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Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Kai Tave posted:

What are you talking about, it's a perfectly viable strategy to spend all your time and effort chasing entrenched tribalist diehards who left for a rehash of an older product and decided to build part of their identity around it, that's why Coke spends so much time trying to placate diehard Pepsi drinkers after all.
I think somebody is projecting pretty hard over here.

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DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Kai Tave posted:

^^^It turned out pretty well actually. Not many other TRPGs get TV shows made after them or even video games for that matter. Vampire was an unequivocal no-fooling shot in the arm for elfgames. Of course it also came out at a time when Magic: the Gathering, World of Warcraft, and online console gaming didn't exist.

It did, and it was! I was a big Vampire player, believe me, I remember. M:tG came out just a short time afterwards, though - I recall buying a few packs of boosters and sitting down to play a few games of Magic while waiting for the rest of the Werewolf game I was in to show up, more than a few times. But Vampire and the other Storyteller games were a big shot in the arm.

Looking at the knock-on effects, some of which last into the present day, however... things like 'endless splatbooks' and 'big sweeping metaplots that the players cannot affect' and 'players of Standard Heroic Fantasy Game sneering at the Emo/Goth Gamers Who Aren't Killing Things With Swords, and vice/versa,' I'm not altogether certain that its contribution to the overall health of the industry was, in the long term, really entirely positive, and that was what I was trying to get at.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Vampire was successful at identifying a non-RPGing subculture and creating a product that appealed to them, thus increasing the total size of the RPG market. A number of game companies have done similar things over the past few decades: I remember when I was in high school, we got a totally-not-a-nerd guy interested in our group of nerdgamers when we described what Shadowrun was about, because he was already interested in cyberpunk and hacking the gibsons.

Vampire may have been one of the biggest successes at that. The elfgamers who sneered at Vampire players (and, as a stupid kid in his early 20s, I was one of them) would probably not have had a problem with the basic idea of social storygaming with a cocktail party context if it hadn't been suffused with Goth imagery and Anne Rice bloodplay fetishism, but at least for us, that aspect completely poisoned the well and we had zero interest in mage: the magicing or whatever the gently caress the other books they were putting out were called, even though they weren't vampires and werewolves, just because we saw them as part of that whole scene.

I've seen similar things done (on smaller scales) in the miniatures wargaming arena. Blood Bowl was explicitly an attempt to appeal to "the jocks" with a fantasy football game. I don't know if that worked, but Blood Bowl has endured long after GW stopped supporting it. Battletech followed on from Robotech as a way of grabbing the interest of the giant anime robots people. Champions, the HERO system, and (much more successfully) HeroClix were all forays into the superhero comics readers domains to try and get some of them interested.

I dunno if there's some untapped genre or subculture or movement that is just waiting for the right elfgames product to come along and transform them all into gamers. Maybe not. But it's not like it's inconceivable. It has been done before.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Terrible Opinions posted:

I think somebody is projecting pretty hard over here.

Give me a loving break, dude. Paizo pushed Pathfinder hard on the "we're the real D&D" platform, that's not even disputable at this point. Lisa Stevens was savvy enough to recognize that she could, in essence, turn edition warring and the "True D&D" crowd into a consumer base.

Misandu
Feb 28, 2008

STOP.
Hammer Time.

Terrible Opinions posted:

I think somebody is projecting pretty hard over here.

I think you just haven't been exposed to enough hard core OSR/3.X fanatics.

JerryLee
Feb 4, 2005

THE RESERVED LIST! THE RESERVED LIST! I CANNOT SHUT UP ABOUT THE RESERVED LIST!

Misandu posted:

I think you just haven't been exposed to enough hard core OSR/3.X fanatics.

Speaking for myself, I've seen some of the most :stonk: examples in the grogs.txt thread... and I've also seen a lot of really offputting rhetoric from the other side.

