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I sometimes wonder if the world wide web / online experience / social media / compu-whatever has been a net positive or net negative for our hobby.

I am unsure how to weigh the positives vs. the negatives to view the whole enchilada in total.

What do you think? Why?

Discuss...and shank anyone who disagrees with you! :)

Positive. Overwhelmingly positive. Especially in the last decade or so.

There's a shitload of RPG systems, hacks, scenarios,resources, and ideas online. Some of it's quite good, a little of it's fucking brilliant, and most of it's free or very low-cost.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;808946Positive. Overwhelmingly positive. Especially in the last decade or so.

There's a shitload of RPG systems, hacks, scenarios,resources, and ideas online. Some of it's quite good, a little of it's fucking brilliant, and most of it's free or very low-cost.

This but even more so. When I wrote a modern game system in the 80s it took me weeks of effort to get the specs I wanted on various firearms, now all free online and 2mins away. The same is true from everything from religious observance in the pacific islands to floor plans of a medieval monestry to the newspaper headlines from October 15th 1923.

Information has been freed from the prison of encyclopedias updated every 10 years to being current, free and democratized. Yes there is a risk of inaccuracies but these are rapidly self healing from a factual perspective.

The internet truly is incredible as does even more than we thought it would when we we all hacking HTML back in the mid 90s

The Internet itself? Undoubtedly. Research is easier and that's good for verisimilitude, for the grasp of probability, for the sourcing of materials and inspiration, and for the sharing of best practice.

The Internet community? Possibly not. Linking up every game-store troglodyte with a PC of their own into a network of troglodytes has had... consequences.

It's like a library with twenty thousand people shouting inside it - but you can't blame the technology itself for the behaviour of its users.

This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

Before the Web, give and take came from APAs and proprietary BBS forums.  For a few years, I was part of Alarums & Excursions, the most popular RPG APA there's ever been.  A lot of then-present and future pros contributed, and there was a good deal of give and take.  With two or three months lead time.  Something of yours I read you might have given to Lee Gold two months earlier; it'd be at minimum a month before you saw my response, and a minimum of a month for you to reply.  And at its absolute height, A&E reached fewer than 500 gamers.

The BBSes?  Well, they were influential, in their way.  I'm proud of the number of spells I contributed to GURPS and the give-and-take that happened on the run-up to GURPS Grimoire being published.  And for Grimoire alone, I blew $300 in connect charges to the old Illuminati BBS.  Few gamers knew about the forums -- the number of people who had a serious impact on Grimoire, for instance, were just a handful more than a dozen, most of whom were Austin-area gamers.

Or how about for writing games?  In writing GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel, it took months to get hold of all of the books in the series, almost all of which were long out of print.  A friend had to smuggle one out of the Yale University library.  My wife's high school librarian smuggled one out of the University of Pittsburgh library.  I spent nearly a tenth of what I made on the gamebook on rare book services.  One book I never did find (and had to admit it in the bibliography), and one book I didn't even know existed.  A couple things I had to make up, because in 1989, I just didn't have the sources ... and the library I was using for research was the largest public library in the Western Hemisphere.

Now?  Quite aside from the blizzard of free sites and material on the Net, the give-and-take is immediate.  I don't have to wait months for feedback -- I get that in moments.  I can, and get, feedback from the line editor of my favorite RPG, same day.  Untold thousands of gamers have access, from all over the world.  And it's all free.

Those out-of-print Scarlet Pimpernel books?  They're all online on Project Gutenberg, each and every one of them, and Wikipedia has all the information I lacked back then.

Quote from: Ravenswing;808962This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

I disagree. Just because the Internet has been good for content creation and distribution of free content does NOT automatically mean the Internet has been good for the hobby community.

Also, I am unsure if the glut of free content is an overall good for the health of the hobby in the long term.

I also look at the quality of communication online and despair. I also wonder if the online RPG community has added, or detracted from the amount of actual play.

Maybe you are right and the web is an overall uber-positive for RPGs. I am just very unsure because of the volume of the "troglodytes".  Nasty and creepy non-gamers in the pre-internet age were a non-issue to the hobby, but now many of those fucks have become the self-styled RPG "thought leaders".

