193: Internet Killed the Tabletop Star

[jonathan.jacobs]

Nice visitor. Landed here from J.M.'s Grognardia blog.

I would just add that the RPG blogging community has tons to give back to table-top gamers. All they need to do is check out the preview at WIRED Magazine [http://www.rpgbloggers.com] about the RPG Blog Anthology, aka OPEN GAME TABLE. But this may all be preaching to the choir here. Still, niche hobby's aside -- I suspect a grass roots revitalization of the hobby as the community reorganizes itself and its habits to be more in line with a Web 2.0 world.

 

[vortexgods]

"It may be true that the only reason the comic book industry now exists is for this purpose, to create characters for movies, board games and other types of merchandise."

Ahem... are we entirely sure that Alan Moore is speaking of Board Games here. My strong suspicion is that he's slightly out of touch and means Tabletop Roleplaying Games. Now you might say, "Why, what do you mean?"

Well, I am the proud owner of the DC heroes supplement, the Watchmen Sourcebook. (Which you may drool over here http://www.amazon.com/Watchmen-Sourcebook-Heroes-Role-Playing/dp/0923763201 ) This sourcebook bears the man's imprimatur.

Now, I know that I take great joy in the fact that the two main industries in the United States are Board Games and Hollywood Films, and I enjoy the fact that every comic book studio wants their comic book to be adapted by the powerful Board Game industry.

However, when I visit the universe that this article appears in, I find that board games are only slightly above comic books on the respect meter. Also, that drops off considerably when you aren't talking about children's board games. Like a Watchmen branded edition of Candyland, perhaps? In fact, there are the somewhat obscure places that make games for weird boardgame fanatics like myself, and then there's the places that simply rebrand Monopoly, Risk or Clue for whichever property they are working on.

He probably doesn't realize that since his work was adapted to "Board Games" the field has crumbled in the face of video games.

 

[Aramax]

They took the credit for your second edition'y.
Rewritten by machine and new technology,
and now I understand the problems you can see.

Oh-a oh

Paper-and-dice roleplaying is not dead yet but it is in critical condition and has a lot of internal bleeding. It was to be expected with all the advancements of the world wide web and of those computers that comes bundled with it. You dont have to look far to see those impacts... A single look at Dungeons & Dragons Insider and you understand perfectly where this is going. No this is not publicity for Wizard of the coast... it's the exact opposite because they dont want you to know what i'm about to tell you; Tabletop roleplaying is comming out of the closet and turning to the digital side of the force. And this is bad news for them because most of the products they sell depend on the inexistence of virtual tabletop games.

No need to buy those heavy books that cost a fortune, no need to call your friends to come to your place to play in the basement, no need to wait for that guy to pick up the dices after he failled to properly roll them onto the table... that is unless you really want to. The alternative is a virtual tabletop program designed to do exactly all that for you and even more. A game with animated characters instead of miniatures that offers you a list of possible moves for everyone, each turns, clearly depicted on screen so that you can select with the click of a mouse just like some sort of customizable online final fantasy tactic game from the future. This would be lots of fun if it existed.

In my mind and in my car, we can't rewind we've gone to far
Oh-a-aho oh,
Oh-a-aho oh

 

[Alex_P]

I think I see the point of the article (let's be honest here: it's mostly to tell RPG players about all these new tools and ideas they're missing out on), but it seems terribly mis-named. Three quarters are all about the shape of the new, Internet-powered "Tabletop Stars" rather than the way the Internet has killed anything. Sure, sure, Wizards of the Coast killed Dragon and people prefer Amazon to the local gaming store -- so what?

Every medium of entertainment is: (1) being killed by the Internet, (2) squeaking by the way it was despite the effects of the Internet, and (3) experiencing a resurgence thanks to the Internet all at the same time. Cheap instantaneous worldwide communication will do that.

Perhaps large parts of the RPG industry are struggling, but large parts of the RPG industry are really just hobbyists playing at being real businessmen, running horribly inefficient companies that have consistently failed to innovate both product and process -- we should expect that kind of a business to struggle.

Are a lot of people playing WoW in place D&D? (Seriously, are they? I'm not sure anyone in the industry has much in the way of data about that.) Good for them, if it's something they like! Two decades ago, this was an audience that pen-and-paper roleplaying games just got by default. Now they have to work for them. That, too, is how things should be in a healthy market.

Meanwhile, as the articles says, modern indie games are "bringing the fire" -- not just to design but to play itself [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=250634]. Even if the whole industry folds and the only books that come out are the result of hobby economics (i.e. keeping your day job), we'll still have lots of classy, professional, intelligent games.

There's never been a better time to play pen-and-paper RPGs. I don't think it much matters how many people are doing it.