I can look at individual examples of OSR or 3E grognards and go "whoa that's pretty drat toxic" but from my point of view, and probably this is because I mostly stay on SA, the 4E/whatever newer systems fans don't do a great job on average of rising above the edition warring rather than turning around and making GBS threads back on anyone who enjoys the older systems. One good thing I can say about the edition warriors for the newer editions is that they seemingly tend to be less correlated with other, more harmful sorts of toxicity, and that's not irrelevant, but "hmm, at least they're less misogynist" is pretty faint praise in my book.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Not everyone who likes or plays Pathfinder is a frothing zealot, but Paizo and Lisa Stevens are masters of ego-stroking the die-hardest of 3.X holdouts. Remember the vaunted open playtest that Pathfinder fans still hold up today, the one that WotC scrambled to copy for Next? Remember how they banned people who actually pointed out where the math was bad and the balance was off, and essentially just shuffled a few deck chairs around before declaring things fixed forever?

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Leperflesh posted:

The elfgamers who sneered at Vampire players (and, as a stupid kid in his early 20s, I was one of them) would probably not have had a problem with the basic idea of social storygaming with a cocktail party context if it hadn't been suffused with Goth imagery and Anne Rice bloodplay fetishism, but at least for us, that aspect completely poisoned the well and we had zero interest in mage: the magicing or whatever the gently caress the other books they were putting out were called, even though they weren't vampires and werewolves, just because we saw them as part of that whole scene.

Again, part of the point. The "new game that brings new people into the hobby and revitalizes the marketplace" that people have been arguing about already happened, and one of the results thereof was "oldschool elfgamers sneering at them because they didn't approve of the trappings." As an elfgamer who was also an early adopter of V:tM, I saw that happen from both sides - anyone who says gatekeeping isn't or wouldn't be a thing in RPGs is wildly optimistic, because believe me, there was plenty of it all around.

It bears noting that - and this is entirely anecdotal, but bear with me - in the heyday of online roleplaying MUSHes and MUXes (think a kind of cross between WoW and Zork), in the very late 90s and early 2000s, World of Darkness MU*s vastly outnumbered almost every other variety, and I was told more than a few times about how some of these players had come to play online because whatever local roleplaying scene they had, usually a college club, was simply not at all interested in anything other than elfgames (of course, I also ran into more than a few pathological liars and truly broken human beings on MU*s, so grain of salt).

GrizzlyCow
May 30, 2011
Things can happen more than once.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Gatekeeping apparently didn't prevent Vampire from being big, though. So with enough appeal and a good enough system, gatekeeping could be overcome, at least in an pre/early Web environment.

I wonder if there's some RPG-savant who is, even now, penning the brilliant game system that will pull in and encapsulate one of these significantly-sized subcultures:

- Bronies
- Gun Nuts
- Clothing Fashionistas (includes the high fashion people, and the thrift store scourers)
- R&B Gangstas
- Reality TV Enthusiasts
- Sports Fans
- Automotive enthusiasts (sub-sub cultures include ricers, mopars, hot rodders, drifters, slammers, NASCAR fans, and those people who accumulate dozens of rusting-out hulks of old classic cars on their trash-strewn properies to watch them slowly disintigrate into rusty patches of dirt on the ground over a period of decades)
- Tea Partiers
- Ravers
- Potheads
- Bitcoiners
- Coupon addicts
- etc.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Probably not. Unless you count bronies, there've been like two dozen lovely attempts at a My Little Pony RPG.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Ultimately Mearls and the Next team swallowed Paizo's narrative: 4e was a huge failure, it was tabletop WoW, every class was the same, and millennial trophies for everybody edition, etc, etc. So they doubled-down on pandering to the shrieking chorus. An extended "playtest" created the impression that REAL TRUE FANS of D&D were creating the edition. This was a weird-rear end time with an almost anti-intellectual backlash against the "too hard" 4e D&D - Feedback surveys asked what felt like D&D. What are your favorite most Dungeony-Dragony feeling things that should be core rules?* It was pure grog-coddling PR.

Mearls leveraged big and loud names to garner appeal. (I personally think Cook was hired to put his name on the cover and shut up about any new ideas.) And still other people were brought onboard for their big online footprints, but who knew gently caress-nothing about game design. He gave the sycophantic fan sites EXCLUSIVE info about the new edition, but left critical ones out in the cold. When consultant-gate hit, he spun it like a champ and turned the accusations against the accusers ("No, WE are the victims of harassment!") in a way that would make Karl Rove proud.

