My recollection of the Magic boom was something like this:

We had a university gaming club, and it was like 30 or 40 people, every Friday ( I think it was Friday..) in the cafeteria playing roleplaying games and board games. Edit: I'm sure that it was Friday night now because the club was called "Friday Night Wargaming", even if wargames were not played very often by then.

But what it really was involved maybe 8 or 10 people actually playing, and around 20-30 people kinda hanging out. There was a lot of hanging out, and there was a certain amount of boardgaming (I played Cosmic Encounter for the first time in this setting for example) but groups were hard to organize, and then some groups that did organize basically didn't work out after 1 or 2 sessions. So boardgaming was almost like the thing you did while waiting to get a spot in one of the better organized campaigns.

The good GMs were in high demand. The *great* DMs were in really high demand, but it wasn't like you could just sit down and play. GMing is a certain amount of work. There were a ton of Vampire/Werewolfers and Champions guys too.. but if you scratched the surface.. it wasn't a lot of playing. It was a lot of talking about playing, talking about your characters or plans.. idly smack-talking other players (My character could kick your character's ass kinda talk..) and just a few groups that were really established were actually playing full time. It had everything to do with the GMs.

I played in a DC Heroes campaign and Earthdawn and Amber for the first time around this period. DC Heroes was great, Earthdawn fell apart after 2 sessions. Amber never went past the auction. The difference wasn't the players or the systems-- all of these were/are great games. The difference was that that particular DC Heroes game had an incredibly dedicated GM. I figured out then that if I wanted my own campaigns to be a success, this was the only way to do it.

And then someone started bringing in Magic cards and suddenly (over the next year or so.. but it almost felt like overnight), it was like everyone in the room was actually playing- because no matter what Magic was or represented.. it was actually a game you could take part in. People who had been in hanging-out mode or drifting-from-group-to-group mode were just as involved as the groups that never missed a session.

And then after that boom, pretty soon one of the players opened up a game/comic shop right on University ave.. like..right across the street from the dorm cafeteria we all played in.

The rest if history. I just think Magic was a big hit because it was so participatory and you didn't need one of those really talented and dedicated individuals to organize it.


UPDATE: The shop that I mentioned still exists. And it is apparently still being run by the same dude. Back in 1993 or whatever year it was.. this guy was just a student. He opened the shop and is still running it today. http://www.yelp.com/biz/mad-hatters-house-of-games-lubbock
http://local.yahoo.com/info-19462185-mad-hatter-s-house-of-games-lubbock

http://www.yelp.com/biz/mad-hatters-house-of-games-lubbock

I think the breaking point came in the early/mid 1990's, and was due to three simultaneous factors:

1. The AD&D 2e brand flooded the market with a lot of products, many of middling or bad quality, including RPG material, novels, and other stuff. This completed the shift from GM/PC balance that AD&D 1e started, shifting it firmly into the "player's" camp, making character creation the focus of the game. 3e, 3.5e, and 4e have only continued to perpetuate that philosophy.

2. White Wolf's games made it big around the same period, feeding into and profiting from the discontent associated with #1.

3. MtG offered a different kind of product that fed into this same line of thinking... player is everything. No DM or GM in MtG. Design and tinker all you like and play. It may not be an RPG, but MtG only served to reinforce notions of the style of play WotC would come out with in 3e.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;456750The rest if history. I just think Magic was a big hit because it was so participatory and you didn't need one of those really talented and dedicated individuals to organize it.

I think this is key the fact is that you can fill each 60 minutes of game time with 55 minutes of playing something.

I also think that the reason why MtG seems to have burnt out (and it fact whilst the boom has gone I think the core goes on and the online stuff is very strong) is that the growth of the internet and deck strategies and increasing numbers of cards means that there are winning decks (Teir 1) and not winning decks and the participation part decreases if one guy is always going to win and if all the decks end up being identical.
The MtG community has tackled this with new formats (2 headed Giant, Elder Dragon Highlander, Pauper, etc etc ) and with new ways of recycling old cards (Cube draft etc). But the Protour stuff is still very much about a small subset of cards and tactics.

Quote from: RPGPundit;456701To me, the demarcation line between "vintage" games and later games would have to be marked at either the release of 2e AD&D, or the release of Vampire and the start of the White-Wolf era of "Storytelling" games as the dominant paradigm for the better part of a decade in the hobby.  Of the two, I think the former is more significant for D&D (though, it being D&D, that makes it significant for the entire hobby) and the latter was vastly significant in its effects on the hobby as a whole.

I attended a gaming convention just after the release of Vampire. It was interesting because it was the first RPG I seen successfully steal D&D's thunder. A definite majority tried it, including myself and my group.

The thing that struck me at the time wasn't it's "storytelling" but rather the definitive setting it came with. Until then only RPGs I seen with a strongly integrated setting were one based on licensed properties like Marvel Super Heroes, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.

