One D&D

[Lunar Ronin]

Ben Riggs tied himself to Dungeons & Dragons. He wrote a book that was published in 2022 called Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, and hosts a podcast that is mostly about Dungeons & Dragons. He also posted on Reddit a few months ago that he's writing a second book on Dungeons & Dragons. Now he's having a meltdown because he sees Dungeons & Dragons becoming slightly less relevant.

I read Ben Riggs' Reddit post last night, and laughed hard. It's a mess. It's clearly written by someone who doesn't know much about the hobby outside of Dungeons & Dragons. What he calls "the golden age," was actually a dark age of the hobby IMO. Just now the tabletop RPG hobby is starting to see light, and it's scaring those who tied their identity or part of their identity to Dungeons & Dragons.

 

[Raleel]

What he calls "the golden age," was actually a dark age of the hobby IMO.

I would not go that far, but I can empathize with the sentiment for sure. I think it’s a golden age, but not for the reasons he thinks it is. D&D is a powerful force, and many things in its orbit have really been powerful, but some of those are spinning off into their own powerful forces, and the rest of the environment is still doing its thing, entirely separate

Just now the tabletop RPG hobby is starting to see light, and it's scaring those who tied their identity or part of their identity to Dungeons & Dragons.

I think we are getting to the point where the new people, have done enough D&D that now they want to try a few other things. OGL really just emphasized that point more. Critical role was a huge loss for the community, but ultimately, if the OGL debacle hadn’t happened, I’m not sure how much exploration outside of D&D we’d have.

I might say he’s making his point badly. I think his point, ultimately, is that the things in the orbit of d&d are the drivers for the renaissance and the death of those will kill it, not d&d itself. I can see that argument.

 

[SavAce]

Just read this over on EN, I'm not sure if I agree with the conclusion Ben Riggs makes. Interesting nonetheless to read.

Ben Riggs: 'The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead'

Ben Riggs, D&D historian and author of Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons has...

www.enworld.org

It's an article that is getting engagement. It's talking about the "Golden Age of TT-RPGs", but it's really going on about money companies are able to make in the D&D ecosystem. "The companies are now asking fans to choose sides." - WTF? By publishing RPGs instead of making D&D Supplements & Adventures & Retro-clones?

As far as "the industry", and whether it's headed up or down as measured by income generated, I don't know and don't care. As I personally don't care all that much about D&D, that aspect is pretty irrelevant to me as well. I do know that, whatever happens, people can put together new, interesting RPGs on a modest Kickstarter budget or less if they want to get a game out in the world, and I expect that to continue. Also, I have a sizable group of friends that enjoy playing RPGs, as in, pretty much any RPG another one of us decides they want to run. I don't need a D&D to have 100 million players with dozens of publishers making junk for it, for the hobby to work for me. I'm set, man.

"What could change this grim future? I suppose a group of publishers coalescing around a single system might change matters."

I don't see anything grim in the future he predicts, in regards to what I care about.

 

[robertsconley]

I find the argument a bit all over the place. D&D's success is good because it benefits everyone even games other than D&D, but when people like Matt Colville, move away from D&D to make their own games that's bad?

I think the problem here is that Ben Rigg is right, but only from how he views the RPG hobby and RPG industry. He just released a book that traces the history of TSR. So, for however long he took to write it, he was immersed in TSR's world of being the largest publisher and hitting the traditional mass market hard for their RPGs, Games, and Novels. Then, documenting the demise of TSR, a major cause of which is trouble with logistics of dealing with the mass market, specifically the return of unsold products by Random House, among other things.

If that is your viewpoint, then Matt Colville moving away from D&D to make his own is absolutely a negative factor. Why? Because the only way to take advantage of the mass market (distributors, big box stores, etc.) is if you have a volume of sales. Anything that threatens that volume is bad; if there are enough threats, the brand or product disappears from the mass market channels. Which, from Rigg's point of view, is apocalyptic.

He is undoubtedly aware of the social network effect and its importance to RPGs, which explains why the RPG industry traditionally had a market leader that is several orders of magnitude larger than anybody else. So, to him, not only is D&D being pushed out of the mass market bad, but it logically to him cripples the hobby as a whole.

To us here, and to many other people who responded negatively, including myself, we know that there has been an upheaval in the hobby industry for the past twenty years. Alongside the growth in sales volume and money on the mass market side, there has been a huge explosion in the number of titles and publishers. Despite two major downturns in the industry (the d20 Bust and the D&D 4e debacle), this growth has not abated but continues to accelerate.