Absolutely positive, for all the reasons given above and more. I struggle really to think of any downsides.

Speaking only for myself and my group (because I can't speak for anyone else)...

Positives

• Things like Wikipedia and Google Maps make it very easy and quick to find out information about somewhere - even mid-session if necessary.
• Email is marginally more convenient than using the telephone to confirm that everyone can make it to a session.

Negatives

• The move to online sales has meant the closure of local game stores - meaning I can no longer browse a book in the store before buying it.
• Bloody smartphones distracting my players at the table!

Overall, I'd say it's a wash. Thirty years ago we were regularly getting together to play a pen and paper game. Now we're still regularly getting together to play a pen and paper game. The players have changed over the years, but not that much. The Internet hasn't really changed a thing.

Sure, I talk about role playing on the Internet - but that's just incidental. The "troglodytes" that people have mentioned don't play at my table and don't affect my game in the slightest, so who cares about them.

Overwhelmingly positive. The internet has added so much, good and bad, while the table experience remains just accessible and almost the same as before.

Looking back with nostalgic glasses, though, I do miss the mystery that limited information brought to the hobby. When game designers seemed remote and glamorous figures and new books arrived in the stores completely out of the blue, or teased only by some magazine information.

Give and take.

Alot of good. Stuff long lost can sometimes be found, ideas shared, people get together and share stories and design ideas. The ability to ask a question and eventually get a good answer alone is a boon. So many creative endeavors shared. Art, stories, games, expansions, modules, accessories, and more. Also there is now near direct access to designers and sometimes the ability to see the whole process of creation from start to finish.

Oh the fucking bad though. Sometimes it seems like every lunatic on earth is out to drag gaming into the gutter or outright destroy it. Disinformation is absolutely rampant and we now have some of the most vile and insane hate groups out there. Ignorance and closed-mindedness walk the gaming streets. And not since the 80s has design theft been at such an all time high.

Very positive.

From a player's point of view, there is so much out there in terms of scenarios, background, writeups and so on that I could never run all of them. There is support for many systems, some of which would probably have died without fan websites.

Publisher sites have a lot going for them, with information about supplements, free downloads, links to other sites. DTRPG is an excellent marketplace and the place where I buy most of my RPG supplements.

Various tools make it easy to write and publish new books, which is a good thing.

Forums are, on the whole, very useful. They provide a lot of information and are a good place to get questions answered. Sure, they are often opinionated, but nobody has to read all the posts in all the forums.

So, generally, a lot better with the interweb than without.

I think mostly positive, but like any technology, it is a tool and can magnify the bad as well as the good.

Overwhelmingly positive.  The internet has introduced me to hundreds of games, thousands of ideas, awesome new people - you get the picture:)

Online PDF RPG buying. That is a plus.

Not a great time to ask me because I've just been mincing words with an idiot over at reddit/r/rpg. :rolleyes:

Still, there would be no OSR without the Internet, and some of my favorite games have come from it. So I'll have to call it a net positive, albeit barely. ;)

I think that while it's easy to argue that the community of gaming has been damaged by the problems the internet creates, it's really a problem for a broader spectrum of culture and not just gaming. In terms of our corner, the net gain of such ease of access to information, community, publishing and sharing is enormous for what we do and need. Learning to navigate the mine field of weird and unpleasant groupthink that takes over certain corners of the hobby is just a modest price to pay for all the perks.

The hobby has had a net negative impact on the Internet.

Positive, but more so for the hobby of talking about RPGs than the hobby of playing them.

Yeah, positive, but I still clicked zen monk on a tulip, because that's some fine imagery there.

It is what you make of it.
Overall, that makes it a net positive effect, for me. Not every website is going to offer what I'm looking for. No harm no foul. Move on to somewhere that inspires you. Don't get dragged down by negativity (hence why I don't post on RPG.net and PMB much anymore).

Quote from: Spinachcat;808968I disagree. Just because the Internet has been good for content creation and distribution of free content does NOT automatically mean the Internet has been good for the hobby community.

