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Ralph wrote:

Quote
At any rate, IMO Call of Cthulhu stands with GURPS as what I consider to be the two most damaging games to the development of the hobby (precisely because of their popularity). GURPS because it derailed the trend of customized game systems linked to their genre in favor of "universal mechanics" leading inevitably to the whole "system doesn't matter" dogma; and Cthulhu because of what it taught a generation of gamers on how story telling gaming should be (helpless players participating in a collosal illusion).

As someone who has never found what he's looking for in the system-linked-to-genre games, I (as I'm sure is predictable) see this in quite the opposite way. Oddly, and maybe importantly, in both cases.

GURPS doesn't show that "system doesn't matter." It just points out squarely that if you're in the mainstream Sim/Gam mechanics with vanilla Nar story-making you're basically golden in any FLGS. You see, just about freaking everything mainstream caters to you ... about equally minus *specific* mechanics. And guess what: System Doesn't Seem To Matter. You play Hero 5th. You play Mutants and Masterminds. You play Tri-Stat SAS ... and nope ... nope ... doesn't really matter. Seems ... 'bout the same ... what are those Forge weirdoes talking about?

When I played CoC it was almost always without modules. And you know what? Didn't teach me a damn thing about "how to play." I read the book. I read the adventures. I gotta disagree. Yeah, the modules didn't really inspire me. Neither did the AD&D modules--but if they had, it wouldn't be "teaching" so much as *enjoying* the way they worked.

Ralph, I also think yer doin' a huge disservice to the players by assuming that they aren't the ones choosing the game--if they are--and they are particiapting in the illusion, they're still in charge (telling the GM to "work us up a cool story" is fine. Being railroaded still isn't. I wonder if you're conflating one with the other).

But finally, both of these are so popular because they work. Becasue they result in superior experience for the people who dig them (and they're popular ... so what does that suggest?) Because when I play I'm interested in the GM's Intellectual Property (same as when I read a book by my favorite author--and if you go assuming I want to be railroaded when I play, or even particiapte in some kind of conducted all-roads-lead-to-rome/GM pre-arranging-results-behind-the-scenes/a-bunch-of-other-things illusion then that's a misunderstanding based on taking the analogy farther than I mean it).

Because for me (at least--and a buncha other people online--judging from posts) GURPS *is* a superior choice than the hypotetical perfect game for the genre that in many cases doesn't exist.

It's not like universal systems were screaminly popular when GURPS came out. It's not like Lovecraft was, you know, a top selling author. The "damage" you're seeing is, I think, the fact that as the industry stands you're at a narrow end of the bellcurve and wonder why "they don't play your music on the popular radio stations."

-Marco

QuoteIt's not like universal systems were screaminly popular when GURPS came out. It's not like Lovecraft was, you know, a top selling author. The "damage" you're seeing is, I think, the fact that as the industry stands you're at a narrow end of the bellcurve and wonder why "they don't play your music on the popular radio stations."

Well, you could see it that way I guess, Marco.

Or one could see that if gaming had taken a different path rather than the one it did it might not be a fringe, barely viable, low profit, niche industry today.  

You could see it in a way that suggests that just possibly more people would be playing, enjoying and supporting this hobby today if the industry hadn't made the choice to cater to the hard core fringe for the last 20 years.

"Both of these are so popular"...hardly.  

When I say these games were damaging to the hobby, I mean just that.  There was a point when gaiming might have reached the mainstream.  Might have become as broadly an enjoyed hobby as MMORPGs or LAN-party shooters.  Heck there was a time when there were 3 whole shelves of the game section in KMart dedicated to D&D.  It might have kept growing from there.

Might have.  But didn't.  Why?  Because gaming took a left turn at Hardcore Boulevard and doomed itself to perpetual insignifigance.

For me, I point to games like GURPS and Call of Cthulhu (among others) as being the signposts marking that choice of highway.  From that point on the formula was solidified and for the next 2 decades its been religiously followed.  Tweaked, altered, given a new paint job but essentially the same formula in game after game.  Result:  the hobby is right about the same size as it was 20 years ago.

Gaming is about the only industry I can think of where you can look at 2 decades of flat or nearly flat growth and then have someone (and far more someones than just you, Marco) point to GURPS and CoC and say "See how popular they are".

Sorry if that sounds horribly bitter; but thems the facts as I see 'em.

Ralph, are you seriously saying that GURPS and CoC catered to the hardcore audience, thus causing D&D to get pulled from KMart's shelves, and thus dooming the hobby to obscurity?

As if D&D itself were such a great thing for the hobby.  Or as if the whole D&D=Satanism thing were totally irrelevant to KMart's RPG-savvy executives.

Bottom line for me: soft-core gamers want entertainment.  They like pretty pictures and cool music.  Thus, as video games passed the Pong stage, they started moving away from RPGs.  The group who stayed were the hard core ones who want what only an RPG can give.  Products like GURPS and CoC didn't cause the shift, they responded to it (or at least rode on it).

Hi Ralph,

It's sort of an article of cannon around here that if games were more like, say, indie (sorry, alternative) designs, they'd be more popular. While anyone can hold any opinion on an alternate timeline they want, I think there are some serious questions of consistency there.

1. If the argument is that games would have moved to radical, rules-lite, GM-less, Narrativist design and that would've been popular then, well, who knows? But that's making an argument that one node of the GNS triad is destined for glory while the others are damning the hobby to FLGS'es. If anyone is saying that, then well, that's pretty extreme--and while it can be couched in SDM talk, the actual theory suggests that all three are necessary and equal.