The aggregate sales volume, total money, and number of hobbyists involved do not approach the mass market RPG publishers, especially WOTC, but they still continue to grow and grow. For the past 20 years, even RPGs that were long out of print have had revivals and now sustain their own niche of the hobby, and I am not talking about just the OSR.

Interestingly, RPG publishers, titles, and small publishers continue to grow and diversify despite what happens to the mass market.

Ben Riggs fails to consider that the moment hobbyists step away from the market leader, they face an uphill social battle to find people to play whatever game they like. It doesn't matter if the game has an audience in the hundreds or thousands. Yet again, this side of the industry and hobby continues to grow.

Why? Because digital technology and the internet have completely upended the social equation for niche interests. What one does to play in the mass market still demands many of the same things now as it did back in the day, namely volume. The amount of effort, capital, and resources one needs to sustain a niche hobby (and industry) has dramatically dropped.

So, while the other side of the hobby/industry may never achieve the numbers and money of the mass market RPG publishers, they are not going away and will continue to thrive. And this will continue the Golden Age of RPGs.

 

[Urdlen's best boy]

I think I both agree and disagree. WOTC is still partnering with other compagnies, including Crit Role. However under 6e rule, thes partnerships will be more selective and constrained. I don't know if there will be more or less money to be made. It certainly might lead to less veriety in D&D OGL products, and D&D products but is unlikely to hamper the general capacity of the TTRPG fantasy hobby to produced TTRPG fantasy products.

I think the problem here is that Ben Rigg is right, but only from how he views the RPG hobby and RPG industry.

digital technology and the internet have completely upended the social equation for niche interests. What one does to play in the mass market still demands many of the same things now as it did back in the day, namely volume. The amount of effort, capital, and resources one needs to sustain a niche hobby (and industry) has dramatically dropped.

This is also how I see it. I think he overvalues centralism here, when the hobby has structures that are way more capable of absorbing the negative effects of decentralization. Now there are other factors that will determinate whether it does or not, and I'm not really optimistic or pessimistic about the general future of the hobby as an industry or as a passtime. I don't think the general situation is where I'd want it to be, but I see the whole post-OGL scandal fragmentation as a good thing in that I hope it encourages more originality but also may lead to more creative choices and experimentation in terms of publishing/networking practices.

 

[robertsconley]

I think I both agree and disagree. WOTC is still partnering with other compagnies, including Crit Role. However under 6e rule, thes partnerships will be more selective and constrained. I don't know if there will be more or less money to be made. It certainly might lead to less veriety in D&D OGL products, and D&D products but is unlikely to hamper the general capacity of the TTRPG fantasy hobby to produced TTRPG fantasy products.

D&D products

That is why folks like Ben Rigg have a failure of imagination.

D&D is a brand, and what is published under that name is Wizard's call. But socially right now D&D for most means the system found in these books.



The bulk of that system will remain available for folks to use after those ceased to be printed and new set of D&D branded books with their own system is released. So given the factors you listed it may be true that new system will have less creative variety.

But the system above, its fate as far as creative variety goes will be in the hands of its fans. Unlike 3.5, and Pathfinder,, I don't think we see a dominant publisher like Paizo emerging. Oh I am sure there are some right now who would like to be in that position. But given the serious creative energy being poured into things like Tales of the Valient or Level Up, I think the post 5e successor market will fragment into something like the OSR only with more hobbyists and publishers. Which is better news for creative variety.

I see the whole post-OGL scandal fragmentation as a good thing in that I hope it encourages more originality but also may lead to more creative choices and experimentation in terms of publishing/networking practices.

As long as the OGL doesn't go away (because it will hamper access to older open content) I am happy to see the number of open content license increase. Five years ago, I would not have expected to see Basic Roleplaying and Mythas Imperative to be under any type of true open content license like ORC.

 

[Ladybird]

No. I never heard of "Apollo 47 Technical Manual the RPG" (referenced in the article).

Did it find an audience?

It did. It was never going to be huge, but the author knew that when they put it out, and didn't expect it to be huge. You might not be the audience (I'm likely not either) but as ever, not every product is for everyone.

As for everything else, there's more games available than ever and getting a game published is easier than ever. There's more mainstream stuff than anyone could ever dive into more than a fraction of, and loads of smaller niche stuff poking around the edges of the form. So yeah, it's a golden age.

