This is the title of a panel being given at a local general fandom convention that I will be attending in February.

Any validity to it? Has there been a slow demise to tabletop gaming? If so, then why?

I know that we have heard people bemoaning that the hobby/industry is dying, but is it really? Can we recapture those heady days of the 80's when our hobby was the star of the show, or is it truely just spiralling down the drain? If so, what factors have caused this? Is it all because of the fanbase? Did the Forge injure the tabletop RPG hobby that grievously?

It's the same doomsaying by the same, and/or different, short-sighted people who've drank the mass media, mass marketing kool aid over the years. Doom, doom doom! We need to compete with World of Warcraft, with the internet, with mass entertainment... we're irrelevant! We should make RPGs more like these other things!

FUCK. THAT. NOISE.

I'll still play RPGs in the nursing home forty years from now just like I'll still play Monopoly, Ticket to Ride, Chess and Checkers, provided I'm not six feet under by then. This whole hipster "have to be relevant in the world of made up PR and marketing", "I am irrelevant because Boing Boing told me so boo hoo fucking hoo" is total bullshit. These people can go fuck themselves.

I've said it a number of times. My observations of decline are based on:

* The financial health and print runs of the companies. Notwithstanding all the little outfits that have sprung up, and I do believe that more individual entities are generating revenue regardless of how you calculate profit. The volume of product actually sold just doesn't seem that great. (One caveat here is that the secondary market is much stronger now than it used to be: eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc. may be reducing primary sales. A caveat to the caveat, though: as Justin Alexander has pointed out, if you know you can unload a book if you don't like it, you may be more likely to buy it just to give it a try.)

* Relative shelf space in gaming and hobby stores. I live in an area with a number of stores, and I've watched this go down...and some stores go out of business. Granted, Internet commerce may be substituting for loss of shelf space, and I don't really have an answer for that.

* I should admit a couple more limitations on my observations. First, the industry isn't the hobby. Second, I don't feel myself to be very well plugged-in to the hobby, in terms of seeing how many game groups are out there and their ages.

And my explanation for decline is that there's so much more stuff competing for free time. I've posted a list occasionally when this subject came up; without knocking myself out I'll point to: video games, MMOs, Facebook and other Internet activities, DVDs and streaming media.

I don't think the Forge has anything to do with it.

I do think that 4e's failure could be another example of the reduced volumes of product. On the one hand I completely agree with the theory that 4e was a failed strategy that deliberately cut off its own fanbase in an environment when fans had other options (Pathfinder, eventually). WOTC thought they had a captive market, and were proven wrong. But if the industry were as strong as it once was, I think they still might have survived on fan-inertia. Also, I seem to recall reading accounts that suggest that 4e was a desperation move in response to dwindling purchases of 3.5 products.

In any case, I also don't think 4e has much to do with it, either.

Look at the player base: it's the same people who played Red Box D&D 30 years ago. Minus a hell of a lot of attrition, and plus a small trickle.

Tabletop RPGs are a hobby for white males born from 1955-1975. This is us. It rose, peaked and declines and dies with us.

The usual disclaimer for the aspies among you: sure this demographic isn't everyone playing RPGs. But it's the majority and the driving force.

I'm going to echo the doomsaying sentiment.

In fact, it's one of the greatest times to be a tabletop gamer: Print-On-Demand, electronic PDFs, numerous free, high-quality RPGs out there; Markets catering to both "old school" and modern gamers alike; Kickstarter's allowing small, new-time publishers the opportunity to get funding for their RPG projects without working for the industry big boys.

The current Edition Wars of 3rd Edition, 4th Edition, and D&D Next are but small brushfire conflicts in an era of prosperity.

Quote from: Benoist;611721It's the same doomsaying by the same, and/or different, short-sighted people who've drank the mass media, mass marketing kool aid over the years. Doom, doom doom! We need to compete with World of Warcraft, with the internet, with mass entertainment... we're irrelevant! We should make RPGs more like these other things!

FUCK. THAT. NOISE.

I'll still play RPGs in the nursing home forty years from now just like I'll still play Monopoly, Ticket to Ride, Chess and Checkers, provided I'm not six feet under by then. This whole hipster "have to be relevant in the world of made up PR and marketing", "I am irrelevant because Boing Boing told me so boo hoo fucking hoo" is total bullshit. These people can go fuck themselves.

Nothing that you say here is really inconsistent with the idea of a 'slow demise'.  Doomsaying is making predictions like "there will be no role-playing hobby as we know it in five years", or "the inevitable failure of 5e will kill the hobby once and for all".

