This post bemoans the gradual death of the original-property roleplaying game and blames it, in part at least, on licenses and the prevalence of licensing over original story content. And I think he’s right to bemoan the death of original roleplaying settings; I love Deadlands and Rokugan and Theah1 for the awesome settings they are. I like tweaky old Shadowrun, despite the fact that playing it required about a million six-sided dice, and I can even spare a kind thought for the World of Darkness.2
But licensed games aren’t the reason original roleplaying settings have gradually died out. Original roleplaying settings have died out for a very simple reason: roleplayers, as a market, aged. Midway through the 1990s, the replacement rate of old RP gamers by young RP gamers started dropping, and it’s never really reversed trend despite numerous attempts to revive the hobby among young people.
Here’s the thing: old gamers mostly don’t want a new, dramatic setting. They want what they know, both in terms of rules systems and in terms of settings. That’s why the D&D revivals – third edition, “3.5,”, fourth edition, and Pathfinder3 have been the truly important releases of the past decade. Steven Long’s list of “major RPG releases of the past five years” misses things: the Gamma World rerelease, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying rerelease, Shadowrun’s 20th Anniversary Edition, and so forth.
And if the RPG market has aged ungracefully and grown more hostile to anything they don’t know already – and I think there’s pretty good evidence that that’s the case – then what can an RPG publisher rely upon to generate new customers? The answer is simple: licensed product. Licensed product offers publishers the opportunity not only to get wary older roleplayers’ attention by offering them rules for intellectual properties they’re already familiar with and like, but is also the best remaining way for those publishers to attract outside attention from non-roleplayers, by offering them a gateway. Most of those non-roleplayers will never buy anything but the licensed product, of course, but so what? They still bought it.
And if you’re looking for original roleplaying settings – well, not to get all Doctorow on you or anything, but it’s just moved. It’s all on computers now. Look at Bioware’s output of the last decade: Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Dragon Age. Any one of those could be a pen-and-paper RPG book setting, and a detailed and enjoyable one at that. Look at games like Arcanum, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3. There’s really no shortage of options. Now, granted, these are computer RPGs and therefore inherently inferior to pen-and-paper RPGs in that the game master doesn’t have to cheat horribly to get players back on track with his plot because the computer will do it automatically, but the point remains.
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I used to feel similar, but I don’t think that’s it entirely. I think the big reason publishers go for licensed RPGs is for the desire to have a built-in customer base. There are people who want an RPG based on the Supernatural tv-show, when all it is is the story of two guys who hunt monsters. There are -dozens- of systems that can handle this premise in any direction you want to take it, but the average Supernatural fan who isn’t into RPGs won’t care about GURPS, or Savage Worlds, or FATE, or d20, or whatever. So you get a few RPG fans who are into the show, and you (hopefully) get even more non-gamers to pick up your book because they’re hoping it’ll have new stuff on Sam and Dean.
Also, while RPGs pride themselves on being a hobby for creative and imaginative people, the simple and sad fact is that a lot of gamers lack the confidence in themselves to come up with ideas for stats, or characters, or stories. Licensed games offer the comfort of doing all that stuff for them. They already know how Xander or or Harry Dresden or Caprica Six or Dean is supposed to act, but now they also have them (and all the monsters/spells/tech/etc.) already statted out and ready for a game. Some gamers will try to say that statting all that stuff out in another system takes too much time, but spending time on pointless stuff is what a gaming hobby is all about (assuming they don’t have a game style of just “winging it” most of the time anyway).
Another factor to possibly consider is the death of the supplement model of publishing. All the settings you describe, the ones with richly detailed and explored original settings, were made during a time when the hobby thrived on supplements. A book that sells well still gets supplements, but most games tend to churn out one or two supplements a year rather than the treadmill of books the 90’s saw. Whether this is good or bad is debatable, as publishers tend to have to produce better quality product than they did 15+ years ago.
Also, there are new settings being developed all the time, they just don’t get a lot of attention as publishers and distributors and so forth don’t want to take risks on “unknowns”. Hellas (Greek Myth in space), Alpha Omega (Rifts for people who hate Palladium), Cthulhutech (Evangelions punch the Mythos as the world slowly dies), Eclipse Phase (transhumanism meets genocidal AIs), Progenitor (a world where super-powers appeared in the LBJ years and are contagious), the Kerberos Club (supers in the Victorian era) are all recent vibrant settings well worth checking out. They just don’t have 20+ supplements each is all.