-- Alex

 

[laserwulf]

Maybe I'm still just too hopelessly idealistic, but I have a career/life goal to operate a tabletop gaming store that offers what amazon.com can't: a fun, welcoming place to meet up with your buddies and play the games. I know that some places do that already, but what I've seen so far are open places with some large tables. That's it. My vision is closer to the Starbucks of gaming: a place that feels instantly home-y, where you'd -want- to hang out at. The Wizards of the Coast Center by the University of WA is my inspiration (but smaller-scale); anyone know why they failed, with a good setup & great location?A side-note: WotC and Games Workshop aren't exactly helping promote a positive image for the industry, releasing new rulebooks every few years. The rules to Chess have stayed the same for how many years now? :>

 

[Figrut]

Maybe I'm still just too hopelessly idealistic, but I have a career/life goal to operate a tabletop gaming store that offers what amazon.com can't: a fun, welcoming place to meet up with your buddies and play the games. I know that some places do that already, but what I've seen so far are open places with some large tables. That's it. My vision is closer to the Starbucks of gaming: a place that feels instantly home-y, where you'd -want- to hang out at. The Wizards of the Coast Center by the University of WA is my inspiration (but smaller-scale); anyone know why they failed, with a good setup & great location?A side-note: WotC and Games Workshop aren't exactly helping promote a positive image for the industry, releasing new rulebooks every few years. The rules to Chess have stayed the same for how many years now? :>

If you do open that gamming store, all those new books are going to be a godsend. How are you going to sell a book to somebody when they have all they need?

On an aside, To quote 2 really inventive men. "as long as their is campfire, and people telling stories, their will be RP", and "if they ever found out that they REALLY do not need rules to do this, we will be in trouble". That being said, my table top game started as like 4-7 and grew to me gamming with over 200+ (easily) over the last 9 years. Really, forum gamming killed something? I would have to say 4th edition (of D&D) is the hammer, nail, coffin, and grave of good RP. Much like 3.5 saved us from the vanilla of 3rd, lets hope a "4.5" is more gaming and less game. I of course, won't buy it. I will be all over a renewed free form kick, or likely GODLIKE, if the next generation of it does not blow. The White Wolf and 40K Dark Heresy seems to be about the next immediate corner though for me.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

A side-note: WotC and Games Workshop aren't exactly helping promote a positive image for the industry, releasing new rulebooks every few years. The rules to Chess have stayed the same for how many years now? :>

My straightforward rebuttal to complaints about WotC and GW's rewrite (and pricing) models is this; they're still here, the other guys aren't. If you make a static product, then everyone buys it once. It could be the greatest product in the world, but you could never stay in business supporting it.

I do wish you luck on your "Starbucks of games" idea though; I'd like to see a mid- to upscale hobby store that supports the social aspect of tabletop gaming, one that'll kill the "hygenically-challenged manchildren" image that unfortunately got attached to the genre.

-- Steve

 

[CapnGod]

A good article.

Can't really say much about Tabletop gaming, having only ever played Magic: The Gathering, which I was beat CONSTANTLY at.

I started back in seventh grade and never had the cards to really do anything. Then I got a bit older and bought up a bunch of cards and studied some stuff, and wow, my deck building improved. Granted, it was old mechanics, but it was still a mean deck. Several ways to annihilate your opponent. So much fun.

Good article, for sure. I didn't follow all the links, and (I read this yesterday, maybe?) don't remember if there was one for finding AD&D groups in your area. Will have to reread. Anyone find 3x or 4 lacking? I just did not like them for anything more than videogames, really.

 

[captainwolfos]

My mum still plays D&D XD
And for that, she is awesome.

 

[doctorwhofan]

I still play D&D (3.5 rules, don't like 4.0) and I play Dungeons and Dragons Online MMO. I think one would be surprised on how many people do play some verison of table top. I think it isnt dead, just changed.

 

[Micah Weil]

I dunno...I'd say the gaming community (and by that, I mean pen, paper, dice, and a couple of cases of Dew) is still pretty strong. I've got two nights that I play (albeit online via AIM and it's dice roller). One night, it's either D&D 3.5 or Alternity, and on the next, it's either Cyberpunk v3 with one GM, or Heroes Unlimited being run by myself. Plenty of people on my other communities want me to run games for them, and...well...

I've been pretty naughty at work.

Had a customer bring their kid in the other day. They were looking for a game for him, and he said he was heavy into the free-range video games - the sandboxes, the "build your owns", so forth. I suggested quite a few games that met the criteria and, as a snarky aside (as I am prone to do at work), said "hey, if these don't work, go and get him some Dungeons and Dragons books and let him have fun with those".

They came back three days later and thanked me, saying the D&D idea was great and that the whole family got into it.

There's hope for the pen and paper yet!

 

[boneyard]

I dunno...I'd say the gaming community (and by that, I mean pen, paper, dice, and a couple of cases of Dew) is still pretty strong. I've got two nights that I play (albeit online via AIM and it's dice roller). One night, it's either D&D 3.5 or Alternity, and on the next, it's either Cyberpunk v3 with one GM, or Heroes Unlimited being run by myself. Plenty of people on my other communities want me to run games for them, and...well...

I've been pretty naughty at work.

Had a customer bring their kid in the other day. They were looking for a game for him, and he said he was heavy into the free-range video games - the sandboxes, the "build your owns", so forth. I suggested quite a few games that met the criteria and, as a snarky aside (as I am prone to do at work), said "hey, if these don't work, go and get him some Dungeons and Dragons books and let him have fun with those".