 

[robertsconley]

No. I never heard of "Apollo 47 Technical Manual the RPG" (referenced in the article).

Did it find an audience?

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

And yes I have it.

 

[Raleel]

a couple of points, some of them from another place

1. it's been likened to saying if Taylor Swift stopped making music, music would be dead. I think this makes a good analogy, but also says it wrong. Music wouldn't die, but it would certainly lose a major focus point. This has happened in the 90s and early 2ks with the "death" of radio and MTV and the introduction of SoundScan. The music industry exploded after this, but it also balkanized heavily and was not pushed into your face. It's the difference between listening to the Top40 and going to hole in the walls to watch local bands.
2. This board, while full of amazing insights, is going to fight this one, because RPGs mean something very different. I point to exhibit A

41% of this board has been playing "rpgs" since, at least, Reagan and Thatcher. Nearly 82% have been playing since Vampire 1e. A mere 4% have been playing only since 5e was released. There is 1 more person who has played less than 31 years than who has played from 31-35 years, combined! Our view is just SO much different. We've all made our minds up on this stuff. We're here for the long haul. We go to the hole in the walls and listen to the local bands, so of course we don't think the music is going to die

I think the more important question is, with the (likely very overblown) "end of the golden age", where are the new folks going to get their easy to step into fix?

 

[robertsconley]

I think the more important question is, with the (likely very overblown) "end of the golden age", where are the new folks going to get their easy to step into fix?

How do young folks without experience learn about new music today?

Books, live-streams, movies?

Anything related to popular culture, really?

Whatever the exact mix is, it will be the same with RPGs but on a smaller scale. The odds are that the market leader(s() will come up first. If the market leader collapses, then you will have a collection of first-tier stuff that will come up more often than others. I

I submit whatever the current mix is, D&D is so far off the radar popular culture-wise that it won't make much of a difference to the rest of the hobby and industry if what pops up first shifts from being a Wizard D&D branded thing to a collection of first-tier publisher stuff popping up.

What will make it into the first tier of what pops up after the collapse of Wizards will probably be "easily understood" and "easy to step into" material. Why? That will give you a better chance of grabbing an individual's attention span to investigate further. Whatever it is, it will only make sense in hindsight.

 

[Turkey Lurkie]

Ben Riggs tied himself to Dungeons & Dragons. He wrote a book that was published in 2022 called Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons, and hosts a podcast that is mostly about Dungeons & Dragons. He also posted on Reddit a few months ago that he's writing a second book on Dungeons & Dragons. Now he's having a meltdown because he sees Dungeons & Dragons becoming slightly less relevant.

I tend to be a bit flippant about this, but I still genuinely believe that the best way to find new blood isn't to rely on corporate marketing, but to bring people into the hobby yourself. Every person in my group is either someone I already knew and invited to join, or someone invited by another existing member of the group. Many had little or no RPG experience before joining the group, most still have no clue whatsoever about the wider TTRPG hobby, and probably wouldn't even know who WotC are.

Yes, same here. And none care that the PHB they have doesn't say D&D. They are playing "D&D" as far as they are concerned. An Elf F/MU is just that. Regardless of not being one made with a Wizards of the Crap product

 

[Baulderstone]

Yeah. And these things cycle.

Wasn't the hobby in a downturn in the 90s from the big D&D fad in the 80s? (or at least D&D was). Yet that downturn gave us so many games that are still around today. The article mentions a renaissance in games like Shadowrun and Deadlands but it would seem to me that the 90s would be a better candidate for a golden age as that's when those games (and so many others) were created.

I worked in gaming retail through most of the '90s, and it was a great era for the hobby. Vampire brought entirely new demographics into the scene, and popularized LARPing. Pagan Publishing gave Call of Cthulhu a shot in the arm. And while the popular narrative is that CCGs were a mortal peril for RPGs, they got the store full of kids who would then join in whatever RPG I was demoing in the game room that week.

Now it may have been that was unsustainable (I remember Ryan Dancey basically argued it was when justifying D20 as a universal system) and it might possibly have eventually led to the demise of the hobby if 3rd edition D&D hadn't come along. But it did come along, and I'm for one, very glad we had that period when it wasn't so dominant to actually allow a wider range of games to be created.

D&D 3E was great for WotC, but it was a blight on the hobby, leaving aside that it was clearly a game where they playtested the first few levels as being fun, and then just incorrectly assumed that it would continue to be fun once you got past level 5 or so.

