in terms of how it relates to your objection that people are playing a game that isn't serving them well, has been that the suboptimality of D&D for any given segment is more than made up for by its ability to provide an effective "compromise point" around which people with different preferences can gather and play together.

In short, D&D 3.x (and earlier editions as well, to a large degree) is a perfect counterexample to the idea that a game must focus on a niche in terms of either design or play: on the contrary (the argument goes), if you don't compromise, you'll never get enough people together to form a gaming group in the first place.

RSD's argument for change is apparently that if roughly 50% of the market disappears, the remainder becomes nonviable, or less viable at any rate. But by refocusing the game at the new center of gravity, you both improve its utility for the remaining players (they don't have to compromise as much in terms of adapting published material to their style of play and vice versa) and hope to capture some of the outlying fringes of groups, essentially people who couldn't be satisfied with 3.x.

This isn't to say I agree with RSD's conclusions about what's happened and what must be done. I've suggested elsewhere that if the heart of the market really does get torn out, there may not be enough of a "bridge" left to hold together the remainder, particularly if publishers misjudge what's left. If, for example, D&D refocused in the direction that Dancey's suggested elsewhere (not in this thread, where he's basically offered a fairly mild adjustment, judging from his answer to droog's question), then the publisher would probably end up alienating a large portion of the remaining audience, who'd recoalesce around, say, Mongoose Runequest

• . The question would then be, can either of the two niches attract enough bodies on the ground to maintain viable networks?

[*EDIT: Or just as likely, various OOP versions of D&D.]

In fairness to Ryan, the members of this site generally have a much more ... black & white ... view of what constitutes a role-playing game than any other population I've ever seen.

Seriously, this is the only place where I've ever seen someone say Action Points or similar mechanics suddenly transform an RPG into a Happy Story Circle.  (And be taken seriously, that is.)

-O

Quote from: obrynIn fairness to Ryan, the members of this site generally have a much more ... black & white ... view of what constitutes a role-playing game than any other population I've ever seen.

Seriously, this is the only place where I've ever seen someone say Action Points or similar mechanics suddenly transform an RPG into a Happy Story Circle.  (And be taken seriously, that is.)

Well, for whatever reason there are lots of people here with an agenda against certain kinds of games. There's this sense of "them vs. us", where "them" is anybody identified with the "story gaming" community.

There's also this weird idea that if you play one kind of game you can't be interested in another kind. Now, just plain not being interested in something I get, but the whole "it's disloyal to our established gaming, which is the right way to play" thing I don't get.

Really, though, if it helps someone to call a game which uses techniques they don't want to use "not a roleplaying game", I guess it doesn't hurt anything.

Quote from: WarthurRyan, take a glance at the top of this forum - on the stickied thread about the Comics and Games Retailer charts I've been putting together graphs of sales figures on a monthly basis.

You have to be really careful when using C&GR data to do analysis on the trends in the industry.  Specifically, you have to understand what it is reporting.

Note that it DOES NOT attempt to report unit volumes for games.  It reports unit volumes for games PER STORE.  That's a critical difference.  There is a hidden assumption in the charts they produce that needs to be carefully examined:  Are there the same number (or type) of stores from month to month?

If you talk to retailers and distributors, you quickly learn the answer to that assumption is "no".  Retailers have been failing at a growing rate since 2003, and the result is visible in the failures of distributors.  As the retail store base contracts, the distribution tier is contracting as well.  There are other data points that point to that trend, like Games Workshop publicly stating that they've taken the number of direct accounts from 1,200 to 800.  Non-public data I get from insiders shows that the number of stores defined as "active" in many publisher databases is declining.

That has two effects on the C&GR data.  First, a stable number of unit sales per store still shows a decline in overall volume if you multiply by fewer stores.

Second, we can reasonably infer that the stores most likely to fail are the stores with the lowest volume of sales (i.e. the smallest stores).  As those stores are removed from the mix, the average unit volumes should go UP.