They came back three days later and thanked me, saying the D&D idea was great and that the whole family got into it.

There's hope for the pen and paper yet!

Family is the #1 reason I still play tabletop games. They were the ones that got me into it originally in the mid/early-80s, and I still get together with my family a couple of times a month to play some D&D. We have incorporated technology like D&D Insider's character builder and such, and I highly doubt we would ever go "virtual tabletop" because the gaming experience is about us getting together and having fun.

 

[KBKarma]

Thanks for that, Allen. I only got into RPGs after I got used to using a computer and the Internet, so I've pretty much grown-up around the whole Internet-and-gaming idea. I'm involved in four online RPGs, and some people want me to run a Paranoia game over IRC (coincidentally enough).

Also, to those who really hate 4th Ed DnD: yes, it's annoying because everything is considered an encounter (after writing that, I started imagining a group of people in front of a door, with the rogue in front... and then the Final Fantasy fight music starts. Hehehe), but it's still a lot of fun... Provided you don't read the new Manual of the Planes, and have never played a Planescape game. Bah.

The PHB 2 is bringing back the idea of crafting a background for your character. Along with gnomes. Double-bah.

Don't forget the play-by-post websites.

http://rpol.net and http://playbyweb.com

Also, DnDOG [http://www.dndonlinegames.com]. For DnD, as well as any other roleplaying game. Just figure out how players will use their character sheets.

Maybe I'm still just too hopelessly idealistic, but I have a career/life goal to operate a tabletop gaming store that offers what amazon.com can't: a fun, welcoming place to meet up with your buddies and play the games.

Come to Ireland. Go to Models Inc in Dublin. Big tables, and an incredibly friendly atmosphere. Martin, the owner, is a great guy, and the staff are wonderful. Four or five RPGs are run there, as well as Magic events and 40k tournaments. It's a great place.

By the way, Allen, thanks for Paranoia. The Computer is pleased with your loyalty.

Ditto, from a GM who considers Paranoia far too much fun to run.

 

[neispace]

Problem was that most tabletops weren't roleplaying games at all, but more focused around mechanics. If you open a pen and paper rpg manual, most of it will be things like encounter tables, experience tables, charts of armor, weapons, creature data, etc.

Videogames did that far better, so many people went to them. I used to be a hardcore Battletech player, but very little of that game couldn't be replaced by an online variant. Same with steve jackson's car wars.

Most people actually don't focus on the roleplaying as much as they think. Look at most MMOs, where the roleplaying crowd is a minority on a few servers. Once pen and paper rpgs were trumped in terms of simulation by computer and videogames, they quickly became niche.

 

[slxiii]

is it just me or did this article contain entirely too many links? it seems to me that at least every tenth word was a link, and the article as a whole suffers because of the assumed knowledge of what all of these sites and utilities are

 

[Alex_P]

is it just me or did this article contain entirely too many links? it seems to me that at least every tenth word was a link, and the article as a whole suffers because of the assumed knowledge of what all of these sites and utilities are

That's really the point of the article: to show you all this stuff that's out there that most tabletop gamers don't know about at all.

New software, new communities, new ideas, new games.

I find that those new games beat the shit out of the old ones. So much that I have no interest in playing the old ones.

(Well, actually, I lost interest in playing the old ones before I found the new ones, since the old ones sucked so hard and you had to fight them every step of the way to get true juicy fun out of them. But, fuck, the new ones even show you how to get more mileage out of the old ones, with simple techniques that are super-easy yet never, ever, ever mentioned by the old-game books or old-magazines or the copious amount of text that old-game writers and old-game players post online. Forget "bringing the fire" -- the RPG industry needs these print-on-demand keep-your-dayjob solo-project guys just to bring the basic competence.)

-- Alex

 

[Zenfar]

Since you mentioned the death of Dragon, don't forget the Phoenix that is Pathfinder.

 

[wilsonscrazybed]

Every new article by AV is as much an education about how to break into the games industry as it is entertaining. There's a lot to chew on, and that's one of the reasons Allen Varney is one of my favorite essayists here.

Allen also fixed my favorite pen and paper game, he's to Paranoia what Christopher Nolan was to Batman. Thanks for the wonderful article, and I hope to see more soon!

 

[Flying-Emu]

Problem was that most tabletops weren't roleplaying games at all, but more focused around mechanics. If you open a pen and paper rpg manual, most of it will be things like encounter tables, experience tables, charts of armor, weapons, creature data, etc.

Videogames did that far better, so many people went to them. I used to be a hardcore Battletech player, but very little of that game couldn't be replaced by an online variant. Same with steve jackson's car wars.

Most people actually don't focus on the roleplaying as much as they think. Look at most MMOs, where the roleplaying crowd is a minority on a few servers. Once pen and paper rpgs were trumped in terms of simulation by computer and videogames, they quickly became niche.

Actually, I play 1.0, and most of the mechanics are thrown overboard in place of "What will make the game more awesomely fun? Oh, there's no mechanic for jumping on a dragon's back, running towards the skull, and screaming "For the En'fidal!" while cleaving its head in two? Improvise!"

In the words of Pirates of the Caribbean:

They're more like a set of guidelines compared to rules.