2. The limiting factor for widespread tradtiona (and that means S/G) gaming (which you nail directly) is not players--but GM's. What do MMPORG's take out of the equation? GM's. What does host-a-murder remove from the equation? GM's. What do all kinds and brands of fantasy boardgames, single player computer games, mainstream speculative fiction and cinema remove from the equation? GM's (and maybe players in the last bit--but it proves that Lord of the Rings isn't of super-limited appeal).

GMing is an intellectual and creative exercise. It's probably an order of magnitude harder than being a player.

And what makes for a good GM? Matter of opinon. Maybe you think that a given system X "gives you" a better GM than system Y. As a GM, I agree. For me, X=GURPS. For a whole lot of other people X=GURPS. For some more, X=Hero. For some X=BRP. The popularity is there because it was, for us, a better way. So system does in fact matter. But not in the way you necessiarily want it to.

I think RPG's come in about like Chess. It's an intellectual exercise that just isn't going to appeal to everyone--it's going to have a medium level of popularity and that's where it comes in at the mainstream level of acceptance. I think in terms of Occam's Razor, that's a more likely conclusion than GURPS and CoC sinking the popularity ship.

-Marco

QuoteRalph, are you seriously saying that GURPS and CoC catered to the hardcore audience, thus causing D&D to get pulled from KMart's shelves, and thus dooming the hobby to obscurity?

Not at all.  What I'm saying is that the idea that RPing could today be a mainstream widely accepted hobby with order(s) of maginitude more popularity and acceptance is not an absurd what if.  The hobby was well on the road to making inroads into mainstream pop culture.

Then it stopped making those inroads and became relegated to a backwater footnote as far as "entertainment in America" goes.

There are a number of factors that contributed to that I'm certain.  Not the least of which is that the folks running the business side of the industry were not as business savvy as say Hasbro execs at identifying and targeting market segments.

But I do believe that one of the contributing factors (note I said the games were "damaging" not that they "caused everything") was that game design began to vear farther and farther away from what would appeal to the general public as a mainstream form of entertainment.

Quote from: MarcoThe limiting factor for widespread tradtiona (and that means S/G) gaming (which you nail directly) is not players--but GM's. What do MMPORG's take out of the equation? GM's. What does host-a-murder remove from the equation? GM's. What do all kinds and brands of fantasy boardgames, single player computer games, mainstream speculative fiction and cinema remove from the equation? GM's (and maybe players in the last bit--but it proves that Lord of the Rings isn't of super-limited appeal).

GMing is an intellectual and creative exercise. It's probably an order of magnitude harder than being a player.

That is a very interesting point, and worthy of further discussion.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, I'd frame things a little differently.  Its not GM's that those games are doing away with.  Its extensive prep and long "buy to play" times.

It takes a long time after the purchase of a game like GURPs before a GM is ready to run the game competently, especially if the GM isn't experienced with other games either.  It takes a long time to successfully prepare for a game even by a competant GM.

Even chess doesn't have this problem (and I'd say there are vastly more chess players than RPers VASTLY more).  Chess takes minutes to learn out of the box for the first time and less time to set up.  You can buy the game set it up and be playing almost immediately...not well...but playing.

MMORPGs are the same way, install it, log-on, and start playing almost immediately...again not well...but playing.

Only RPGs (and wargames) ask you to spend hours and hours studying the rules and then hours and hours getting the game into a format where you could start playing.

Those old D&D books that you could get at Kmart...you could pretty much start playing those right out of the box.  Character creation took almost no time, and with a module like "Keep on the Borderlands" you were off to the races almost immediately.

So I don't think its the GM role per se.  Its the truly yeoman's effort that games require GMs to go through to get from rule book to play session that's the issue.

To say that the reason RPing isn't more popular is because its more intellectual and creative than most people are interested in vears into the same territory as "RPers are smarter than the average person"...which, while as a RPer, I'd love to believe...just isn't the case.

There's plenty of smart creative people who simply don't see the value in RPing.  Some of that is certainly "different strokes different folks" and all that.  But some of it I think comes directly back to the direction RPing took years ago.

Ralph

Whilst I'm not keen on nailing GURPS and Cthulhu to the cross - in large part because of positive past play experiences - I do have to sound a hearty note of agreement here:

QuoteThose old D&D books that you could get at Kmart...you could pretty much start playing those right out of the box. Character creation took almost no time, and with a module like "Keep on the Borderlands" you were off to the races almost immediately.

Here I think you really have something in terms of a problem with how rpgs are put together.  I'm not sure GURPS/CoC are really exemplars of this problem.  But it is, I think, an issue in the take up rate of gaming.

I am probably going to cause so much trouble posting this but, well, we'll see.

Let me start by saying I am going to begin by comparing RPGs to computers. I am prefacing this because such an analogy is problematic. All analogies are. I am using it to point out a similarity between the computer industry and the RPG market.

I am stuck by Ralph's comments about prep time and see a similarity to older computer systems. Really old machines, like the Altair requires a "bootstrapping" proceedure before you could do any work. That is, you had to flip certain switches in a certain order before you did anything. I had read somewhere that Steve Wozniak had the Apple I's bootstrap committed to memory, but Apple turned it into firmware on a ROM so the bootstrap would load automatically when you turned it on.