Third, there are seasonal cycles to TRPG purchases.  The summer months are the best months.  C&GR data is delayed by 3 months (I may be off, it may be 2 months or 4 months), so the October issue should be showing data for July sales.  Sales in June & July will be higher than sales in April or May because of the cyclic nature of the sales curves.  So what you have to compare is sales in the same month vs. the previous year's sales, not vs. the previous month's sales (unless there's a dramatic move, obviously attributable to non-seasonal sales like the release of 3E, or 3.5E).

Fourth, the TRPG market has been experiencing a "flight to quality".  This is a stock investing term that means that when the markets get rough, people tend to invest their dollars in stocks that are "safe" and show less volatility.  What we are seeing across the TRPG market is a similar flight to quality; people are buying fewer "risky" small or new TRPGs, and investing dollars in "safe", traditional TRPGs (D20, RIFTS, Storyteller, etc.)  This means that while sales of D&D may be "rallying", that may be an indication of an overall weakening trend in TRPGs as a whole.  (In other words, strengthening D&D sales may be a trailing indicator of a problem, not a leading indicator of a broad based recovery).

I combine that public information with the private information I have to draw the broad-brush conclusion that the TRPG market is in crisis, and is not likely to rally any time soon; but it is always possible that a turnaround could be occurring and it will just take some time for the visible evidence to pile up to the level where I can see it clearly enough to start revising my overall market projections.  Unfortunately I don't believe that is happening, as much as I wish it was.

Ryan

Quote from: HaffrungSo I'm curious where Ryan thinks these local groups made up of several exceptionally creative, cooperative players who can handle unstructured play are going to come from, if the RPG market is indeed retracting to a wargame-sized rump.

I have not indicated that I think a Storytelling Game needs to consist completely of people who want to co-author the world.  I have been very clear who the target of my work is for:  Games with Thinkers, Character Actors & Storytellers (and Basic Roleplayers).  Of those three, only the Storytellers are likely to be actively engaged with world-building play modes.  The Character Actors will likely author as they play to add background details appropriate for their characters, but that will be primarily work filling in the details of the game world, not creating a lot of content whole cloth.  The Thinkers are likely to do neither; I expect they will often play the role of "adjudication"; figuring out how to apply the rules of the game to the ideas being generated by the Storytellers and the Character Actors.

I think that the Basic Roleplayers will fill part of the void left by the Power Gamers, in the sense that they'll be pushing the group to actually DO SOMETHING rather than sit around and talk about ideas.  However, the Basic Roleplayers are like utility infielders.  They can also be counted on to do a little Storytelling, a little Character Acting, and a little Thinking as well; filling gaps and smoothing rough edges.

Ryan

What follows is pure metacommentary on Sweeney's post.

I think a lot of what is perceived as arguments for "the right way to play" is actually a defense of "how we play". Either against misconstrual (such as mixing up GM control over the world with GM leading PCs through a preplanned plot) or evangelizing. When somebody says, "then it's not an RPG" it might be worthwhile to pause for a second and consider that the person is really just saying, "no thanks, that would damage something that's essential to how I enjoy RPGs".*

At the moment there's an excellent thread on Story-Games, started by John Harper, about the phrase "GM creates the plot" that does more than anything else I've seen to elucidate where people are coming from, how their experiences can radically affect the way they receive that phrase, and how their relationship to that phrase has affected their current gaming preferences. (It's in the publicly accessible portion of the site.) Which I would contend strongly influences what they think an "RPG" is.

There's a little more to it though: RSD is talking about marketing, so a lot of this discussion passes out of individual opinions and into arguing about what people in general want...so the problem passes from sometimes expressing opinions as fact, to talking about facts which would be hard to know even if we could objectively define "RPG", and subcategories of "RPG".

*Granted something along these lines might be a more productive way of putting it than getting into an argument over what is or isn't an RPG.