Also, I am unsure if the glut of free content is an overall good for the health of the hobby in the long term.

I also look at the quality of communication online and despair. I also wonder if the online RPG community has added, or detracted from the amount of actual play.

Maybe you are right and the web is an overall uber-positive for RPGs. I am just very unsure because of the volume of the "troglodytes".  Nasty and creepy non-gamers in the pre-internet age were a non-issue to the hobby, but now many of those fucks have become the self-styled RPG "thought leaders".

Well ... a couple of rebuttals.  I'll break this down into multiple posts to make it easier to follow:

How do you figure?  Certainly the glut of free content must be alarming to a number of game companies, and can't be helpful to FLGSes, or to those who can't picture a world without pervasive FLGSes.  

As against that, the Internet's freed us from the necessity of FLGSes.  A generation ago, the FLGS was the necessary point-of-entry into the hobby: you had to buy the stuff from somewhere, and for those wannabe gamers who didn't live near one, you were pretty much non-existent as far as the hobby was concerned, and you were pretty much limited to the owner's taste in games.  Except for collegiate clubs or the occasional HS enthusiast, you wouldn't find a group outside the dogeared notices on the FLGS bulletin board.

Now you don't.  Other than returning old gamers, every player I've had over the last twelve years came from online gamer meetup sites or from friends of the same.  You can order stuff online.  You have umpteen zillion reviews online.  You can get everything in print online, and a good bit of stuff that isn't in print.  And you can do so at an average cost of less than the FLGS can deliver, which I know I'd have appreciated when I was a broke college student.

About the only potential losers aside from the FLGS groupies -- and really, FLGSes opened and closed with startling frequency 20 years ago, and 30 years ago, and 40 years ago -- are those who need to have slick full-color glossy content.  But hang on: since when was that ubiquitous?  The first corebook that was slick paper, all full color illos and hardcover wasn't until the fall of 1989.  And these days, even the indie outfits can manage that.

Quote from: Spinachcat;808944I sometimes wonder if the world wide web / online experience / social media / compu-whatever has been a net positive or net negative for our hobby.

I am unsure how to weigh the positives vs. the negatives to view the whole enchilada in total.

What do you think? Why?

Discuss...and shank anyone who disagrees with you! :)

In my anecdotal experience, the "hobby" - even at this stage - is mainly not on the internet.

Almost everybody I know is on the internet.  During my years of gaming, I've become friends with a lot of gamers, and made gamers out of a lot of my friends.

I can count on both hands how many of those people come to RPG boards, blogs or websites.

So I believe that gamers on the internet are a tip of the iceberg of gamers overall.  

Again - in my experience - people have time to add an active internet presence to perhaps one or two activities that they spend time on regularly.  For some, they go to car mod forums.  Others, weightlifting/exercise forums.  I knew one woman who was all over kitting, crafting and etsy, but had never come to a gaming forum and would never think to do so.  But all of these people game.  

The internet has been good for the gamer who games as their predominant use of free time.  That's it.  And since I believe those lifestyle gamers don't understand that they are a minority, instead of the majority of the gaming world, I also believe that the loud small voices on the internet drive the RPG hobby in a way that makes sense to the connected, and to the disconnected makes little sense.

The internet gives producers too easy of access to too small of a population fraction.  And the feedback gained drives too much of what is done.  Which is probably great for a lifestyle gamer, but - again, in my experience - the casual gamer and the lifestyle gamer look for different types of activities and immersion in RPGs.

Quote from: Spinachcat;808968I am just very unsure because of the volume of the "troglodytes".  Nasty and creepy non-gamers in the pre-internet age were a non-issue to the hobby, but now many of those fucks have become the self-styled RPG "thought leaders".

You do mean "gamers" instead of "non-gamers," right?  Because absolutely, nasty and creepy gamers in the pre-Internet age were a dreadful burden to the hobby: a lot of folks were turned off, and a lot of them permanently, by Cat Piss Man and that ilk haunting FLGSes and gaming clubs.