In 1999, I was running and playing Fading Suns, Deadlands, Call of Cthulhu and Unknown Armies. Within a few years of 3E coming out, those games were all either dead or in a coma. And the race to feed the 3E glut killed the distribution system. We were damn lucky that PDF/POD sales became viable shortly after that or channels for distributing independent RPGs might have died completely.

Also D&D is really in a rut designwise right now. And if something doesn't come along and actually force it to innovate that could itself could be bad for it in the long run.

Which brings up what a great thing it is that we have all the players in the D&D space competing to make their own D&D. I suspect that in the long run, the D&D player community will mostly coalesce around one of these games, whether they return to Hasbro or pick one of the new guys. However, this time of competition is bound to spur new ideas, and it nothing else, encourage the idea that there is no such thing as an "official" was to play RPGs.

If you want to generate unsolicited interest in the hobby outside of word of mouth from existing players D&D is the gateway.

Going back to my college years, I've spent a lot of time bringing people into gaming, recruiting non-gamer friends and co-workers. Something like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire is roughly 100x more likely to spur interest in a non-gamer than some deep-nerd shit like D&D. Look at the genre Critical Role picked for their RPG. They know how to chase a mainstream audience.

I tend to be a bit flippant about this, but I still genuinely believe that the best way to find new blood isn't to rely on corporate marketing, but to bring people into the hobby yourself. Every person in my group is either someone I already knew and invited to join, or someone invited by another existing member of the group. Many had little or no RPG experience before joining the group, most still have no clue whatsoever about the wider TTRPG hobby, and probably wouldn't even know who WotC are.

Yes. Gaming will always be primarily a hobby, and the industry is an optional tool, especially in an age where gamers can just share ideas, house rules and home-brewed adventures online.

Companies like Hasbro are actually harmful to the hobby, as their goal is to create dependency on them. We watched Gary turn from a member of the hobby into an industry-backed villain when he declared that you had to play by his rules as written (ironic given that nobody can fully parse AD&D to play it RAW).

I'm not calling for a boycott or anything, but I've personally decided to stop buying anything RPG-related from Hasbro. The OGL scandal showed us they are an actual threat to the hobby. Their interest lies in restricting competition, and home-brew tinkerers like us are competition. They don't care about D&D, and I expect that "D&D" will eventually just be a meaningless husk, just like the way Avalon Hill, an actual company I used to love, is just a sticker you slap on whatever Risk media-tie in is coming out this week.

People worry about the 5E-only people going away if Hasbro stumbles, but those people aren't part of the same hobby as me. It doesn't hurt me if they leave, and I consider it a good thing if they stop feeding Hasbro.

Hobby growth is about growing gamer groups, industry growth is getting new people to buy things. Healthy D&D is good for getting new people to buy RPG materials and all the associated tie in crap like t shirts. They are different things. We care about the health of the hobby, having people in gaming groups (in the case of this forum specifically in groups that don’t play D&D) but the article is looking at the industry.

Edit to add we can quibble over the terms hobby and industry but hopefully I’m getting my point across. I’ll be off line the next few hours so I’m not ignoring

I agree. I will add, even taking the article as looking at the industry rather than the hobby, it's still bad. Riggs is operating from the idea that having one company in control is a healthy industry, and that's just nonsense. The D&D boom will end at some point, if it hasn't already. Riggs wants a world where there are no other companies to support the hobby when Hasbro decided supporting D&D is no longer profitable enough to produce. And keep in mind, WotC has already decided it's under-monetized. The new core books and the VTT are its last chance to prove it can make enough money to satisfy shareholders, and that's an iffy bet.

I think the mainstream appeal of D&D in the wake of 5E and Stranger Things is actually overblown, partially by the media influence of Hasbro. The failure of the D&D movie is a big sign of this, especially as it was a solid movie that was liked by most people that saw it. The D&D name didn't have enough interest to draw an audience a movie audience.

And sure, it's easy to blame the OGL scandal for keeping audiences away, but that's nonsense. On the scale of a movie audience, the people who cared about the OGL are a blip. The influx of 5E players seemed huge to the gaming scene only because we are so small.

 

[robertsconley]

And the race to feed the 3E glut killed the distribution system. We were damn lucky that PDF/POD sales became viable shortly after that or channels for distributing independent RPGs might have died completely.