"Slow demise" to me seems to be saying that the hobby is withering away. Slowly. Gradually.  I've certainly seen nothing to contradict this and all my experience seems to support this.  If people have been saying this for years, then it's probably been happening for years.

Whether this really matters all that much to people with stable gaming groups is another matter.  Maybe "demise" is overstating things slightly.  The hobby can survive in a fashion as long there's still a generation of gamers, and people can even make a little money off it thanks to the internet.  But unless something happens to reverse trends, I suspect that just means a "very slow demise".

It's hardly the worst thing that could happen however.

I think partly because the biggest names in the industry haven't really been able to take advantage of the re-found popularity of fantasy (aka Harry Potter and LOTR/Hobbit).

WOTC seemed to aim 4e at both the MMORPG crowd (or so it felt like to me) and the miniature crowd (Warhammer and such). Way too much focus on rules and minis (and maps) than imagination, they should have gone the other way, try to make something aimed at kids.

POD + the unleashing of OSR + OGL type platforms + Internet make this one of the great times to be a gamer.

I believe the hobby as we know it is being eclipsed by other things. However time will see our hobby transformed into something else that is much like it; so yes, its shrinking away, but it will come back as something else.

I think there will come a time where man-machine combinations will allow us to create experiential virtual realities, and very likely before the last of us die off.

I think the hobby will be a lot smaller once the Red Box generation dies out but it won't disappear with them. The university RPG society at my old school was substantially larger in the dim, distant past, but was still a viable entity when I went to university (in 2000 - you will note this puts me well outside the Red Box generation) and is actually somewhat larger than it used to be currently.

The hobby will never again attain Red Box-era popularity, but this isn't really a viable ambition these days anyway. In the era of the internet narrowcasting is king and there's all sorts of niche activities which can be kept alive which may not have sustained themselves in a less connected age.

Quote from: Killfuck Soulshitter;611725Look at the player base: it's the same people who played Red Box D&D 30 years ago. Minus a hell of a lot of attrition, and plus a small trickle.

Tabletop RPGs are a hobby for white males born from 1955-1975. This is us. It rose, peaked and declines and dies with us.

The usual disclaimer for the aspies among you: sure this demographic isn't everyone playing RPGs. But it's the majority and the driving force.

Not really, no.

Quote from: vytzka;611753Not really, no.

I shall consider your words.

Seriously though, are there any concrete arguments aside from self-importance for your statement? It doesn't describe the target audience for any of the most popular roleplaying games this last decade, and companies publishing them are doing alright (aside from maybe Wizards at the moment, heh). It's pretty odd to say that the hobby will die with you when the hobby doesn't seem to consider your eventual death very relevant at all.

It does describe the audience of therpgsite, though, which I find a bit ironic.

Publishing models are changing. Dead-tree print runs might be shrinking and shrinking over time, but electronic documents and print-on-demand are on the rise, for instance (look for Matt Sprange's state of the Mongoose this year for an example of that). So you can't really make pronouncements to the effect of "well the print run of this or that game was that much smaller from this or that game from fifteen years ago, so we're fucked". That's just not how these things work.

And that's forgetting, additionally, that "the industry", whatever that actually is, is one thing, and the hobby, the people actually playing the crap out of the games, sharing with each other via social media and DIY and free downloads and all that, is quite another. With one RPG and an internet connection you can play for years and years, and get together on Skype or Hangouts with other gamers right now if you are so willing (and you think that's awesome now? The technological platforms will just get better and better with time). Games can be rediscovered decades from now. It's just not as straightforward as so many seem desperate to believe.

I don't have any concrete data, but everything I've seen points to the massive bulge in the RPG-playing demographic towards the group I mentioned (which I do belong to).

As far as the popular games of the last decade - 3.x, 4e, various Warhammer games etc, I suggest you try this. Go to Youtube and run a search for 4e reviews, Pathfinder reviews, etc. and then see how many of the video uploaders are in fact white males aged 35-45. I think you'll find most of them are. The same guys who unwrapped a Red Box at Christmas in 1982 are the mainstay today.

Just like you can write a history of culture from 1960 to now through the lens of the baby boomers and the various ages they passed through - youth, settling down, empty nesters and now retirees - you can write a history of RPGs through the lens of the changing tastes and spending habits of John Q. Whitebread, born 1971 in Tulsa.

You may as well talk about the slow decline of the MMORPG industry because there will never be another WoW, just a couple hundred smaller games sharing the same market space.  The new kids are playing shooters, soon as the "born in 1980" group dies, so will MMORPGs.

We're stuck with tabletop, crpgs and MMORPGs for a while, thank god, until simsense comes along and we can do it "for real". Of course at that point 99% of the population will die of starvation while plugged into porn.