Dang. Sorry about the novel.
As a genuine Young Person, who has a great fondness for computer RPGs, I have to say the reason I never got into the concept of pen-and-paper RPGs is mainly the fact that everyone I know that would want to play a pen-and-paper RPG with me is, frankly, the sort of person I wouldn’t spend time with if you paid me. I know it’s unfair, I’m sure statistically many if not the majority of pen-and-paper RPG-ers are not skin-crawlingly creepy/ amazingly annoying/ racist, but those are the ones that talk about the hobby in public. Loudly. To anyone who doesn’t categorically state disinterest quick enough.
Any one of those could be a pen-and-paper RPG book setting, and a detailed and enjoyable one at that.
In fact Dragon Age is a pen-and-paper RPG setting, and apparently people like it quite a bit (haven’t had the inkling or opportunity to play myself).
But really, what this comes down to is as you say the aging population of pen-and-paper gamers and the fact that game companies are either no longer interested or possibly no longer able to convince geeky teenagers to spend nights playing RPGs around a table. Wizards had a significant misstep with their latest attempt to get their product into the hands of new players (if that is in fact what their latest cluster-fuck of marketing was intending), and no one else is really even trying.
Seriously – when I go to the retail chain bookstores and the RPG books I see all cost more than $40 just to buy in for a game you might be able to convince a few fellow geeks to play, that’s a problem. For a few bucks more I could get an Xbox game that has solo and network modes and know that even if I can’t get my friends to play, I can either play on my own or find players on the Internet to play with.
A good intro product – even a licensed one – could help alleviate that (the West End Star Wars RPG was a gateway to gaming for many a young geek), but that requires a game company to have the desire and the ability to actually do a good intro product. And none of the companies around these days seem to have a clue what that means (again – Wizards latest attempt to do so with their new “red box” shows some good intentions, but it’s really a terrible product as an intro to gaming these days).
@Menamebephi and @Jer
Both of you pretty well express a huge chunk of what’s killing Table Top RPGs: advancing technology. TTRPGs are geeky and for kids (or old freaks as the case may be), but World of Warcraft is cool and for everybody! TTRPGs require you to get together with people and spend time waiting for everyone to show up and then bicker about rules, but you and your friends can play WoW from across the world or you can play it by yourself whenever you want (yes, there are time commitments in WoW too, but the new player doesn’t notice them upfront).
WoW makes the hack-n-slash style of gameplay pioneered by TT D&D obsolete. And as D&D goes, so goes the rest of the industry (the hobby however will be fine, if substantially smaller).
I can agree that a lot of the RPG market has aged, and the reasons for that are complex; technology is certainly a factor. White Wolf and TSR nearly going bankrupt also helped, as the inventory of RPG books on random bookstore shelves decreased. I can remember going into a mall Waldenbooks and seeing giant posters for TORG–that just doesn’t happen anymore.
The cost of physical publishing has jumped up over time as well, with increased production values (which I honestly unabashedly love–you want a reason to not pirate something, get your fingerprints all over a satin-finish cover) and the rising cost of paper, which makes it harder for a little company to print a physical book and get it into a tight distribution system
But there are awesome new settings that get released, mentioned above. Getting a lot of gamers to notice them has always been hard, and there were a lot of new settings which might have seemed cool at the time but which fell by the wayside for one reason or another in the past. TORG, Shatterzone, Jorune, Conspiracy X, a bunch of heartbreaker systems, Cyberpunk, Alternity, it’s a long list of childhood memories.
What I really can’t figure out is how Rifts just keeps chugging along like a juggernaut of crazy.
Yeah, but… there’s no dice! What’s the fun of any RPG without a big fat sack of fancy dice? I’m a girl, I need accessories.
“But licensed games aren’t the reason original roleplaying settings have gradually died out. Original roleplaying settings have died out for a very simple reason: roleplayers, as a market, aged. Midway through the 1990s, the replacement rate of old RP gamers by young RP gamers started dropping, and it’s never really reversed trend despite numerous attempts to revive the hobby among young people.