I can see a similar issue with start time/accessibility. I suppose it can be expressed mathematically as the length of time it takes to start up T times the amount of effort required from the end user E equals the start up accessibility X  

T x E = X

My Windows XP machine can take a few minutes to start up, so that's a fairly high T or it feels like it. But all I do is press the power button to turn it on. That's a very low E. Getting X down was necessary to making home computers more mainstream.

Back in the day of the Altair, it was mostly the computer enthusiasts and hobbyists who were using it. I can imagine someone suggesting figuring out a way around the bootstraping and the other members of the computer club asking "why?" It's not *that* hard to preform the bootstraping proceedure, is it? Perhaps not but the average person, the mainstream market does not want to have to flick twenty switches before using a computer.

So lowering the X in RPGs would help them appeal to the mainstream.

However, I have my doubts that RPGs had ever been poised to enter the mainstream or that such a thing is even possible, really. However I don't think discussing the what if is going to get us anywhere. It's easy to argue either position and in the end, we'd still be where we started.

I hate to think of any game as "damaging" except for perhaps games that market itself as one thing and is another in play. Like V:TM. It sold itself as a "story game" whatever that means, so many thought and think it is how RPGs do "story" whatever that means.

Of course the only ones who noticed V:TM were vampire (the concept) fans and existing roleplayers. I don't think the mainstream has notice a single RPG besides D&D

I don't know how popular RPGs can be, and I don't know if anyone really does. I do think that fairly rules-lite systems (like OD&D, btw), with imaginative, eye-catching packaging, is probably the road to success with the mass market. Well, that and access to good distribution channels, and someone who already has a lot of money thinking they can make more out of it, all the usual capitalist stuff.

One thing that makes me wonder whether it really has to be a niche market are some of the stories I hear from old-timers like Bob Bledsaw of Judges Guild. In his original game, he had over twenty players, most of whom were workers at the factory and other locals in Decatur, Illinois. These people were so into it that they would follow Bob around, call his house, hang on to his car when he was going to go on vacation, etc. so they could find out what was going to happen next! We're talking serious emotional investment here.

So for all the reasonable arguments that it 'has' to be a niche market, there's at least one sociological observation that suggests it doesn't have to be. And when I look at these endless rows of tract McMansions going up here in the Midwest (and I know they're in Jersey and Cali too), it seems to me that the social isolation that produces is just the kind of thing that games ought to be able to break down a little in small gatherings - especially if they're fun and don't require a lot of ramp-up time.

I for one would love to know how highly atmospheric, intelligent horror roleplaying hurt the hobby. Call of Cthulhu is a signpost... in fact, it is the signpost... of the faithful rendering of a literary setting for roleplaying use. I refer to the original Basic Role Playing edition, of course, not the d20 iteration. I have been closely involved in the industry since the mid-1980's, and have seen nothing to support Ralph's assertions.

Several people have taken a bit of umbrage at that.  But I would direct your attention to the fact that I said "damaging to the development of the hobby".  Not "horrible game design that no one likes".  

To be clear about my point its not that CoC was a "bad" game, but rather it IMO was instrumental in defining what an RPG of the story based variety should look like...much as GURPS was instrumental in defining what RPG mechanics should look like*

While those definitions are appealing to many gamers, they serve (again IMO) as one of the barriers that stood in the way of the hobby gaining more mainstream success; and as a result the RPG "industry" in terms of size, growth, and revenue has been largely stagnant ever since.

I find it incredibly poignant that the single biggest thing to hit the gaming industry in years was the release of a new edition of the first big thing to hit the gaming industry.

I think these game's role in defining and codifying what a "standard" RPG looks like and influencing most every subsequent RPG release is fairly indisputable.  These two games were I think of paramount importance in helping set the direction of the hobby (and others as well to be sure).

Whether one finds that direction a good thing or a bad thing is perhaps a matter of personal taste, but I stand by the rather pathetic barely scraping along state of the RPG industry as whole as evidence for my choice of the word "damaging".


*no that doesn't mean that the characteristics that make up these games were the first, or that the given "style" of play didn't exist prior to them.  I'm not talking about where the idea was first invented.  I'm talking about when the standard began to be "carved in stone".  There were certainly cars for many years before the Model T.  It was hardly the first or even best.  But it set the standard on how cars would be designed and built from that point on.

That's the role I'm talking about.  The standard setters.  And musing as to whether the hobby wouldn't be larger and more profitable today if a different standard had been set.

Quote from: ValamirThen it stopped making those inroads and became relegated to a backwater footnote as far as "entertainment in America" goes.

There are a number of factors that contributed to that I'm certain.  Not the least of which is that the folks running the business side of the industry were not as business savvy as say Hasbro execs at identifying and targeting market segments.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I'd frame things a little differently.  Its not GM's that those games are doing away with.  Its extensive prep and long "buy to play" times.

It takes a long time after the purchase of a game like GURPs before a GM is ready to run the game competently, especially if the GM isn't experienced with other games either.  It takes a long time to successfully prepare for a game even by a competant GM.

Even chess doesn't have this problem (and I'd say there are vastly more chess players than RPers VASTLY more).  Chess takes minutes to learn out of the box for the first time and less time to set up.  You can buy the game set it up and be playing almost immediately...not well...but playing.

MMORPGs are the same way, install it, log-on, and start playing almost immediately...again not well...but playing.