And in a way, it was the right play. 4e's biggest "failure" was a diplomatic one. Monte Cook Presents: Passive Perception confirmed as much. If they'd come out swinging this hard when 4e was introduced, grogs today would be singing about how Gary would have loved the Warforged, Healing Surges, and getting D&D back to its miniatures wargames roots.

(*Not actually how core rules work)

Misandu
Feb 28, 2008

STOP.
Hammer Time.

JerryLee posted:

Speaking for myself, I've seen some of the most :stonk: examples in the grogs.txt thread... and I've also seen a lot of really offputting rhetoric from the other side.

I can look at individual examples of OSR or 3E grognards and go "whoa that's pretty drat toxic" but from my point of view, and probably this is because I mostly stay on SA, the 4E/whatever newer systems fans don't do a great job on average of rising above the edition warring rather than turning around and making GBS threads back on anyone who enjoys the older systems. One good thing I can say about the edition warriors for the newer editions is that they seemingly tend to be less correlated with other, more harmful sorts of toxicity, and that's not irrelevant, but "hmm, at least they're less misogynist" is pretty faint praise in my book.

There's this weird tendency on the internet to see everything as two sides. Just because you've seen assholes who like a variety of different products doesn't mean anything other then that a lot of assholes play RPGs. On the other hand there's an entire company that established themselves catering to this sort of behavior who have a bunch of dedicated fans they gained via that behavior, which is why we lump them all into one group. Just because some people disagree with them doesn't magically make them into a unified group of anti-grogs.

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Leperflesh posted:

Gatekeeping apparently didn't prevent Vampire from being big, though. So with enough appeal and a good enough system, gatekeeping could be overcome, at least in an pre/early Web environment.

No, but it did prevent Vampire's bigness from improving the lot of the industry as a whole in the long term. Once that bubble burst, a lot of those players didn't take their money and move to a new game and keep the industry healthy; they just left.

Dr. Tough
Oct 22, 2007

DivineCoffeeBinge posted:

No, but it did prevent Vampire's bigness from improving the lot of the industry as a whole in the long term. Once that bubble burst, a lot of those players didn't take their money and move to a new game and keep the industry healthy; they just left.

Where do you get that idea from? Every White Wolf player I've ever met was also a D&D player.

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

Dr. Tough posted:

Where do you get that idea from? Every White Wolf player I've ever met was also a D&D player.

White Wolf is what got me into roleplaying, and I can count on one hand the number of times I've played D&D*

If it weren't for games like MHRPG, or Apocalypse World, I probably wouldn't play ttrpgs.


*And even those few times only lasted a session or two before fizzling out.

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

Dr. Tough posted:

Where do you get that idea from? Every White Wolf player I've ever met was also a D&D player.

I've known several people, meanwhile, who thought Vampire was pretty cool but wanted nothing to do with D&D or whatever, or who played Vampire and it just never occurred to them to play something else when they stopped going to the local game.


Leperflesh posted:

Gatekeeping apparently didn't prevent Vampire from being big, though. So with enough appeal and a good enough system, gatekeeping could be overcome, at least in an pre/early Web environment.

I wonder if there's some RPG-savant who is, even now, penning the brilliant game system that will pull in and encapsulate one of these significantly-sized subcultures:

- Bronies
- Gun Nuts
- Clothing Fashionistas (includes the high fashion people, and the thrift store scourers)
- R&B Gangstas
- Reality TV Enthusiasts
- Sports Fans
- Automotive enthusiasts (sub-sub cultures include ricers, mopars, hot rodders, drifters, slammers, NASCAR fans, and those people who accumulate dozens of rusting-out hulks of old classic cars on their trash-strewn properies to watch them slowly disintigrate into rusty patches of dirt on the ground over a period of decades)
- Tea Partiers
- Ravers
- Potheads
- Bitcoiners
- Coupon addicts
- etc.

You're mostly listing fans of activities or objects, whereas what Vampire tapped into was a scene based on aesthetics. That includes music, clothing, and, I think most importantly for an RPG to draw in a subculture, fictional narratives, be they Poppy Brite, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, or Bram Stoker. I'm not sure what the RPG that draws in Tea Partiers looks like, since RaHoWa was a miserable failure that went nowhere.