Here’s the thing: old gamers mostly don’t want a new, dramatic setting. They want what they know, both in terms of rules systems and in terms of settings.”
As someone who never really played RPGs at all, I found this passage to be very familiar. The same argument can and has been made about paper-and-ink comic books.
And the second paragraph quoted, well, I think that’s Geoff Johns’ reasoning for everything he does.
For me, a lot of it is about what the books concentrate on. At my peak, about 70% of the D&D books I was buying were setting sourcebooks for the Forgotten Realms. I could care less about ten new versions of anti-Paladins or new proficiencies. What I wanted were new locations, NPCs, and ideas that I could use or adapt. Then the supplements shifted to endless new class and race kits, specialty priests, and new magic items of either ridiculously power or extremely limited usefulness. Any of which I could have put together myself, if I cared to. All those (hundreds of dollars worth of) books had going for them was their status as officially supported rules. And then the Third Edition hits, and they become irrelevant to anything else to be published in the future. What I get out of the licensed books I buy is easily accessed setting material and insight that I can use however I like. At a quick count, I have thirteen licensed games on my shelves that I have never played with their included rules, but have found many other uses for.
In just my limited, anecdotal experience as a games retailer, we have about a 50/50 split between older RPG gamers and kids, or at least younger guys, which have increased exponentially over the last year thanks to Wizard’s weekly Encounters activity. I never really thought we’d be DMing two tables of 10 year olds.
dirge93 has the right of it: D&D (and thus, I hate to say it, but the majority of the gaming industry that’s actually paying to buy new games) is in a losing position right now vis-a-vis computer RPGs and MMORPGs. If what you’re really looking for is to murder a pile of monsters to the tune of a story, computer games do that really well now, and so if you’re trying to grab those buyers and convince them to do it with pencil, paper, miniatures and dice you’ve got a hard sell coming. I feel like this leaves a lot of room for more (for lack of a better word) sophisticated fare, games for which combat is neither the beginning nor the end as room into which gaming could grow, but fundamentally if paper-and-pencil RPGs are to survive it will be because they figured out how to offer something that the consoles and computers can’t and sell THAT well.
I think people are missing the key point about licences, which was made by someone at Cubicle 7 (can’t remeber where, I’m afraid) about Starblazers, a licensed RPG with the most obscure IP imaginable. If you wish to create a professional looking RPG book, one of your major expenses will be art, which if you commission new art for the book will cost an order of magnitude more money than the text. Buying a license, although an expense, gives you a massive amount of pre-existing artwork on the cheap.
Take a look at Doctor Who, Starblazers and Smallville, and think how much it would cost to fill the book with original artwork. Then look at Reign, Spirit of the Century and Diaspora and how little artwork there is in those books, by comparison.
Well, for my part a large issue is the semi-forced inclusion of minis, battlemaps, etc. We used to need writing materials, game books, and dice dagnabbit! And we liked it!
To be honest the extras are nice, but they should be just that – extras.
Another thing that may have hurt the table top RPG market is play by e-mail games. I have been playing PBEMs for well over ten years now and during that time my interest in table top gaming has waned to the point where I am starting to sell off some of my old gaming material. I have numerous friends I have gamed with for a decade I never met face-to-face or even spoken to on the phone.
Another factor is probably more streamlined ways to make your own settings. GURPS revolves around the whole idea, and other systems make it easier than they used to.
If you have the tools to make thousands of homebrew settings, what need is there to buy all new sorts of campaigns? that’s expensive.
Of course, the obvious answer is that most players don’t actually make the most of those tools, rarely finish creating a setting once they start, and that new campaign books often have them completely outclassed in quality.
I think the original setting stuff has mostly moved online as .pdfs and the like. Like with Atomic Sock Monkey’s books. Difficult and expensive to find in print but easy to buy in digital format. Which is a pity, because as a creaky old dude I hate buying .pdf stuff for rpgs…
“What I really can’t figure out is how Rifts just keeps chugging along like a juggernaut of crazy.”
Rifts is the purest, most concentrated form of 12-year-old gamer crazy on the market. Also, it is the only system I can think of that doesn’t feel the need to apologize or be ironic when it supplies the 12-year-old gamer crazy.