Note that Rifts never caught on in NW PA so I wasn't exposed to it until I started gaming more with people from Pittsburgh were it was a huge hit.

In the year after Vampire I saw a new wave of gamers that were different than the usual group. Yes many of them could be called "goths" but to be fair it was more than that and included a lot more ladies.

Overall I thought at the time it to be a positive thing for the hobby. While I bought a half dozen White Wolf supplements I never really got into it. I did buy quite a bit of Ars Magica because I liked the background and the mechanics that supported. I found the idea of troupe play mildly interesting but not my cup of tea.

Because of the release of the GURPS World of Darness books (Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage) I was able to use the White wolf stuff in my Majestic Wilderlands campaign. I said then and I say now they were the among the best monster manuals I owned and made for great antagonists in GURPS. Although I pretty sure that Mark Rein Hagen didn't intend for them to be used as such.

Ars Magica served as the foundation on which I built the magic system of the Majestic Wilderlands. It helped my all-mage campaign to become one of the greatest campaigns I ran.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;456750And then someone started bringing in Magic cards and suddenly (over the next year or so.. but it almost felt like overnight), it was like everyone in the room was actually playing- because no matter what Magic was or represented.. it was actually a game you could take part in. People who had been in hanging-out mode or drifting-from-group-to-group mode were just as involved as the groups that never missed a session.



I just think Magic was a big hit because it was so participatory and you didn't need one of those really talented and dedicated individuals to organize it.

Quote from: jibbajibba;456754I think this is key the fact is that you can fill each 60 minutes of game time with 55 minutes of playing something.

tl;dr - it was the WoW of its day, no more and no less. It swept away the more casual players, and left only the hardcore tabletop gamers.

This pretty much jives with what I saw at the time, in my neck of the woods.

Quote from: Benoist;456500It just got me thinking... could a case be made (amongst about a zillion possible definitions) that vintage gaming is more or less about games which were published prior to the explosion in popularity of the Magic trading card game? If so, is this just a matter of coincidence, the two elements having no precise relationship with each other, or is there more to it than that?

I do not understand the precise difference between old-school games and vintage games, if there is any.

In my eyes, Magic's main contributions to the hobby have been
a) its role as a huge casual magnet (as Abyssal Maw and jibbajibba wrote) that brought in people but also flushed out people;
b) its focus on modularised game design. In Magic, a card is basically a somewhat self-contained rule. You add rules, combine rules, overlay rules and so on. This didn't originate with MtG (e.g. AD&D spells are often similar "cards"), but MtG made the mindset more popular, along with things like templates etc.

Quote from: The Butcher;456804tl;dr - it was the WoW of its day, no more and no less. It swept away the more casual players, and left only the hardcore tabletop gamers.

(At the risk of going off topic).

When I got back into playing rpg games, I noticed the exodus of casual players from tabletop rpgs to WoW.  (I took a long 15+ years hiatus away from rpg games, where I came back shortly after 3.5E was released).  By the time I was DMing my own 3.5E campaigns, it was mostly hardcore players remaining.

Fast forward to the present, the 4E D&D players I played with over the last two years were mostly hardcore experienced players.  The only time I can recall playing 4E with some casual players, was back in mid-late 2008.  I suppose when 4E was no longer the "shiny new thing", quite a number of casual players abandoned it.

Quote from: Melan;456811I do not understand the precise difference between old-school games and vintage games, if there is any.

Well, it's a matter of personal perspective: definitions will widely vary, and I'm totally cool with that. To me, at this point, Old-School is related to the OSR, with all that supposes of aesthetics, play style(s), vintage D&D focus, and the like, whereas Vintage RPGs is broader, and just means "old role playing games". If you want a quick and dirty area, I'd say anything that preceded the 90s.

I'm aware that for some people, the two terms will mean the same thing. That's not wrong either. It's just a matter of POV.

I also tend to agree with the Pundit that White Wolf is more of a line to draw between vintage and the current run of games.   But that's not to say MtG didn't have an effect on the hobby.

But I think MtG's main effect was in taking away players that were into RPG's because they were in that social culture and RPG's were the closest fit for them.  MtG came along and stole away a huge portion of the RPG crowd that wasn't really into RPG's to the same level.  So you saw players that left and never came back, players that continued to play both as well as other elements of the hobby and of course players that burned out on MtG and later on have come back.

It hasn't come up but another player in the change in the RPG world was the ever increasing popularity of table top miniature games.  In my circles I've seen far more players drop out of RPG's and turn to Miniature (Fantasy Battle and 40k) in particular then people lost to MtG.

Quote from: Benoist;456834Well, it's a matter of personal perspective: definitions will widely vary, and I'm totally cool with that. To me, at this point, Old-School is related to the OSR, with all that supposes of aesthetics, play style(s), vintage D&D focus, and the like, whereas Vintage RPGs is broader, and just means "old role playing games". If you want a quick and dirty area, I'd say anything that preceded the 90s.