Only RPGs (and wargames) ask you to spend hours and hours studying the rules and then hours and hours getting the game into a format where you could start playing.

Those old D&D books that you could get at Kmart...you could pretty much start playing those right out of the box.  Character creation took almost no time, and with a module like "Keep on the Borderlands" you were off to the races almost immediately.

So I don't think its the GM role per se.  Its the truly yeoman's effort that games require GMs to go through to get from rule book to play session that's the issue.

To say that the reason RPing isn't more popular is because its more intellectual and creative than most people are interested in vears into the same territory as "RPers are smarter than the average person"...which, while as a RPer, I'd love to believe...just isn't the case.

There's plenty of smart creative people who simply don't see the value in RPing.  Some of that is certainly "different strokes different folks" and all that.  But some of it I think comes directly back to the direction RPing took years ago.

I couldn't agree with you more Valamir.  Present traditionally structured rpgs target themselves at a small group of people who are willing and capable  of designing their whole lives around the hobby.  Game rules that require reading and understanding hundreds of pages ,play styles that require commitments that may last months into the future, and an insular and ingrown culture (that is very self satisfied with the situation) and makes no real effort at outreach, are the real factors keeping rpgs down, not the silly idea that roleplaying requires some brain surgeonlike intellect to understand  and appreciate.

Indeed my major priority in what constitutes a good rpg is what I call 'Roleplay NOW!' I firmly believe that any rpg that takes more that 15-20 to explain to people and to prep for  isn't worth the paper its printed on.  I also believe a complete and satisfying scenario should be playable in less than 2 hours, preferably in an hour.

 I  believe that any really revolutionary effort in the field of rpgs HAS to be directed outside the existing culture.  The feedback mechanisms that keep the rpg landscape on it's present path are too strong, the selection pressures to focused for any change to come about from within it.

For a more detailed discussion of my take on this issue, take a look at my essay, 'Rpg Structures and issues of Recruitment' (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6001&highlight=&sid=749705d1dac0dd4e5a8feda754931dd3)

I think the blame is being placed in the wrong place, if blame really needs to be placed anywhere. Neither GURPS nor Call of Cthulhu were damaging. It was the inability of designers to make games that were not built on assumptions based on those games.

I still have my doubts about any potential for mainstream success and these assumptions serving as a barrier.

Possibly it has deprived people who doggedly continue in the hobby but as not satisfied with it because they games they really want are not written or people who tried it and then left for that same reason.

Whether catering to these different tastes while it would be nice, whether that would make it mainstream or not remains to be seen.

So revolutionize the industry, Ralph, and tell us how you will single-handedly turn things around so we can cater to the lowest common denominator and thereby "save" the hobby. Not that the hobby will be worth engaging in, once that happens.

I think it's useful to cross reference this thread with one here (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=88215#88215).

To add another datapoint, from the ages of 11 to 16 there were very few people I knew as friends with whom I didn't game at one time or another.  We're talking I would say thirty people into gaming one time or another (unlike America, 11-16 represents a single school experience, so my social group was relatively static at that time).  Only, I think, one of those people just played once - others played from half-a-dozen sessions to the whole period.

I never made any particular evangelical efforts.  It was just a fun thing I did, we we're friends, the gaming was just part of those friendships.  It wasn't until sixth form, uni and after that the flow started going the other way (i.e. gaming with strangers, some of whom became friends).

Now, my point is: those thirty or so people represeted a fair cross section of people.  The only demographic it didn't really hit was girls (one female player that whole time).

So - that's just more anecdotal evidence to support the idea that gaming could be more mass-market than it is.

QuoteSo revolutionize the industry, Ralph, and tell us how you will single-handedly turn things around so we can cater to the lowest common denominator and thereby "save" the hobby. Not that the hobby will be worth engaging in, once that happens.

No one single handedly revolutionizes anything Michael.  I think there's alot going on right now, both at the Forge and at the tons of product to be found on places like RPGNow et.al. that didn't originate here that show a return to the idea of small passionate individuals contributing to the hobby (which was a hall mark of the early days of RPing).

I'm not going to stand here and tell you that games like Universalis and My Life with Master are the cat's meow and going to take the world by storm.  But I do think they (and many others with them) represent a look at the vast diversity of possible forms and formats gaming can go in.  And not just game design here either, but assumptions about ownership and distribution as well.

Is it possible now to overcome the stigma the public associates with RPing, the entrenched insular nature of much of the hobby, and to actually compete in the face of far more ways to spend ones entertainment dollar than there was in 1985.  Don't know.

But if you're going to retreat into the tired old "the more popular it is, the more it must suck" defense* as indicated by your "lowest common denominator" quip, then there really isn't anything more I can say to you on the issue.

*and the corrollary "I feel special and superior because I'm engaged in a hobby not many others appreciate, and I choose to think of that as if they can't appreciate it because they're not as sophisticated as me" attitude that often accompanies this sentiment.

Hmm.

The quote that kicked this thread off was discussing the "damage" done by GURPS by being a "universal system" that taught "system doesn't matter." (leaving CoC aside for a bit).

But I confess a minor amount of annoyance that we seem to have moved directly to: "the problem with GURPS was that it took too long to start up." (And not because it's "off topic"--it just seems kinda dodgy. Not that it *is* a dodge--just that on my side of the computer it sorta seems that way).