Rifts will not judge you or your desire to play a 20-foot-tall robot that is also a werewolf and has a nuclear laser. It will suggest that perhaps your werewolf robot should also be part dragon, and provide stats.
That sort of unapologetic attitude can sustain a lot.
The thing I miss most about the tabletop RPG industry’s heyday is the old D&D ads on the back covers. On at least ten of mine, there was an ad with an elf pirate screaming and pointing at a ship in the distance, and I remember thinking it was the bee’s knees. Before the Internet and, in my neck of the woods, local game stores, this was literally the only way I found out about new game releases, and it was pretty damn effective.
As an aside! I just discovered that you’ll probably want to turn SafeSearch on if you do a GIS for “D&D comic ad.”
“What I really can’t figure out is how Rifts just keeps chugging along like a juggernaut of crazy.”
It’s amazing how long something can endure when the creator has a nigh single-minded fixation on never letting it die, ever, no matter what. Or change in any meaningful fashion, for that matter. Judicious use of the copy-paste function and regularly bilking your freelancers helps too.
Do you have ANY IDEA what I would give for a Morrowind tabletop RPG? If licensing eventually means that I get my Morrowind tabletop, then I’m all for it.
I want to see the Microsoft Surface prototype D&D program networked with Android Tablets as character sheets/toolsets/dicebags/etc. 21st century tabletop gaming!
(My comment on the Facebook post, before I read this thread)
Recent new settings:
– Diaspora (based on FATE)
– lots of Savage Worlds settings (Slipstream, Sundered Skies, Evernight, Necessary Evil)
– the Warmachine universe/Immoren
– Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies
– REIGN (and other ORE games, like Wild Talents)
– Exalted (though this goes back to 2001, and XBoxes existed then)
Admittedly, some of these are “Indie” (which is to say, the size of LOTS of releases we used to like back in the day, but self-published), and some of them are tied into larger properties (Warmachine and Hordes having an associated minis game) and some are pastiches (Slipstream, sort of a vanilla Flash Gordon),
But others are actually truly original (I’d argue that Diaspora’s Traveller-like “there’s a setting but you build the details” and Seven Skies’ “It’s pirates, but VERY SPECIFIC VARIATION”). Some, like Exalted or particular outliers like Nobilis or Mechanical Dream really have no clear correlate in other media — weird, weird worlds where player character agency reshapes the laws of reality.
So I get your point, and I know you’re talking “mainstream”, but I argue that it’s like looking for new characters to show up in the DC universe. There are the cash cow channels, and there are the “innovative” channels.
I think a lot of the 70s, 80s, and 90s build up around the table top gaming franchise came from board games. And board games have kinda bent the knee to video games. Even Monopoly is better when you play it on the X-Box.
Now, a lot of companies have dabbled with going online. D&D regularly puts a toe in the water. The third party clients for White Wolf and Rifts and the rest are everywhere, although they’re typically simple little apps a guy and his friends cooked up in their basement. But there’s really just not a proper tool kit for converting modern table top to digital table top.
People would love a big, easy-to-use “make-your-own-video-game” game. That’s what D&D ultimately is all about. But the big companies either balk at releasing online content (Wizards has been promising DM tools since 3.0 was a twinkle in their eye) or give us tools so painfully complicated that no 20-year-old (much less a 12-year-old) can approach them without a programming degree (Yeah, Neverwinter Nights, I’m looking at you).
On the flip side, video game RPGs are either grind-happy dungeon crawls, like WoW, or completely scripted single player experiences, like the FF series. A multi-player computer-based RPG is a niche that is simply screaming to be filled. I think we’re just waiting for a good designer to come along and fill it.
“TTRPGs require you to get together with people …”
You know, after living for decades under the cloud of the antisocial nerd stereotype, I find it oddly refreshing to realize that a major reason for the decline of tabletop roleplaying is because the cool kids would have to physically gather with other people to play. Yeah, getting together with your friends face-to-face for snacks and recreation is so much lamer than sitting alone in your rec room in front of a screen sending misspelled text messages to people you’ll never meet.