I'm aware that for some people, the two terms will mean the same thing. That's not wrong either. It's just a matter of POV.

For me, the tipping point from Vintage to "modern" has to be Vampire - or more precisely, the point at which Vampire was seen to be a big thing, and everyone and his dog started jumping on one of more of the bandwagons of "story-focused gaming", "metaplot" etc. I can't remember the order of events at the time but maybe Vampire's 2nd Edition in 1992 would be a reasonable moment to flag as the tipping point?

Of course, Magic then hit the year after and was certainly disruptive to the RPG hobby, but as it didn't directly effect RPG design at all I don't think it can be seen as a tipping point in game style.

Eh.  It wasn't Magic that killed RPGs.  

It was Pokemon.

Magic had the advantage of a shared interest set with existing geek hobbies.  There was crossover.

What really murdered the FLGS was Pokemon. The difference with Pokemon is it wasn't the same nerd buttons, this was something targeted, as Nintendo things always are, at a totally new audience, young kids that don't give a flying fart in the wind about fantasy and RPGs and wargames.

Suddenly FLGS' had a whole new market of kids with rich parents and allowance money to burn, and who made basically no demands of a store other than "sell me more cards".  

And furthermore, these kids had overbearing mothers who weren't comfortable with all these older nerds hanging around in the places that sell the cards, so suddenly the atmosphere got real uncomfortable for the existing customer base in a lot of stores.  

Gaming tables started disappearing, wargaming and RPG nights suddenly got dropped from schedules, table fees started appearing, restrooms even became employees only, whatever it took to get the old fucks (and note by old fucks I'm talking people who were often only in their 20s) to leave.

40K exists as the force it is today because it was one of the few to grab some of that crossover market, and later on the same effect would occur once more when yuppies discovered the existence of Settlers of Catan.

But the real stroke was, and always will be, Pokemon.  That was the moment that nerddom started casting out the nerds.

Quote from: J Arcane;456857But the real stroke was, and always will be, Pokemon.  That was the moment that nerddom started casting out the nerds.

Slightly tangential, but when yu gi oh and pokemon finally tanked, it took down a couple of the stores local to me.  They had focused on the card game money and didn't survive the loss of revenue.

Quote from: J Arcane;456857Eh.  It wasn't Magic that killed RPGs.  

It was Pokemon.

Magic had the advantage of a shared interest set with existing geek hobbies.  There was crossover.

What really murdered the FLGS was Pokemon. The difference with Pokemon is it wasn't the same nerd buttons, this was something targeted, as Nintendo things always are, at a totally new audience, young kids that don't give a flying fart in the wind about fantasy and RPGs and wargames.

Suddenly FLGS' had a whole new market of kids with rich parents and allowance money to burn, and who made basically no demands of a store other than "sell me more cards".  

And furthermore, these kids had overbearing mothers who weren't comfortable with all these older nerds hanging around in the places that sell the cards, so suddenly the atmosphere got real uncomfortable for the existing customer base in a lot of stores.  

Gaming tables started disappearing, wargaming and RPG nights suddenly got dropped from schedules, table fees started appearing, restrooms even became employees only, whatever it took to get the old fucks (and note by old fucks I'm talking people who were often only in their 20s) to leave.

40K exists as the force it is today because it was one of the few to grab some of that crossover market, and later on the same effect would occur once more when yuppies discovered the existence of Settlers of Catan.

But the real stroke was, and always will be, Pokemon.  That was the moment that nerddom started casting out the nerds.

I never thought of that. That's a very good observation.

Here is a concrete example of the CCG industry, started by Magic affecting RPGs.

Jolly Blackburn's company original was AEG. He's told stories before that the partner that he brought in after a few years wanted to get into the CCG growth spurt and Jolly didn't. Therefore Jolly sold his interest in AEG. Now from what Jolly says they are still on good terms and he always says good things about AEG. Jolly only left because he didn't want to be a part of the CCG scene, it wasn't his style. So, without CCGs, who knows if Jolly would have left AEG and gone to K&Co. What would KODT, HackMaster and all been like without Jolly being at K&Co?....

Quote from: greylond;456952Here is a concrete example of the CCG industry, started by Magic affecting RPGs.

Jolly Blackburn's company original was AEG. He's told stories before that the partner that he brought in after a few years wanted to get into the CCG growth spurt and Jolly didn't. Therefore Jolly sold his interest in AEG. Now from what Jolly says they are still on good terms and he always says good things about AEG. Jolly only left because he didn't want to be a part of the CCG scene, it wasn't his style. So, without CCGs, who knows if Jolly would have left AEG and gone to K&Co. What would KODT, HackMaster and all been like without Jolly being at K&Co?....

A similar parallel can probably be made for TSR.

If WotC didn't buy up TSR, then there is the possibility that TSR could have filed for bankruptcy.  D&D would have been tied up in bankruptcy court for many years, effectively taking it off the market.  There would not have been a d20 boom to revive the tabletop rpg market.