...of course it also helps that the worst-kept secret of the gothic-industrial scene is that it is chock-full of nerds.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Kai Tave posted:

Give me a loving break, dude. Paizo pushed Pathfinder hard on the "we're the real D&D" platform, that's not even disputable at this point. Lisa Stevens was savvy enough to recognize that she could, in essence, turn edition warring and the "True D&D" crowd into a consumer base.

I get that it was a large part of their original marketing, but pretending that they represent the majority of the Pathfinder fan-base is massively wrong. Hell most of those same people who jumped ship because 4th edition "betrayed" have jumped ship back to 5th edition because pathfinder is getting too "bloated". The perpetually angry grognard either never changes his game in the first place or jumps ship to the flavor of the month retroclone trying to replicate the game he played when he was twelve.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Bieeardo posted:

That'd be great, if you would. Most of what I remember from that period is filtered through secondhand 'Gary's Ex is the Devil' nerd rage.
So, Sweetpea Entertainment.

Back when TSR was ailing in '94, they sold the rights to a company known as Sweetpea Entertainment. Sweetpea was the brainchild of would-be director (and later, actual director) Courtney Solomon, who wanted to make sci-fi shows or MMOs. Since the turn of the century, it has essentially pumped out pure schlock (Universal Soldier sequels probably being the best-known thing outside of D&D itself). He's also responsible for After Dark Films, which pumps out a bunch of b-movie horror films it packages together for film festivals of... its b-movie horror films. Like Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror.

At some point they acquired the rights to John Tynes' Puppetland, oddly enough. Nothing came of that.

They're also known as one of the primary backers of Imperium Games, who produced the fourth edition of Traveller, mainly to obtain that sweet, sweet Traveller license, with all of its memorable characters and places and stories. Remember those? Me either. Maybe they were planning to use those famous tables to randomly generate the Traveller TV series that was the intention at the time. Anyway, that version of Traveller failed, and failed pretty hard. A combination of a slapdash core rulebook, the kind of loveable PR you'd expect from aging grognards, and just the continual gutpunches any RPG publisher in the 90s had got it to start leaking money pretty hard in just a year. You know the drill. They couldn't pay their freelancers, the books weren't selling, things were looking dire despite their financial backers. But there was hope!

Around the same time TSR was also ready to collapse, Sweetpea Entertainment saw a future for Imperium Games and their RPG business. They entered into negotiate terms to buy out TSR, and then they would have the most famous sci-fi RPG and the most famous fantasy RPG! Think of the media spinoffs, featuring Elminster and... whatever Traveller has! Like a combination of Shaolin and Wudang, they would be nearly invincible!

Then Wizards of the Coast bought the company out from under them. They also negotiated to buy White Wolf around the same time, which was facing similar troubles, but White Wolf ultimately turned down their offer.

So, Sweetpea got their D&D movie out in 2000, and have the rights to put out a sequel every 5-7 years to maintain their license. Now, Hasbro, with genre movies dancing in their eyes, has tried to reclaim the rights with a lawsuit in 2013 which led to a trial in 2014 where Hasbro asserted that the movies A) aren't sequels, since they don't follow up on the 2000 release in the slightest and B) direct-to-tv releases don't qualify as movies. The trial itself was inconclusive, with the judge pressing Sweetpea and Hasbro to come to an out-of-court settlement, but ruling that Hasbro had sufficient evidence for a jury trial. That seems like it was slated for March 2015, but since I can't find anything on that, the trial is likely still on hold. Meanwhile, Sweetpea is starting to come due on whether or not they're going to produce a fourth D&D film...

Traveller still remains unfilmed.

Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jun 24, 2015

BrainParasite
Jan 24, 2003


The quickest way to bring in new blood to RPGs is to build a young adult party game. Some weird bastard of CaH and Fiasco. A little "edgy". Takes about an hour. Rules you could learn even if you're a little buzzed.

Pope Guilty posted:

You're mostly listing fans of activities or objects, whereas what Vampire tapped into was a scene based on aesthetics. That includes music, clothing, and, I think most importantly for an RPG to draw in a subculture, fictional narratives, be they Poppy Brite, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, or Bram Stoker. I'm not sure what the RPG that draws in Tea Partiers looks like, since RaHoWa was a miserable failure that went nowhere.