But that being said, you phrased it exactly right: there are a lot of self-styled "thought leaders" out there ... pretty much the same way there was in the heyday of the APAs and prozines.  Yes, absolutely, a lot of RPG forum junkies know who Ron Edwards is.

But a lot fewer have any real handle on what he advocates.  A lot fewer than that give a damn.

Consider this: do you have any notion who Glenn Blacow was?  He was a prominent Boston-area gamer whose significant contribution to RPG Thought was the "Four-Fold Way" -- the first iteration of the Roleplayer / Storyteller / Wargamer / Powergamer divide.  Blacow's been dead now for decades, and he's got as much current name recognition in the hobby as the likes of Don Kaye or Brian Blume.

Hundreds of thousands of gamers have no idea who those people were, the same way that hundreds of thousands of gamers aren't forum junkies ... and those who are, I humbly submit, aren't very likely to toss all their game books into the trash can because Some Guy on Some Forum was mean to them.

And a lot of forum junkies don't care.  I really don't give a damn about Ron Edwards, for example.  I've never been on The Forge.  I haven't given GNS much thought.  I keep on playing the games I want to play, in the style I want to play them.  I pay attention to the folks on forums who strike me as smart cookies, and tune out the ones I think are idiots.

Don't we all?

Mostly positive. Information has never been more accessible-- even when you live far away. Would have greatly helped me learn to GM, something I regret I never learned, since RPGs weren't a thing where I'm from.

The negatives are easily ignored

Quote from: Ravenswing;809165How do you figure?  Certainly the glut of free content must be alarming to a number of game companies, and can't be helpful to FLGSes, or to those who can't picture a world without pervasive FLGSes.  

I am not an RPG company, nor a FLGS.

If they cannot find a way to compete then that is their problem not mine.

That might be a harsh view, but this is the real world.

Free content actually drives people to FLGS, as they want to see new content or to buy supplements. Some people like to see the books first, before they buy them.

Quote from: Ravenswing;809165As against that, the Internet's freed us from the necessity of FLGSes.  A generation ago, the FLGS was the necessary point-of-entry into the hobby: you had to buy the stuff from somewhere, and for those wannabe gamers who didn't live near one, you were pretty much non-existent as far as the hobby was concerned, and you were pretty much limited to the owner's taste in games.  Except for collegiate clubs or the occasional HS enthusiast, you wouldn't find a group outside the dogeared notices on the FLGS bulletin board.

I found my current gaming group online, so I didn't even need the FLGS for that.

Quote from: soltakss;809534I am not an RPG company, nor a FLGS.

If they cannot find a way to compete then that is their problem not mine.

That might be a harsh view, but this is the real world.

My point precisely.  There are a bunch of people who equate "the hobby" with a thriving local FLGS or their favorite game company doing well.  I think that especially now, the hobby would manage perfectly well if every FLGS vanished tomorrow, and people would still find a way to roleplay if every game company folded the day after.

I think, overall, a net positive, and voted as such, but the concerns I have would be:

1>  The fate of the hobby in the nebulous post-FLGS world.  I've seen a number of claims and speculations that the FLGS is critical to the hobby, as a means of introducing non-gamers to the hobby.  Certainly, we all recruit, but is that enough, or does the hobby need those retail outlets to make itself more visible?  From my own observation, while the online communities certainly have a fair number of people, I personally know very few gamers who actually participate in any kind of online activity as it relates to the hobby, save for ordering a book on Amazon.  Very many people I have become acquainted with were surprised to learn about sites like DTRPG even existing.

2>  Print as a dying medium.  Certainly not unique to the hobby, but more and more is being released exclusively in an electronic format.  I loves me some PDFs as supplements to my print, but I'm still not a fan of it as a primary source, and regularly pass up content that looks interesting as it's not offered as print - and while I own a couple of laser printers, one being color, printing PDFs for my own use just isn't good enough for me.  I don't consider myself particularly "old-school" but there's something far superior about a real book to me.

On one hand the net has allowed designers and companies broader access to fans which encourages them to what areas to develop.

Unfortunately its also shown designers and companies what a bunch of totally unreasoning fickle bunch of lunatics the fans can be. Its also lead a few down the absolutely wrong paths as internet polls do not equal real world views as much as some would like to claim.