Okay.

The first thing that's clear is that if long start times (whatever they are) were a bad thing then the game should have died--or sold less well than the other, quicker start games out previous (certainly Top Secret combined both a mainstream genre with a small rulesbook, no?).

But market effects get trammeled in this discussion (people either point--eronously, I think--in the direction of network effects or decide that the forces of demographic segmentation are *so strong* with RPGS--as opposed to major blockbuster movies in the same segment--that superior products simply cannot be marketed).

So let's look at start-up time == damage to the industry. NOT a game with a big startup time is a bad game. This argument says that a game with a large startup time is a) popular with gamers and b) unpopular with everyone else.

Here's how I see it. Oh, and yeah: GURPS got named. Not some of the other usual suspects:

1. GURPS was not significantly more rules-heavy than Hero (and, y'know, Role-Master and a bunch of other games that did things like include cubing numbers (V&V) and square-roots for computing travel time (Traveler, IIRC) and stuff like that). What it didn't do was give you a default world out of the box.

So either:

a) It wasn't GURPS after all. The game that sunk the industry came earlier and was too complicated (GURPS was following the trend) --or--

b) It was GURPS because by not giving you a default world they increased startup time beyond all measure because you had to read a 128pg world book and buy High Tech and GURPS Magic and stuff just to get anywhere.

Do I have that right? Or is there a c) or d) or f)?

-Marco

I am more than open to discussing whether or not I've targeting the appropriate "culprits" or if there was some other game that fits the bill better.  But I think I made it clear above that what I was interested in identifying was the game that set the standard for subsequent industry development; and not "which game was more or which game came first".

Maybe GURPS wasn't the defining game...maybe it was Hero...or Rune Quest.  But IME niether of those games were of the "swept the industry" variety.  Throughout both my jr & sr high days as well as my college days, Hero was almost non existant and Rune Quest completely absent.  Now obviously there were people playing both of those and alot of them, so maybe this was just a geographical aberration.  Certainly would be an interesting topic to discuss.  At this point, I refer to GURPS because it seems to me to have far more wide reaching effects than either of the other two (and no this is not to say that there were no influential effects from the others).

I think the definitive game here was GURPS.  To replace GURPS with something else we'd have to establish a game that not only has the "standard" characteristics the industry came to expect in an RPG, but also was widely played and followed and mimicked to be identified as the real trend setter pre-GURPS.  What would be good candidates.


As for changing topics...well, one can't very well take a tangental comment that was kept intentionally brief because it was fairly off topic for the thread it was in, and expect that that brief line includes everything I'd had to say on the topic.

The issue for me is the game that set the standard for what a RP Design is supposed to look like and really represents the key fulcrum transition from the eclectic universe of games that had existed to the standardization of RPG design.

What do I mean by standard:  Many things, including (in no particular order of importance):  format of the book (including size and page count), reliance on the freelancer / publisher system of creation, attributes, and skills, and extras (ad and disads and such), careful definition and elaboration of gear and equipment, attempt to model "how things would work in reality", rule subsystems to cover a variety of special cases (fire damage, drowning damage, falling damage, vehicle combat, etc), enforced game balance among PCs, what an "adventure" looks like and how to prepare for one, the relationship between GM and players, the role of rules as defenders of territory between participants, mechanics that don't need to be customized to setting. etc.

There are certain "standard" answers to all of these that I think form the basis of what the typical gamer expects to find in a "complete" RPG.  GURPS is the system to me where we find all of these elements together in a game with a very widespread following, and one which subsequent designs actively set about to mimick.

Should this instead be Hero...or RQ, or RM.  Is GURPS merely a trend follower rather than the trend setter...maybe.  As I said, I'm open to discussions along those lines.

Hi Ralph,

Well, that's all good--and I think I'd agree that GURPS was a distillation of several emergant trends in the industry combined with an interesting take on "completeness" (which is the various sub-systems, the world-book/freelance authors, etc.)

Now, here's the question: Let's take GURPS as, (as you say), if not the first, the textbook case of universal sim-oriented game design.

What's the damage?

Is it that the listed design is too hard for people to get into?

Is it that it shows/teaches that "system doesn't matter"?

Is it that it sets an expectation for games like Over The Edge ("where's the vehicle combat system, man?")

What was the damage?

-Marco

By "damage" I specifically mean "raises the barrier to entry for new participants" leading to fewer gamers, and fewer dollars suppporting the industry.  

My hypothesis, as it were, is that there was a transitional period fairly early on in this hobby (for which I see GURPS and CoC as being poster children representatives of) in which that barrier was ratcheted up higher than it could have been (if design had gone right instead of left, so to speak), thus limiting the size of the hobby to a smaller niche than it might have obtained otherwise.

I think all three of the questions you ask at the end are symptoms of this.  

If the design requires too much up front investment of time before the payoff its going to appeal to fewer people.

If the design asks you to learn 100 pages of rules and then turns around and says "they really don't matter, change whatever you want" I think only the devotees really find that appealing.

If the ingrained expectations of these devotees cause alternative approaches to be squashed, or causes them to try to adhere to "standards" so they don't upset the critics, I think that just keep reinforcing that barrier by closing off doors.

So yeah, I'd answer yes to all of them.

Quote from: ValamirThe issue for me is the game that set the standard for what a RP Design is supposed to look like and really represents the key fulcrum transition from the eclectic universe of games that had existed to the standardization of RPG design.  