...of course it also helps that the worst-kept secret of the gothic-industrial scene is that it is chock-full of nerds.

I knew it, Castle Falkenstein was way ahead of its time.

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Kai Tave posted:

but I'm pretty sure the fundamental issue is just that there isn't actually some big audience yearning to play tabletop RPGs that simply hasn't been catered to yet.
No. Speaking from personal experience where I basically went to an open improv class for a few months the desire to play pretend is pretty widespread. Hell its a required college course depending on where you are located.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

MadScientistWorking posted:

No. Speaking from personal experience where I basically went to an open improv class for a few months the desire to play pretend is pretty widespread. Hell its a required college course depending on where you are located.

Gosh, and if only "playing pretend" equated to "wanting to play traditional tabletop RPGs" then you might actually have a point. Someone tell all those freeform roleplayers that they've been doing it wrong and what they really want is a collection of textbooks and rules and a subculture waiting to tell them that everything they like is stupid, I'm sure they'll be emptying their wallets in no time.

Nobody, not one person, who espouses this notion that there's this untapped market of potential elfgamers waiting to be catered to, has any sort of actual, concrete idea for how to make it work. It's like listening to a room full of Idea Guys talk about how they have the perfect concept for a hit new webcomic that'll take the world by storm aaaaaany day now.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Look if talking about TG as an industry gets you that mad there are other threads, dude.

Bedlamdan
Apr 25, 2008

Kai Tave posted:

Nobody, not one person, who espouses this notion that there's this untapped market of potential elfgamers waiting to be catered to, has any sort of actual, concrete idea for how to make it work. It's like listening to a room full of Idea Guys talk about how they have the perfect concept for a hit new webcomic that'll take the world by storm aaaaaany day now.

It's a mega-man sprite comic, tyvm.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

moths posted:

Look if talking about TG as an industry gets you that mad there are other threads, dude.

It's been a very tense day for this thread, hasn't it?

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

moths posted:

Look if talking about TG as an industry gets you that mad there are other threads, dude.

Good grief.

Freeform roleplayers on the internet, improv theater guys, people who love making up stories with their friends over drinks, the guys who make up stories while playing Gloom or Monopoly, you know what the common factor they all share is? None of them need a game like D&D to do what they enjoy doing. They already have everything they need to enjoy acting, playing pretend, collaborating on stories, etc. The trick, the actual trick, to convincing these legions of non-roleplayers to jump into the TRPG hobby, isn't a matter of brewing up some new licensed game or a new system with the perfect blend of crunch and fluff, it's not a digital app or a virtual tabletop, it's figuring out how to sell people on a hobby they neither want nor need. When someone sinks millions upon millions of dollars into solving that, then you'll see a growth surge in the TRPG hobby.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Yeah, holy cow.

It's funny that a discussion about what might draw RPG players into the hobby would provoke someone to get salty over YOU ASSHOLES DON'T EVEN HAVE A FIRST DRAFT IN ALPHA ...but here we are.

e: That's just finding a way to monetize something they're already doing. The problem is that if it encroaches on table-top role playing's perceived turf, the RPG police go full-grognard and remind everyone else why they weren't there in the first place.

moths fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Jun 24, 2015

Bedlamdan
Apr 25, 2008
I think that, after Bob&George ended, there's kind of an untapped market for MM9 and MM10 jokes. Just putting that out there.

Dr. Tough
Oct 22, 2007

Show us on the doll where the RPGs touched you, Kai Tave.

Kibner
Oct 21, 2008

Acguy Supremacy

BrainParasite posted:

The quickest way to bring in new blood to RPGs is to build a young adult party game. Some weird bastard of CaH and Fiasco. A little "edgy". Takes about an hour. Rules you could learn even if you're a little buzzed.


I knew it, Castle Falkenstein was way ahead of its time.

How to Host a Murder was really fun and I need to start a new game up with some friends sometime soon.

Pope Guilty
Nov 6, 2006

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty.

Kibner posted:

How to Host a Murder was really fun and I need to start a new game up with some friends sometime soon.

It's amazing how easy it is to get people to larp.