Some designers and companies just do not realize that the online extremists are in no way representative usually of the rest of the gaming customer base. Really guys, RPGnet is NOT representative of the rest of the gaming community!

Quote from: Omega;809627Unfortunately its also shown designers and companies what a bunch of totally unreasoning fickle bunch of lunatics the fans can be. Its also lead a few down the absolutely wrong paths as internet polls do not equal real world views as much as some would like to claim.

But how different is this from any other poll a company might conduct?

SJ Games, for instance, got suckered into taking on the Conan license when a comment card included in products for a couple years turned up rabid support for the same, as well as for publishing solo adventures.  So they duly put out GURPS Conan, and put into print several solo adventures for Conan ... and found out that sales were flatter than a board.  It turned out that indeed, there was a slice of fans out there eager to buy everything with 'Conan' on it ... and an indifferent bunch of people beyond that.  Heck, they wound up shipping me a crate of copies of my own Conan solo, preferring to do that instead of just tossing them all into the trash for lack of warehouse space.

Game companies didn't start taking opinion polls when the Web got underway; they've been doing it in publications and prozines and at conventions throughout.

Quote from: Ravenswing;809835Game companies didn't start taking opinion polls when the Web got underway; they've been doing it in publications and prozines and at conventions throughout.

I recall that their feedback process was a big thing for SPI. (And that it didn't protect them from some bad decisions, either.)

The Internet has definitely been a net positive for me. Without it, I would never have found out I'm a raging psychopathic lunatic.

The Internet is like panning for gold in an open sewer.  You will find an occasional nugget of great value, but you have to wade through a lot of shit to get there.

Whether the subject is RPGs or anything else.

The Internet, like everything else, is subject to Sturgeon's Second Law, so it's no place for people without filters.

But it's made a lot of information available, so net positive.

Quote from: rawma;810116I recall that their feedback process was a big thing for SPI. (And that it didn't protect them from some bad decisions, either.)

SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

Quote from: Omega;810134SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

And they asked pretty frickin' complicated questions sometimes, too.

Quote from: Old Geezer;810137And they asked pretty frickin' complicated questions sometimes, too.

I got an old copy of Dragonquest (boxed 1st edition), and it had one of those mail-in polls. Likert scale, a ton of questions, then some short answer variety at the end. It was obviously produced by someone who cared about the people buying their games and looked like legitimate market research. A couple Avalon Hill games I bought had the same sort of thing. Does anyone actually think that equates to posting a "poll" over at rpg.net?

Quote from: Omega;810134SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

Nah, I'm sorry, but no.  Sending in a card doesn't mean that you're an avid gamer, it just means you got your hand on a card and that you've bought the game.

And c'mon, listen to yourself.  Do you really think that a large swathe of the people on RPG forums don't give a damn for, and know nothing about, RPGs?  That's nonsense.  I certainly believe that as many people on RPG forums are boobs as is the case in the general population, and I'm certainly ready to concede that you might feel that anyone you disagree with is ignorant by definition.  But if you think that the forums are riddled with anti-RPG activists who participate in polls just to screw up the percentages, I'd recommend you get some help for that paranoia problem.  :confused:

Quote from: Ravenswing;809539My point precisely.  There are a bunch of people who equate "the hobby" with a thriving local FLGS or their favorite game company doing well.  I think that especially now, the hobby would manage perfectly well if every FLGS vanished tomorrow, and people would still find a way to roleplay if every game company folded the day after.

This and a thousand times this.

For me, Internet has brought a Golden Age of Gaming. All games are available (out of print is not a concern anymore), communication and flow of ideas is better than ever, finding players is easier than ever and you don't even have to sit face to face witrh people, so you can play via Hangouts or whatnot even if you live in Godforsakentown, Alaska, or in a fucking Antarctic station.

And you cannot read and use all the awesome ideas being thrown around in forums, blogs, G+ and the like. Seriously, my gaming bookmarks folder is huge, insaenely huge, and it keeps growing.