I am sure the distribution was in trouble before the 3E glut. I agree the 3E glut was a problem, and I feel it was a contributing factor. However, my memory in dealing with my local hobby store owner was that the whole hobby distribution had major structural issues by 2000. The 3E glut was just the final nail in a long string of issues originating in the 90s. It boiled down to the fact it is easier to deal with a small number of high-volume items than it is to deal with a lot of smaller items with more modest sales. Stuff like the collapse of the collectible card boom and the 3E glut just accelerated the issue and triggered conslidation.

PDF/PoD indeed arrived at the right time.

 

[Acmegamer]

"Oh no! Not the D&D industry!" (LMAO)

Get it right Skarg! The D&D Industrial Complex! As I said, I found it interesting to read what he came up with though I couldn't actually agree with his points.

I guess I should have used the term "entertaining" instead of "interesting" and I can't agree versus softballing my comment with "I'm not sure", based on how folks reacted to my comments. Some really good comments I might add.

I'll agree to to most of us here, we've been doing this long enough that we've seen the cycles of boom and bust with the industry and aren't worried. I just found how he was reacting and his points interesting if all over the place. I don't know much about him honestly, I knew about the book of course, but I didn't know how limited is "total rpg" knowledge was. Narrowed down to just focused on D&D is a shortcoming on his part.

 

[Baulderstone]

It's not about having an audience to sell to. Hasbro is publicly traded. It's about selling investors on the idea there is this vast audience out there that this new direction will appeal to. Throw is some buzzwords like AI or block chain. Ideally people buy stock to get in before the rush when kids abandon Fortnite and Roblox for the D&D VTT. Maybe the VTT tanks, but by then, Hasbro can come up with another pipe dream to sell investors on to keep the stock afloat.

That's the plan at least. Not that I am saying it is a good plan.

 

[Telok]

No. I never heard of "Apollo 47 Technical Manual the RPG" (referenced in the article).

Did it find an audience?

Yes it did.
Nice book, big dictionary size, easy diceless game, half got it for the fact that its the compiled technical manuals of the Apollo program.

 

[Turkey Lurkie]

Companies like Hasbro are actually harmful to the hobby, as their goal is to create dependency on them. We watched Gary turn from a member of the hobby into an industry-backed villain when he declared that you had to play by his rules as written (ironic given that nobody can fully parse AD&D to play it RAW).

I'm not calling for a boycott or anything, but I've personally decided to stop buying anything RPG-related from Hasbro. The OGL scandal showed us they are an actual threat to the hobby.

Yes, the OGL criminality caused me to stop spending any $ on WotC products.

 

[Turkey Lurkie]

Yes it did.
Nice book, big dictionary size, easy diceless game, half got it for the fact that its the compiled technical manuals of the Apollo program.
View attachment 74211

I have the originals for the entire Apollo pgm.. Complete with engineer's mark ups on the margins.

 

[Telok]

I realized this could be misleading if I edited it into my last post.

What I want from D&D is for it to be the Monopoly of RPGs. Well known, advertised, available, yet stagnant with kinda shit rules that lead peoole to move on the better games.

Monopoly isn't a great game for fun because it was designed as a teaching tool. But its universally recognized and sold pretty much everywhere. However, although its almost certain to be in any home with people who like boardgames, that home will have and play other (opinion: better) games. Monopoly only comes out when they try to pull in people who don't do board games, because of the name recognition.

 

[robertsconley]

Yes it did.
Nice book, big dictionary size, easy diceless game, half got it for the fact that its the compiled technical manuals of the Apollo program.
View attachment 74211

I wrote a complete simulator for the Mercury Spacecraft based on the original NASA technical documentation. I was starting on the Gemini spacecraft, and then I got involved in writing RPG material.

Meadville Space Center

The only thing I didn't get working was the radio. But VOIP APIs were in their infancy.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

I honestly don’t know who Ben Riggs is (he wrote a book. Big whoop.) or why people have been treating his words as gospel. But that blog is a mess. He doesn’t even get basic mechanics for MCDM’s new rpg correct.

If the “decline” of WOTC (which hasn’t happened outside of Internet forums) is the dark ages of the hobby. Then long love the dark ages.

 

[robertsconley]

I have the originals for the entire Apollo pgm.. Complete with engineer's mark ups on the margins.

I focused more on Mercury and Gemini and have some of the documentation in its original form. Another team of folks, NASSP, focused on Apollo, including implementing an option to run the original guidance software.

 

[opaopajr]

But what if I built my identity and brand around corporate product?!

Oops, and roll up a new character?

( I sorta miss that youthful 'the sky is falling!' hyperbole.)