On the one hand, I agree with you that far too many RPG designs follow in well-worn tracks defined by (among other games) CoC and to some degree GURPS.  On the other hand, I think it is completely backwards to blame games like these (i.e. the "standard-setters") as doing damage.  

You are attempting to blame innovators, when what you should be blaming is the other non-innovative designs which chose to imitate rather than break new ground.  It's not like Chaosium forced other game designers to accept CoC as the standard.  Rather, other designers made it a standard by imitating rather than trying new approaches.  In 1981, Call of Cthulhu expanded the diversity of RPGs, being the first successful foray into the horror genre.  This was a good thing and was a boon to the industry.  

IMO, the blame falls not on the trend-setters, but the trend followers.  (Incidentally, I disagree with you on the importance of GURPS, but that is a side matter.)  To be fair, there have been various efforts to try new approaches: like Ghostbusters (1986), Prince Valiant (1989), Amber (1991), Over the Edge (1992), Theatrix (1993), and Everway (1995).  However, the results of these have not been very promising.

Quote from: ValamirThere are certain "standard" answers to all of these that I think form the basis of what the typical gamer expects to find in a "complete" RPG.  GURPS is the system to me where we find all of these elements together in a game with a very widespread following, and one which subsequent designs actively set about to mimick.

Should this instead be Hero...or RQ, or RM.  Is GURPS merely a trend follower rather than the trend setter...maybe.  As I said, I'm open to discussions along those lines.  

GURPS came pretty late to innovate in mechanics (1986).  By that time, Palladium, Chaosium, and Hero Games had already established the practice of house systems and what they look like.  GURPS simply took the next logical step to house systems and published core rules separately.  

So I do blame GURPS to some degree, for following trends rather than setting new ones.  To me, the key damage which GURPS did is that it resists improvement.  Because the books are not self-contained, they needed to keep the system the same in order to maintain backwards compatibility.  In contrast, you can see that Chaosium did some innovative things with its house system, such as Pendragon (1985).  This was much more difficult for GURPS.  It is interesting to see that some of the newer GURPS books are breaking this trend and including core rules in a self-contained package.

Quote from: ValamirBy "damage" I specifically mean "raises the barrier to entry for new participants" leading to fewer gamers, and fewer dollars suppporting the industry.

This, I believe, is just indicative of a general shift in the roleplaying industry: no longer making games for new roleplayers, but only for the existing gaming audience.  This is demonstrated by many games ceasing to publish "What is Roleplaying?" sections and simply assuming that newcomers to the game will be already familiar with roleplaying.  There is little marketing for roleplaying outside of magazines that cater to existing roleplayers.  Think of every major release in the past 10 years.  Besides games that built on an existing intellectual property (like Tolkien, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.), most were advertised to roleplayers and written for roleplayers.  The only one I can think of that didn't take this route is the new Marvel game, and that's because Marvel's directly involved with the game and wants to see it reach a large audience.

This also means that most games can be as complex as they want, because they have, in effect, a captive audience that is already committed to roleplaying.  They don't have to appeal to newcomers or be easily understood and explained.  Desity is seen, by existing gamers, as a positive thing.  There's more "meat" in the game to be explored.

So, I think gaming stepped onto this road a long time ago, but not because of CoC or GURPS.  It was an industry-wide choice, made by a whole host of publishers and gamers.  "Let's make games for people like us."

Hey John, glad to see you jump in.  I know you have a pretty extensive knowledge/database of gaming history to draw upon.

I'm actually currently inclined to setting that transitional period at somewhere in the mid 80s.  From my own recollection (which is a bit fuzzy because I was pretty young in the hobby late 70s / early 80s) supplemented by that least rigorous of investigative techniques --- the anecdote, the time before the mid 80s seems to be a pretty eclectic mix different ideas and techniques with the period of the late 80s and 90s becomeing more and more homogenous.

I tend to view the less than promising results of some of the games you mention as largely being the result of that growing homogenity which penalized games that didn't fit the mold.  I'm inclined to believe that those games may well have been more successful if that trend hadn't evolved as it did.  

It seems to me, at any rate, that OTE is actually a much more highly respected and admired game today than it was when it was released.

Hi Ralph,
I do wonder what the mechanism is that promotes homogeniety and penalizes innovation (especially considering that CoC was innovative, Vampire was innovative, Champions was pretty innovative--and all of these were *rewarded*--and fairly handsomely for it).

But let's look at the three questions:

1. Too hard to get into: this is hard to judge (and by saying that, I mean: maybe it's true). The big counter to that is V:tM. Widely carried in conventional stores with slick production values the books were, still, pretty damn big. It was hard to get into and opened new venues for gaming well above the D&D crowd. So it's a good counter example--but not a great one (although in the Artwork Does Matter essay it's a great one).

Also serving as counter examples is the fact that simpler systems have not done as well. Everyone loves Over The Edge. Few play it. Fudge is designed to be ultra-low BTE but it hasn't taken over.

Some people finger distribution (although my FLGS carries a pretty big spread so at least the *comics* guys get to see several games ... and the *magic* kids get to see a buncha different games--but when I go to Boarders ... oddly, I see things like Mech Warrior (WTF?).

Raven said that people buy crap and blames network effects. This, I think, is due to a misudnerstanding of network effects (yes, I know how they can be applied to people who "can't find a group" but network effects are ultra-weak in the RPG field compared to the electronics or software field where the term came from).