Trolls and morons are non-entities and don't impact the hobby at all. They're easy to ignore and avoid, and don't stop people from going on and producing more awesome stuff.

There has never been such a variety of games, styles and approaches to design. Best time ever to be a gamer, thanks to internet.

For those who play rather than engaging in frothing rhetoric - overwhelmingly positive!

There are so many RPGs legally available for free online, some of them great, that a person could enter the hobby with no greater a dollar investment than buying a set of dice.

Quote from: Ravenswing;808962This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

Before the Web, give and take came from APAs and proprietary BBS forums.  For a few years, I was part of Alarums & Excursions, the most popular RPG APA there's ever been.  A lot of then-present and future pros contributed, and there was a good deal of give and take.  With two or three months lead time.  Something of yours I read you might have given to Lee Gold two months earlier; it'd be at minimum a month before you saw my response, and a minimum of a month for you to reply.  And at its absolute height, A&E reached fewer than 500 gamers.

The BBSes?  Well, they were influential, in their way.  I'm proud of the number of spells I contributed to GURPS and the give-and-take that happened on the run-up to GURPS Grimoire being published.  And for Grimoire alone, I blew $300 in connect charges to the old Illuminati BBS.  Few gamers knew about the forums -- the number of people who had a serious impact on Grimoire, for instance, were just a handful more than a dozen, most of whom were Austin-area gamers.

Or how about for writing games?  In writing GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel, it took months to get hold of all of the books in the series, almost all of which were long out of print.  A friend had to smuggle one out of the Yale University library.  My wife's high school librarian smuggled one out of the University of Pittsburgh library.  I spent nearly a tenth of what I made on the gamebook on rare book services.  One book I never did find (and had to admit it in the bibliography), and one book I didn't even know existed.  A couple things I had to make up, because in 1989, I just didn't have the sources ... and the library I was using for research was the largest public library in the Western Hemisphere.

Now?  Quite aside from the blizzard of free sites and material on the Net, the give-and-take is immediate.  I don't have to wait months for feedback -- I get that in moments.  I can, and get, feedback from the line editor of my favorite RPG, same day.  Untold thousands of gamers have access, from all over the world.  And it's all free.

Those out-of-print Scarlet Pimpernel books?  They're all online on Project Gutenberg, each and every one of them, and Wikipedia has all the information I lacked back then.

I fought long and hard to keep Dark Bolt spell during play test... Sadly, John thought it too silly to keep...

I just wanted it switched to Cut or Crushing damage... Piercing was a bit silly...

Quote from: Ravenswing;810181Nah, I'm sorry, but no.  Sending in a card doesn't mean that you're an avid gamer, it just means you got your hand on a card and that you've bought the game.

Nah, Im sorry, but no. You havent seen the polls SPI used to send out. Try again.

Quote from: Omega;810348Nah, Im sorry, but no. You havent seen the polls SPI used to send out. Try again.

Hrm.  My advice would be to go back to Cracker Jack and ask for your money back, because the crystal ball you got from the box is obviously defective.  I had a sub to Strategy & Tactics for three years.  Try again.

Well, I bought GURPS Conan and all the Solitaire adventures anyhow.  I played them too.  I think Beyond Thunder River was the best one.  Never did buy the flawed Horse Clans one or the  Humanx one.  I certainly filled out cards and sent them in.  The Roleplayer Newsletter was a wonderful thing to find in the mail box.

On the subject of the internet, I honestly suspect it saved the hobby in the nineties when roleplaying really took a dive due to Magic the gathering.  It gave us a broader place to meet and talk and argue philosophy.  It gave us access to information about everything that was out there well beyond Dragon Magazine or the convention circuit.

As for FLGSs well I'm in the process of selling mine.  I lost a fair bit of money doing it but I can say that rpgs and rule books in general don't sell well.  Not even when a drooling fanboy like myself is running games regularly.  Another thing I've observed is that many people aren't willing to come to the store and play rpgs, they'd rather play at home.  I can respect that, you don't have to worry about offending people who wander in or including trolls who want to join.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I now game exclusively online, as otherwise our group would have long since been split up as people move around. So that's plainly a net positive.