 

[Turkey Lurkie]

I honestly don’t know who Ben Riggs is (he wrote a book. Big whoop.) or why people have been treating his words as gospel.

No idea. I'm sure tons of the people here know FAR more about the RPG market than he though.

 

[Voros]

Just read this over on EN, I'm not sure if I agree with the conclusion Ben Riggs makes. Interesting nonetheless to read.

Ben Riggs: 'The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead'

Ben Riggs, D&D historian and author of Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons has...

www.enworld.org

It's a big of an odd statement from Riggs, who I know from previous writing is a big MSH fan.

I think the flaw here is he is assuming a lot of the best work was being done with 5e and while I'm not as dismissive of the good work that does exist on DM's Guild as others, because I've actually looked into it and found that good work, it's pretty clear that most of the energy in rpgs in the last number of years has been in the OSR and non-D&D games.

I do think the success of 5e has been a good thing for the OSR and non-D&D games as it brought back a lot previous players and lots of new players and designers. As usual only a small number probably got further than D&D but in a hobby this small that's still a lot of players.

 

[Voros]

I see where he is going, you need to continually bring in new players to keep growing the industry and the best thing to bring in new players is a strong D&D. I think the issue for me is that I just don’t care if the industry keeps growing or if it contracts back down to a niche hobby again.

My issue with it being a niche hobby is that makes it harder for good designers to make a living at being designers, which means fewer good games.

I know we've got KS and a handful of designers may have been able to make it a cottage industry off of that but without a sustainable business model for rpgs outside of D&D we won't get the next Robin Laws, Ken Hite, Greg Stafford, etc. and will continue to lose talented designers like Costikyan, etc. to video games or academia.

Many of our current best designers are doing it as a day job and that is not a good thing for them or the hobby.

 

[Voros]

...
Going back to my college years, I've spent a lot of time bringing people into gaming, recruiting non-gamer friends and co-workers. Something like Call of Cthulhu or Vampire is roughly 100x more likely to spur interest in a non-gamer than some deep-nerd shit like D&D. Look at the genre Critical Role picked for their RPG. They know how to chase a mainstream audience...

Yes I found the same thing recently as well.

I've yet to encounter these '5e D&D-only' players in the wild but I have seen players bounce hard off of D&D, including not just 5e but 2e even more so, to the chagrin of those who think the OSR is the magic solution, but be quickly hooked by CoC and Apocalypse World respectively.

 

[sharps54]

My issue with it being a niche hobby is that makes it harder for good designers to make a living at being designers, which means fewer good games.

I know we've got KS and a handful of designers may have been able to make it a cottage industry off of that but without a sustainable business model for rpgs outside of D&D we won't get the next Robin Laws, Ken Hite, Greg Stafford, etc. and will continue to lose talented designers like Costikyan, etc. to video games or academia.

Many of our current best designers are not doing it as a day job and that is not a good thing for them or the hobby.

Sure. The niche hobby comment is a selfish one in my part because if I never bought anything again I would have more than I could ever play and I could be very happy only playing old games.

I do think for the industry to stay healthy you need an easy gateway outside gamers asking people to join their games, like it or not D&D traditionally has been that gateway. If D&D crashes and burns it will lower the amount of new players. Less new players means less players find other games and less business for those developers trying to make a living.

 

[Voros]

I honestly don’t know who Ben Riggs is (he wrote a book. Big whoop.) or why people have been treating his words as gospel. But that blog is a mess. He doesn’t even get basic mechanics for MCDM’s new rpg correct.

If the “decline” of WOTC (which hasn’t happened outside of Internet forums) is the dark ages of the hobby. Then long love the dark ages.

Riggs' book is good.

 

[Patchwork Dragon]

From a consumer standpoint, I have quite a bit of stuff already. If there was never an new edition for any of the rpgs I played, I would be okay with it.

I probably have enough stuff that I could game happily for the rest of my life without buying anything new. Not that it will stop me from buying new stuff.

There are more games out there than I could play in my lifetime. And more games and more modules are being added all the time.

 

[Patchwork Dragon]

Sure. The niche hobby comment is a selfish one in my part because if I never bought anything again I would have more than I could ever play and I could be very happy only playing old games.

I do think for the industry to stay healthy you need an easy gateway outside gamers asking people to join their games, like it or not D&D traditionally has been that gateway. If D&D crashes and burns it will lower the amount of new players. Less new players means less players find other games and less business for those developers trying to make a living.