Quote from: HaffrungRyan brings up 'nodes' of player groups. In my experience, those nodes are DMs. DMs tend to be the most creative and motivated people in a group. In fact, I'd say a typical group consists of one, or maybe two very motivated and creative enthusiasts, and a few more casual players.

Specifically, I identify two kinds of people that provide the structure to the player network.  These kinds of people are drawn from the information presented in The Tipping Point.

http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-5488504-1503227?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1192134785&sr=8-1

These two kinds of people are Mavens & Connectors.

Mavens are people who know a subject in extreme detail, and delight in sharing that knowledge with others.  The examples you may know are the guy who knows everything about home stereo gear, or cars, or kitchen appliances.  These are the kinds of people who tend to be highly involved in web-based internet discussion boards of TRPG topics.

Connectors are people who have links to many different social groups and tend to be the way that individuals in those groups meet each other.  The Connector is the guy in highschool who was friends with the guys on the football team, and the people in the school play.  Connectors tend to end up doing things like hosting games, running game conventions, or starting web-based internet discussion boards for TRPG topics.

Manipulating these two groups is the key to starting & sustaining a TRPG player network.  Without them, the network cannot form (or cannot be sustained if one does start to form). With them anything is possible.

It is hard to support a 1:1 relationship between Connectors & Mavens with play types.  The traditional "DM" is often seen as a hybrid; having to have massive rules knowledge, and be the person hosting the game and inducing others to show up and play regularly.  I believe this may be an inherent problem with the way the classic TRPG game concept was structured:  there just are not very many Maven/Connectors in the world.  Finding ways to separate those two tasks into things done by two different people may help shore up the overall TRPG player network for the future.

Ryan

Quote from: RSDanceyFourth, the TRPG market has been experiencing a "flight to quality".  This is a stock investing term that means that when the markets get rough, people tend to invest their dollars in stocks that are "safe" and show less volatility.  What we are seeing across the TRPG market is a similar flight to quality; people are buying fewer "risky" small or new TRPGs, and investing dollars in "safe", traditional TRPGs (D20, RIFTS, Storyteller, etc.)  This means that while sales of D&D may be "rallying", that may be an indication of an overall weakening trend in TRPGs as a whole.  (In other words, strengthening D&D sales may be a trailing indicator of a problem, not a leading indicator of a broad based recovery).

Ryan, is people here people in the industry or gamers?

I ask as the reason for a flight to quality in investing is that market volatility and increased risks have changed people's risk to reward ratios, making previously acceptable investments unacceptable.  It's a money thing, as you plainly know.

I'm not clear how that translates to rpgs for gamers.  My risk of getting a sucky game, or having a sucky evening trying to play a sucky game, is pretty much independent of the market.  Distributors taking a kicking doesn't make my game on a Monday night more likely to suck in the way investors getting a kicking makes my investments more at risk.

So what is causing the flight to quality?

Quote from: RSDanceySecond, we can reasonably infer that the stores most likely to fail are the stores with the lowest volume of sales (i.e. the smallest stores).  As those stores are removed from the mix, the average unit volumes should go UP.

To be fair, if a store stops reporting sales figures to C&GR that doesn't mean the store itself has failed - it could be that they simply stopped stocking TRPGs. I've known several stores over the years which carried a single shelf of RPGs (mainly D&D and World of Darkness rulebooks) for a while and then gave up because they weren't selling (and they weren't selling, of course, because the store was neglecting their RPG range and barely paying any attention to that single solitary shelf).

Such stores pulling their RPG range might not be due to a crisis in TRPGs so much as (for example) a boom in comic books or graphic novels prompting stores which formerly sold a mix of comics and RPGs devoting themselves entirely to comics - not because RPGs have become less profitable, but because comics have become significantly more profitable. If there's really a crisis in the TRPG market, then you'd start seeing stores that are mainly or entirely devoted to RPGs going under as the basis of their profit margin is savagely undermined. I've not seen that happen; all four of the Friendly Local RPG Shops I've frequented over the years are still in business and thriving.