Effectronica
May 31, 2011
Fallen Rib
If you look at the most popular RPGs of all time, you would see it shake out into three leaders: D&D, World of Darkness, and the D6 Star Wars game. Both of the latter also brought players into the hobby. Both of them had settings that were easy to get into, and had plenty of depth to explore. Both of them had plenty of crunch.

This is why indie games will never approach D&D in popularity.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



That's a little simplistic.

The real reason Indie RPGs will never be popular is because of the paradox where getting popular means you're no longer an Indie.
And clown shows like Luke Crane's active evasion of popularity and a sustainable business model.

DivineCoffeeBinge
Mar 3, 2011

Spider-Man's Amazing Construction Company

Dr. Tough posted:

Where do you get that idea from? Every White Wolf player I've ever met was also a D&D player.

There's more crossover now, though as Error 404 and Pope Guilty note, it's hardly universal; Back In The Day (tm), however, White Wolf players who were also interested in more traditional elfgames were very much the exception rather than the rule. I had to talk my FLGS owner into special ordering the first edition of V:tM after I read about it on - I poo poo you not - a message board on Prodigy (I feel so fuckin' old), and even once the Storyteller games exploded in popularity I used to talk to him about the ordering patterns; he was very, very clear on the fact that people who were buying the White Wolf games were avoiding AD&D books like the plague, and vice versa.

(The fact that this is late in the lifecycle of AD&D 2nd Edition probably had a lot to do with that as well, mind you)

Part of that was the sheer pretentiousness of those early White Wolf games; they were very self-consciously different. Vampire, especially, made a real effort to mechanically support social RP and intrigue and Machiavellian scheming, at a time when the most popular roleplaying game in the world had virtually no mechanics for that sort of thing beyond "DM's discretion, maybe with a Charisma roll attached;" the two sets of rules scratched very different itches. And V:tM knew that and was so loving smug about it holy poo poo, and that fact - just as much as the lack of monsters to kill for treasure - irritated a lot of more traditional elfgamers, who felt they were being sneered at. And they reacted by sneering right back - which only amplified the traditional "you're playing games wrong" gatekeeping that's older than TSR ever was.

Honest to God, if you weren't there it's hard to really grasp, but there was genuine animosity; the elfgamers would shout and holler about how the goths and freaks were going to destroy their hobby and the White Wolf players (especially the LARPers, Jesus, I'd put hardcore Vampire LARPers up there with brony conventions for 'most concentrated dysfunction in one place') would shout and holler about how their games were more pure and story-driven and touched on Deep Adult Themes and you neckbeards just wouldn't understand and SHUT UP MOM. In my experience, for many years a gamer who enjoyed both types of games - such as myself - would essentially end up with two separate gaming groups, one for elfgames and one for gothgames, with maybe one other person crossing over with them.

Over time, that division crumbled - mostly because White Wolf sank into the abyss, sales-wise, because the players who kept the games afloat all grew up and got jobs and families, and no new blood came in to replace them, IMHO. It was like a market bubble bursting; White Wolf brought a lot of new players into the hobby, but in an almost segregated section of the hobby; when they went away, the hobby itself didn't grow and strengthen. Those White Wolf players who also enjoyed more traditional elfgames, and those that could be convinced to try them out, weren't a large enough section of the market to overcome the usual customer churn that RPGs have always had (see again, growing up and getting jobs and families).

Anyways, the point is, that's why your earlier comment that "I'm really not sure how grognards are going to "gatekeep" people out of the hobby" in the context of "a new, popular, and accessible RPG were to crop up heralding a renaissance" made me sort of sad, because I watched it happen twenty years ago. The grognards weren't the only force to blame, of course - like I said, V:tM was written in such a fashion that it made it really easy to want to gatekeep it away - but it's happened before, and frankly I have no reason to believe it won't happen again.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

Pope Guilty posted:

You're mostly listing fans of activities or objects, whereas what Vampire tapped into was a scene based on aesthetics. That includes music, clothing, and, I think most importantly for an RPG to draw in a subculture, fictional narratives, be they Poppy Brite, Anne Rice, Brian Lumley, or Bram Stoker. I'm not sure what the RPG that draws in Tea Partiers looks like, since RaHoWa was a miserable failure that went nowhere.