I will admit that D&D is the first role playing game I played. But it could have been anything. I joined the game club at my high school thinking I would be playing Uno or Clue or Risk. I knew nothing about D&D before joining.

I would say that D&D might not even be the best introduction to rpgs. The best might be a game that is more rules light and easier to understand.

I also think a more natural intro would be games that already tap into an existing fandom. Horror games at horror conventions. Anime themed games at anime conventions. Star Trek and Star Wars games at SF conventions.

 

[TristramEvans]

Most people have said better than I could what my response to Rigg's lament for a monosystem hobby is, so I'll simply add the general statement that I care about the RPG hobby but could care less about the industry, and the relationship between the two I've always seen as vaguely parasitical. The rise or fall of D&D never aided nor improved my hobby, and in many ways popularity brought with it an influx of people who contribute little to nothing to the hobby. With the rise of the internet both removing any barriers beyond time and talent for releasing gaming materials, and also providing the ability to connect with other niche gamers that all but ameliorates the relative popularity of a game as a barrier to play, the concept of D&D as a market leader is all but meaningless to the health of the hobby these days. In fact I view D&D more often as a conceptual anchor holding the hobby back and restricting creativity.

 

[Sable Wyvern]

Sure. The niche hobby comment is a selfish one in my part because if I never bought anything again I would have more than I could ever play and I could be very happy only playing old games.

I do think for the industry to stay healthy you need an easy gateway outside gamers asking people to join their games, like it or not D&D traditionally has been that gateway. If D&D crashes and burns it will lower the amount of new players. Less new players means less players find other games and less business for those developers trying to make a living.

I honestly don't care at all about the "Industry".

I grew up in a country town, where the nearest game store was a mythical structure off somewhere in the vast distance. We got a quarterly mail order catalogue, and that was our main source of knowledge as to what games were out there. In my adult years, I have occasionally gone into a game store, browsed the products, and purchased some stuff. I didn't make friends there, game there, or talk about gaming there.

As with you, I have a massive pile of material to work through, plus the ability to make up more myself if necessary.

I am more than happy to support individual authors and publishers who release material I enjoy, but I don't require that they exist and create stuff. Further, even the great and prolific creators, such as Kevin Crawford, are just people I have an impersonal, business relationship with. I respect Kevin's opinions and appreciate the fact that he spends some of his time and effort providing advice to help others succeed but, ultimately, he creates useful products and I give him money in return for his time and effort. If he decides tomorrow that there's no more money in gaming and he wants to become a florist, I'll be perfectly fine with that.

I don't need the Industry to grow and thrive. To be honest, I don't even need the hobby to grow and thrive, because the hobby is me and some friends hanging out talking shit, or me thinking about how to integrate planar effects for clerics in Planescape using WWM. I have all the hobby I need, and no outside market forces will take it away from me, at least not without much larger, more important impacts that have nothing to do with gaming.

 

[Skarg]

I started with The Fantasy Trip, and I'm so glad I did. Shortly thereafter, I tried BX, White Box, AD&D, and looked at Gamma World, and they seemed preposterously silly and deficient in logic.

I've tried checking out various forms of D&D, and countless other games based on D&D design patterns, over the decades since, and I think of D&D more as a proliferation of mostly-defective ideas such as too-steep power curves and way too many hitpoints on high-level characters, etc.

Then there are all the players who start with D&D and stay with it forever, and who don't like other games because they're different from the design patterns they know. Those players seem to me more like they're stealing space and attention from better and more interesting designs, to me.

Not to mention all the ideas that spread into computer game design, where they also infect the thinking of way too many games for my taste. They infect the often-unquestioned foundations of too many game designers' thought patterns, IMO.

So I don't really agree that it's a good thing for D&D to still be a popular gateway to the hobby.

 

[ffilz]

I started with The Fantasy Trip, and I'm so glad I did. Shortly thereafter, I tried BX, White Box, AD&D, and looked at Gamma World, and the seemed preposterously silly and deficient in logic.

I've tried checking out various forms of D&D, and countless other games based on D&D design patterns, over the decades since, and I think of D&D more as a proliferation of mostly-defective ideas such as too-steep power curves and way too many hitpoints on high-level characters, etc.

Then there are all the players who start with D&D and stay with it forever, and who don't like other games because they're different from the design patterns they know. Those players seem to me more like they're stealing space and attention from better and more interesting designs, to me.