“Yeah, getting together with your friends face-to-face for snacks and recreation is so much lamer than sitting alone in your rec room in front of a screen sending misspelled text messages to people you’ll never meet.”
It has nothing to do with how lame or cool it is, only with how hard it is. Getting five or six people to commit a five or six hour chunk of time every Saturday on a weekly, even bi-monthly basis, is increasingly difficult as the relative age of the fanbase rises. Roleplayers aren’t a bunch of lonely geeks in highschool with abundant free time to devote to mapping out the Underdark on grid paper anymore, they’re people with jobs and mortgages and families of their own, and tabletop roleplaying games are NOT a quick-and-easy pastime that lets you dip your toes in for a half-hour at a time the way, say, World of Warcraft does. TTRPGs require a commitment of time and effort that many other hobbies competing for the same market simply DON’T, and like it or not this is a factor that limits their appeal.
The L5R game is a licensed setting. It was a card game first, published by Wizards of the Coast. Every RPG incarnation has been licensed. (The original RPG designer, John Wick, cited in his designer notes that in the card game, characters died very quickly. So he wrote the game so player-characters would also die very quickly.) By contrast, 7th Sea was developed simultaneously as a CCG and RPG.
The elephant in the room? One of the grand-daddies of RPGs, still saluted as a classic today, is Call of Cthulhu, a 30-year-old license.
Nitpicking aside, we have rose-colored glasses. The 1980s and 1990s are littered with RPGs no one remembers any more, both licensed and unlicensed. All of this talk about the death of pen-and-paper RPGs ignores that companies like Palladium, White Wolf, and WotC still move millions of dollars worth of merchandise.
But without accurate sales figures to consult, this is all speculation. RPG sales aren’t tracked by any benchmarking service, so we don’t know if they move more or less units — or more or less dollars — than they did 10, 20, or 30 years ago.
“The L5R game is a licensed setting. It was a card game first, published by Wizards of the Coast.”
Because this is a discussion BY geeks FOR geeks I’ll just mention that L5R the CCG was actually first created by Alderac Entertainment and published by Isomedia. It was, for a brief time, under WotC’s umbrella when they purchased Five Rings Publishing Group, but Hasbro put the rights up for sale again and Alderac bought them back and have held them ever since.
“All of this talk about the death of pen-and-paper RPGs ignores that companies like Palladium, White Wolf, and WotC still move millions of dollars worth of merchandise.”
If Palladium moves “millions of dollars worth of merchandise” I will buy a hat for the sole purpose of consuming it. WotC? Yeah, okay. White Wolf? Maybe, though they’ve scaled back a lot recently as they focus on their upcoming MMO. Palladium? Not a chance. And after WotC and White Wolf, the numbers shrink FAST.
And no, you’re wrong: we DO know that RPG sales are, and have been, on the decline for a while now. Publishers have come right out and said so. You’re right in that they don’t give any numbers, but unless they’re all lying when they say “the market is shrinking and the money isn’t what it used to be,” then the market is shrinking and the money isn’t what it used to be. I mean, it’s not really hard to see that at one point D&D was VASTLY more successful then it is today and no amount of new Red Boxes or podcasts have managed to reverse that. And nothing will. RPGs, or at least D&D, was very, very popular and successful once upon a time and now it isn’t and probably won’t ever be again.
That doesn’t mean the hobby is DEAAAAAAD!!!…but this hobby has a number of hurdles that get in the way of attracting new blood which, to be perfectly frank, don’t really seem to be going away anytime soon because (and here we come ALL the way around to actually addressing part of MGK’s post) the people making up the bulk of the hobby ARE rather conservative and resistant to change that doesn’t happen gradually over the course of many years and they’re getting older and dropping out or trading in and new players aren’t coming in fast enough to replace them.
The internet has helped things in a number of ways, from allowing easy play-by-post games to allowing independent publishers to easily create and distribute good-quality games to fostering a sense of shared community and networking to simply keeping older games alive through secondary markets, retro-clones, and good ol’ fashioned piracy. The hobby will endure so long as enough people are willing to cling tenaciously to it, and geeks DO love clinging tenaciously to things. But that the hobby has shrunk and shrunk noticeably over the years isn’t something that can really be dismissed as conjecture at this point.