Yeah that's fair. I mean... like I said before, I'm old and out of touch. Are there even still goths? What other things are there now, like, ways for a group of high school or college aged kids to selectively segregate themselves to Be Different? When I was a kid, punk had been around for a long time, and I suppose there's still punks, sort of. And goths. I guess there's Juggalos, but that's kind of old now too, right?

I thought of Hipsters, but... I assume Hipsters play 1st edition AD&D, but ironically, while listening to vinyl records and smoking from hookahs.

I'm only half-joking. I'm 40 and most of my window into modern pop culture is filtered by SA. What subcultures are sitting around, ripe for plundering if only someone can come up with a game system that panders to their proclivities?

Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

People who ship Steven Universe characters on their blogs.

Falstaff
Apr 27, 2008

I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

I really don't think quality of product is the barrier to RPGs gaining a wider audience, here. In terms of product variety and quality, things have honestly never been better. What's lacking, though, is visibility.

When I was a kid, I learned of the existence of D&D through a combination of primetime television commercials and real estate in toy stores. I actually bought an issue of Dragon magazine before I ever got my hands on the game itself, because it was there next to the He Man and GI Joe figures, it's what I could afford with my own money, and I figured maybe it would tell me how this whole D&D thing actually, y'know, worked. (It was issue #115, for the record. I hardly understood any of it, but it did make me want to learn more.) Finally, I got the Red Box as a birthday gift from my grandparents.

There was a gaming store in town, but my grandparents didn't buy the Red Box there. They wouldn't have even known to look there for it. They just went to the toy department of the local big box store and picked it up there for me. It's likely I would have eventually found a means to learn the game even if they weren't found in toy stores (I was a pretty determined kid), but it would have taken longer. I'm sure some kids who got into the game wouldn't have managed it if not for how widely available it was, or even wouldn't have learned of its existence if not for actual marketing in the form of commercials and even, at one point, a cartoon.

I'm honestly not sure if this is the sort of thing that can be fixed in the current climate. The market's a lot more fractured than it used to be, retail has changed (and continues to do so), and what little I understand about advertising suggests to me that a successful advertising campaign designed to bring in new customers is a much harder nut to crack than it used to be.

Then again, it's entirely possible this is all a red herring, and my own anecdotal experience can't really be learned from. After all, nobody predicted the wild success that V:tM had, or the way it expanded the hobby. If it's not marketing, then I expect the next opening-the-floodgates moment in the TG industry will be just as difficult to predict. A product that's lucky enough to harness an unexpected zeitgeist.

MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Kai Tave posted:

Good grief.

Freeform roleplayers on the internet, improv theater guys, people who love making up stories with their friends over drinks, the guys who make up stories while playing Gloom or Monopoly, you know what the common factor they all share is? None of them need a game like D&D to do what they enjoy doing. They already have everything they need to enjoy acting, playing pretend, collaborating on stories, etc. The trick, the actual trick, to convincing these legions of non-roleplayers to jump into the TRPG hobby, isn't a matter of brewing up some new licensed game or a new system with the perfect blend of crunch and fluff, it's not a digital app or a virtual tabletop, it's figuring out how to sell people on a hobby they neither want nor need. When someone sinks millions upon millions of dollars into solving that, then you'll see a growth surge in the TRPG hobby.
You do realize that an improv theater person would probably lecture the hell out of a freeform roleplayer. Its not like there isn't a textbook for that field and to act like its really that different in terms of rules and techniques is the major disconnect.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

MadScientistWorking posted:

You do realize that an improv theater person would probably lecture the hell out of a freeform roleplayer.

Like a lot of your posts, I have no idea what this has to do with what's actually being discussed.

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MadScientistWorking
Jun 23, 2010

"I was going through a time period where I was looking up weird stories involving necrophilia..."

Kai Tave posted:

Like a lot of your posts, I have no idea what this has to do with what's actually being discussed.
Basically you are throwing a grognard fit over the suggestion of making a game that panders to other people especially when you have no clue what the hell you are talking about. That and just burn this industry to the ground. For as much talk about gatekeepers in the previous thread you'll never get rid of them and I'd probably actively drive people away from it nowadays.

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