On the other hand, I find that modern RPGs are far worse for my tastes than those published back in the pre-internet days. Of course, I can't positively link the internet as a causal factor there, so I suppose overall I have to say things are better. Or at least not worse.

Quote from: Grymbok;810649On the other hand, I find that modern RPGs are far worse for my tastes than those published back in the pre-internet days.

That's probably more of an age thing. Very few things are as good as they used to be.

Quote from: David Johansen;810647Another thing I've observed is that many people aren't willing to come to the store and play rpgs, they'd rather play at home.  I can respect that, you don't have to worry about offending people who wander in or including trolls who want to join.

Yep.  I've been invited, quite a few times over the years, to GM at FLGSes.  And the way I figure, it's always boiled down to the following:

FLGS: I set up, with the amount of stuff I can comfortably carry, at the store's gaming table.  (In more than one iteration, this is a rickety 6' x 6' card table that seats just a handful comfortably, set up in the store's cramped broom closet of a back room.)  Proceedings can be interrupted at any time by passers-by, to whom I have to be prepared to explain what's going on, at as much length as said passers-by require.  The ability to indulge in food and drink can be problematic.  Noise level is variable, and also outside my control.  I am at the owner's whim as to the hours I can play, and not unreasonably, there is a degree of pressure upon my group to patronize the store.  There's travel time to and from the venue.

Home:  I set up with as much stuff as I feel like; I don't have to carry a damn thing, and I can go get that binder from my study if I turn out to need it.  I'm in my own comfy armchair, and in fact there are armchairs and couches for all my players, each of whom has their own tray table.  Food and drink are no problem, and the kitchen's near to hand to produce more.  Noise, traffic and itinerants are entirely under my control.  I can play whenever I want, as long as I want, and five minutes after the players are out the door, I can be snoozing in my own bed.

It's always been a no-brainer.

Quote from: David Johansen;810647I can respect that, you don't have to worry about offending people who wander in or including trolls who want to join.

The latter is a big plus. Also all the stuff Ravenswing said, except for the snoozing in bed 5 minutes after everyone leaves. I am always too wired to sleep for hours after GMing.

Quote from: soltakss;810657That's probably more of an age thing. Very few things are as good as they used to be.

Wine is better. Though that may be, as you say, an age thing.

Quote from: soltakss;810657That's probably more of an age thing. Very few things are as good as they used to be.

Well yes and no. I'm not doing the full-on old man thing and shouting "get off my lawn". But yes, my tastes in RPGs were formed in the late 80s/early 90s, and the kind of games that were popular then are no longer popular. Times change. I just find it mildly annoying sometimes that there's nothing around I want to buy any more.

I do have one last game I want to try that's a post-1990 design which I think might work for me, before I just give up and call myself an irredeemable grognard.

Quote from: Ravenswing;810658FLGS: I set up, with the amount of stuff I can comfortably carry, at the store's gaming table.  (In more than one iteration, this is a rickety 6' x 6' card table that seats just a handful comfortably, set up in the store's cramped broom closet of a back room.)  Proceedings can be interrupted at any time by passers-by, to whom I have to be prepared to explain what's going on, at as much length as said passers-by require.  The ability to indulge in food and drink can be problematic.  Noise level is variable, and also outside my control.  I am at the owner's whim as to the hours I can play, and not unreasonably, there is a degree of pressure upon my group to patronize the store.  There's travel time to and from the venue.

I suppose I should be more appreciative of the GMs who keep running games at my local store (although it has more space and better tables). While the players face some of those disadvantages, the opportunity to play a number of different games run by people who know the rules well is enough of an attraction for me.

The internet has been a huge net positive for the hobby, no ifs ands or buts. OOP-books have been made available as PDFs like never before. Anyone with OpenOffice and some webspace can begin sharing his games for free, or selling them online. Players can be found even beyond personal contacts and the remaining FLGS networks.

We won't get an golden age like the 80s ever again with all those competing leisure activities of today, but the internet age has led us as close as we can get to one in the present day.

Positive, obviously.