I have to back up what Kai said: it is way to hard to get even four people around a table to play D&D. Out of my high school gaming friends: three of them moved out of town and one got married. I had hoped that I would meet people in college that would swell the ranks, but the people I meet (which were about seven of them) were worse about showing up then my regulars and this was before most of them moved away. After college most of those new players moved back home and the one that’s still around is only still around because she lived around here before college. She’s an unreliable player as she has three different jobs which have odd hours. I know this hurts the industry as a whole because I’ve bought several rule books over the years, three of which we’ve never played and one which only got a couple of outings. When we (or maybe I, its been so long I don’t remember) finally put a halt to any other games until we finished my D&D campaing. Since then there are several settings I’ve wanted to buy because they looked like fun, but whenever I think “That would be great to play.” I have to remind myself that I’ve got no one to play the game with and keep my money in my pocket.
There’s also the fact that RPG texts are easily pirated, and that a collection of pdfs on your netbook or tablet weighs a whole lot less than the golf bag o’ supplements people would bring before.
Yeah, the original books are pretty, especially the new World of Darkness books, but the warezed version is so much more convienient. There’s a guilt factor about ripping off a moribund industry, but most of the RPG PDFs in my collection haven’t been read much more than I would’ve browsed them at a game shop.
I Despise MMOs as IMO they take all the crap I hated about RPGs (leveling, grinding, hack and slash) and don’t have any of the bits I like (world-building, complex plots, role-playing).
“Yeah, the original books are pretty, especially the new World of Darkness books, but the warezed version is so much more convienient. There’s a guilt factor about ripping off a moribund industry, but most of the RPG PDFs in my collection haven’t been read much more than I would’ve browsed them at a game shop.”
Ehhhh…not to completely derail things into Yet Another Debate on the ethics of internet piracy, and understand that I haven’t led a life entirely without sin myself here, but while I don’t believe internet piracy is responsible for all the evils people claim it is, the margins on roleplaying games being as thin as they are means that people being as willing to pirate them as, say, the latest big blockbuster video game probably ISN’T helping matters. Most roleplaying publishers these days offer their products for sale in .pdf format as well as dead tree (except, interestingly enough, Wizards of the Coast), and purchasing RPGs in .pdf format tends to be a win/win situation for everyone involved…the .pdfs are usually cheaper than a hardcopy AND it puts that money directly in the hands of the publisher, eliminating the hassles of distributor and shelving and shipping fees and all that. Not to be preachy, but if you want these folks to keep making the games you want then you need to vote with your wallet.
I’ve never done RPGs, but I do dabble in MTG. I will say from my personal experience that once I discovered MTGO (Magic the Gathering Online), I never looked back: instantly, what had been a somewhat arduous and time consuming task (going to the special place to play a game with people who sometimes were there and sometimes weren’t and sometimes wanted to play and sometimes didn’t and who were, let’s be honest, maybe kind of smelly racist assholes to begin with) became something I can do with the click of a button, instantly and anytime I want, 6PM or six in the morning.
I haven’t cracked a real-life pack of cards since I opened my account. I play A LOT more Magic now than I ever did before, when the most I could have hoped for was a couple uninterrupted hours at the game story away from my girlfriend. It was, admittedly, a bit difficult to get going – for some really weird reason they don’t have a Mac app so I had to install a Windows emulator on my MacBook – but now that I have it on my computer I play more than I ever did before. Also, the way the online game is set up makes it cheaper, too – you can instantly trade or purchase the cards you want when you have an idea for a specific deck without having to buy a ton of extraneous packs, end up with a dozen Bloodthrone Vampires when all you wanted was one Wall of Omens, and have to either pay awful store mark-up or trade, which was usually an unpleasant experience.
Plus, a lot of the people I used to play with were tournament-level computer science or machine logic PhD candidates who could kick my liberal arts’ ass up and down the street seven ways to Sunday.
I used to play Magic as well and I quit for pretty much the same reason. I was a mediocre player and could never seem to either master the intricacies of the game to produce devastating combos or allow myself the sheer insanity to purchase the rare cards that would improve my odds. I was halfway decent at forming broad, generalized theme decks but they simply were not diverse enough to work against the true masters.