So ... maybe rules-heavy games push out rules-lite ones due to distribution channels. Maybe. But I see nothing conclusive there. But I'm not a major distributor ... maybe I wouldn't.

2. System Doesn't Matter. Well, GURPS isn't claiming that (quite the opposite, really)--but it may be rubbing several people's nose in the fact that if you dig GURPS you may dig Hero equally (or BRP or D20 or ...) Since those systems do fairly align, I think.

It's not "teaching a lie." It's, IMO, pointing out a truth (a pedantic truth, perhaps, but a truth nontheless.)

3. Completeness: I expect a game that I have chosen to satisfactorily resolve whatever I throw at it. It's a bonus if it appeals to me in more than one way.

Forex: vehicle combat (being that I'm making a vcbt sub-system right now)

A. I want to distinguish cool combat vehicles *in the system.*--that means if my character has a souped up car, I want it's faster-ness to be somehow illustrated in the system. So, for me, that's one requirement (and I don't think I'm alone there).

B. I like a bit of tac-challenge in my play--maybe not as focus--but I find the odd tactical combat cool (I will not say Gamist here since, cannonically, it isn't--and I'm therefore unable to articulate this really clearly)--but while I don't want a steady diet of tactical combat, I do, on occassion, enjoy it. So if a system can provide that, I'm impressed with it.

C. Having a vehicle/vehicle combat system that feels just like a man-to-man combat system would (SDM?) not (SDM?) be quite as good (SDM?) as one that works somehow differently--specifically to illustrate the differences in what is occurring (IMO/IME).

So if you put those three requirements together you get something that's likely to have a bit of a design section (telling you how to differentiate your car) and a bit of a combat subsystem (telling you how vehicular combat differs both in feel and mechanical handling)--and it'll probably be slightly more complex than "add up your good, subtract your bad, and roll" if you want tactical challenge.

While you don't have to get into cube-roots to do that, you are going to move away from OtE's generic resolution system at least somewhat, if not substantially.

Finally, I think that those three requirements are not only "common amongst 'true-gamers' " but are "common amongst anyone who will play an RPG." I find my newbies liking the tactical combat (so long as it's not overwhelming) and liking distinguishing themselves in system and liking a (say) martial arts fight to play out with a different feel than a firefight.

So I think that those design strategies are pro rather than con ... across a whole lot of "the board."

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoHi Ralph,
I do wonder what the mechanism is that promotes homogeniety and penalizes innovation (especially considering that CoC was innovative, Vampire was innovative, Champions was pretty innovative--and all of these were *rewarded*--and fairly handsomely for it).

I actually consider these games to be very similiar.  MECHANICALLY they are different.  But the differences are mainly in the form of different approaches to the same end desires.  How one determines ones attributes and skills differs between these three...but they're all built around the assumptions that having both is necessary...nor do they even question whether having EITHER is necessary.   These are all pretty homogenous in approach.

QuoteAlso serving as counter examples is the fact that simpler systems have not done as well. Everyone loves Over The Edge. Few play it. Fudge is designed to be ultra-low BTE but it hasn't taken over.

Relative sales figures here are pretty meaningless.  NONE of these games have ever been targeted at a mainstream audience so there's no way of judging which would have been the better seller if they had been based on actual sales numbers.  In my view gaming went down the path of catering to the hard core devotee...showing how certain games didn't sell well to the hard core devotee doesn't say much.  Of course they didn't.

Quote3. Completeness: I expect a game that I have chosen to satisfactorily resolve whatever I throw at it. It's a bonus if it appeals to me in more than one way.

A. I want to distinguish cool combat vehicles *in the system.*--that means if my character has a souped up car, I want it's faster-ness to be somehow illustrated in the system. So, for me, that's one requirement (and I don't think I'm alone there).

Spoken like a true hard core devotee.

I think that in the main what most people would expect in a game is radically different from what most gamers would expect.  The threshold for what is necessary to engage interest is alot different.

"somehow illustrated in the system" is a pretty broad brush.  A game targeted at illustrating a cool souped up vehicle for a mainstream audience would IMO have a decidedly different approach to this differentiation then one targeted to gamers.

A key problem we're faced with as designers, however, is that that mainstream audience is so dramatically turned off on RPGs that even getting them to want to try it would be a herculean effort.  Which is why game designers stick with the audience they already have and the cycle continues.  

I don't think it had to be that way; but now I'm not certain that it could be any other way going forward.

QuoteB. I like a bit of tac-challenge in my play--maybe not as focus--but I find the odd tactical combat cool (I will not say Gamist here since, cannonically, it isn't--and I'm therefore unable to articulate this really clearly)--but while I don't want a steady diet of tactical combat, I do, on occassion, enjoy it. So if a system can provide that, I'm impressed with it.

[snip]

Finally, I think that those three requirements are not only "common amongst 'true-gamers' " but are "common amongst anyone who will play an RPG." I find my newbies liking the tactical combat (so long as it's not overwhelming) and liking distinguishing themselves in system and liking a (say) martial arts fight to play out with a different feel than a firefight.

But that doesn't mean you need 100 pages of rules to accomplish it.  Don't paint the issue as the difference between "having interesting mechanics that are complex vs. having simple mechanics that are bland and boring".

There's a lot of room in between.