Not to mention all the ideas that spread into computer game design, where they also infect the thinking of way too many games for my taste. They infect the often-unquestioned foundations of too many game designers' thought patterns, IMO.

So I don't really agree that it's a good thing for D&D to still be a popular gateway to the hobby.

As someone who likes both styles of games, I feel like there really is something good about D&D.

I really love Cold Iron, which takes a lot of good ideas from TFT and RQ, but still has power curves and increasing hit points.

But I also love RQ.

And there was stuff to like about TFT though the campaign I played in had some issues. I did find the very limited healing a problem that made it hard to enjoy one of the adventures we did where we had to make several forays into a "dungeon" because we kept running out of hit points. And it never made sense to me to ever want to fight a dragon, but maybe I never saw all the options.

But ultimately, I think the popularity of D&D is due to the suitability for the dungeon scenario and the increasing power levels. No matter how much we might prefer other ways of playing, that scenario is always going to be popular.

 

[sharps54]

I started with The Fantasy Trip, and I'm so glad I did. Shortly thereafter, I tried BX, White Box, AD&D, and looked at Gamma World, and the seemed preposterously silly and deficient in logic.

I've tried checking out various forms of D&D, and countless other games based on D&D design patterns, over the decades since, and I think of D&D more as a proliferation of mostly-defective ideas such as too-steep power curves and way too many hitpoints on high-level characters, etc.

Then there are all the players who start with D&D and stay with it forever, and who don't like other games because they're different from the design patterns they know. Those players seem to me more like they're stealing space and attention from better and more interesting designs, to me.

Not to mention all the ideas that spread into computer game design, where they also infect the thinking of way too many games for my taste. They infect the often-unquestioned foundations of too many game designers' thought patterns, IMO.

So I don't really agree that it's a good thing for D&D to still be a popular gateway to the hobby.

The thing is something else isn’t going to replace it for the masses, there will just be a hole and we will lose the people that D&D used to bring.

 

[Baulderstone]

My issue with it being a niche hobby is that makes it harder for good designers to make a living at being designers, which means fewer good games.

I know we've got KS and a handful of designers may have been able to make it a cottage industry off of that but without a sustainable business model for rpgs outside of D&D we won't get the next Robin Laws, Ken Hite, Greg Stafford, etc. and will continue to lose talented designers like Costikyan, etc. to video games or academia.

Many of our current best designers are doing it as a day job and that is not a good thing for them or the hobby.

I think mainstream commercial concerns have often been bad for game design. It's why we had so many '90s splat books with a sliver of content buried in flavor text. It's why most adventure modules went from being designed for use at the table to being fun-to-read, linear stories with stats for the characters. It's why 3E was designed to provide an endless stream of feats and prestige classes.

And once you are operating on the scale of Hasbro, working on the game becomes lucrative enough that people with no interest in the game begin competing to run it.

As to future game designers, Stafford was making games before the first D&D boom happened. Hite and Laws came into their own during the supposed "bust" of the '90s. None of these guy came out of a peak D&D period. If anything, they show what happens when D&D isn't hogging the stage.

 

[Baulderstone]

The thing is something else isn’t going to replace it for the masses, there will just be a hole and we will lose the people that D&D used to bring.

The people that leave if D&D falters were never part of the hobby anyway. They are just tourists.

 

[Baulderstone]

In any case, Greg Stolze gave the best advice on how to make a living as a game designer. "I married a doctor."

 

[Voros]

I think mainstream commercial concerns have often been bad for game design. It's why we had so many '90s splat books with a sliver of content buried in flavor text. It's why most adventure modules went from being designed for use at the table to being fun-to-read, linear stories with stats for the characters. It's why 3E was designed to provide an endless stream of feats and prestige classes.

And once you are operating on the scale of Hasbro, working on the game becomes lucrative enough that people with no interest in the game begin competing to run it.

As to future game designers, Stafford was making games before the first D&D boom happened. Hite and Laws came into their own during the supposed "bust" of the '90s. None of these guy came out of a peak D&D period. If anything, they show what happens when D&D isn't hogging the stage.

Sure but I think there's a middle that can be reached between those business excesses and everyone designing games off the side of their desk. Stafford, Laws, etc. started off as fans but were able to make some kind of living from game design.

Of course I would prefer we get to the point that the non-D&D rpg business is healthy and sustainable without needing D&D, the way bands and labels were able to function without major labels for many years (until the record store/tour infrastructure collapsed), but that still seems a bit off in the future although perhaps closer moreso than anytime since the 90s.