Further I would point out one counter point to this.  OD&D and AD&D.  Argueably the single most widespread popular RPGs of all time.  How was martial arts different from swords, different from bows, different from mounted combat with lances, different from steam powered war chariots in those games...not very.  So is that what people REALLY want.  Or again are we back to thats what devoted gamers want?

Hi Ralph,

GNS wise, I suppose Champions, CoC, and V:tM *are* pretty similar. But, IMO,  this is missing the forest for the trees. Not only did they appeal to vastly different sects of the gamer demographic, they accomplished their goals in vastly different fashions. Diametrically different fashions in some cases (V:tM's fixation on gothic music and literary quotes with lots of high-gloss art vs. Champion's line art and moderately dry mechanical focus).

The goal, of course, for all three, is traditional roleplaying. Yes. They are all RPG's. None of them are so far out of the box as to be "alternative." But saying they're all the same is the same as saying all indie games are "the same" because they're "trying to be different."*

They were, mostly printed on paper too. And made good use of (in many cases) serriffed fonts. They too involved dice. The similarities (and I would argue that V:tM made a moderately good a case for advocating something like vanilla Nar play) are more numerous than the differences.

But I think the differences are far more profound.

As for the vehicle system: You need about 74 pages to accomplish it, it seems. Maybe more if you do out a bunch of "threat vehicles" and don't stick them in the Monsters book. But I digress.

Something "for gamers" assumes that "What gamers want" is different than what "normal people want." I start by questioning this. Who are these gamers and what do they want?

I want the system that does what I outlined but does it in 10 pages. Considering that I have more than 10 pages worth of gear this doesn't seem likely (much of it with cool, flavor-ful names or interesting described-in-English effects, I would have to conclude that either "normal people" do not want a list of cool pieces of gear to choose from or perhaps that they would prefer a very small typeface).

The issue of tactical challenge is, of course the major issue. How much of a tactical exercise do I want combat to be? The answer is: as much as I enjoy and no more. Considering that the market for strategy games is far larger than the market for RPG's though, where are you going to take that?

You mention that in AD&D all combat is about the same--and maybe people want that--who knows? No numbers exist and anecdotal evidence is very hard to vett. But I do know this:

There is an argument that a certain type of mechanic is superior: the mechanic that is most closely bound to the important aspect of what it resolves (genre, setting, etc.).

I find it interesting that when this aspect is setting you like it. When it is situation, it seems you don't especially.

-Marco
* this is intentional misuse of the TF's definition of "indie." I didn't put it in quotes because while the speaker might be generalizing about most of those small-press/creator owned games, he most certainly thinks he knows what he means by "indie" and it isn't what The Forge means.

QuoteThere is an argument that a certain type of mechanic is superior: the mechanic that is most closely bound to the important aspect of what it resolves (genre, setting, etc.).

I find it interesting that when this aspect is setting you like it. When it is situation, it seems you don't especially.

I'm not sure I'm able to parse this correctly.  I certainly was trying to bring any personal mechanics preferences into the discussion.

In trying to find a context for this remark I read over my last post...perhaps my identifying you as a "true hard core devotee" carried too much of a me vs you connotation.  Certainly I would fall into the same category for the vast majority of my gaming experience.

I'm the guy who thought Dungeoneers and Wilderness Survival Guide were the pinnacle of game design evolution and who dismissed OtE when it came out as a piece of froofy incomplete crap trying to pass itself off as a legitimate game.  We spent several years grafting Top Secret SI rules on top of Car Wars so we could play an RPG with a real vehicle combat system.  I am not trying to paint the "hard core devotee" in a bad light; because at the time this transition was going on (mid 80s)...I was one lock stock and barrel.  I participated firmly in the direction the hobby went.  In 1990 I tossed Prince Valiant aside with a sneer while grabbing for the latest Vampire splat.

I'm just saying that going down that road and catering to gamers like me was probably not the best thing for the industry in terms of long term profitability.

Well, maybe not.

Certainly some things like Soap (with appropriate marketing) would be a good step in the right direction. I suspect the ultimate mass-market game would be played in 1-2 hours, contain a very low level of weirdness, and require little by way of GM. Maybe the story would be set up universalis style or like Mad-libs (we are actually considering doing a pack of "mad-lib" mini-scenarios for an anime book).

But I do agree: if a niche market can be identified, catering to it is not a primary method to expand one's cachet. Perhaps time will tell what the true market potential is for RPG's--and perhaps that will give us more insight into what an RPG really is (the game I outline above would maybe be fun once in a while--but it's not what I'm truly looking for most of the time).

-Marco

There is another possibility that RPG'ing is not a mainstream activity simply because it does not suit the interests of the majority of people, rather than due to 80's games influencing and shaping how RP'ing is done.

Let me address the first point, the first being RP'ing as a mainstream hobby.  First I think you have to define what you mean by making RP'ing a more mainstream hobby.  Is it acceptance value?  In that case there are many hobbies which have only niche audiences, and there should be no attemtpt to make them more popular (bungee jumping, street luging, skate boarding, certain gambling games, and even certain computer games).

Look at the movie industry.  Some of the top grossing films of all time are movies I haven't seen (ET and Titanic for example).  Why?  Because they simply held no interest for me.  However, the majority of people found something intersting about these movies.  Now here comes the important part.  Getting people to accept something and like it is a different goal than just getting people to tolerate it or be exposed to it.  

I admit that I wish more people would express interest in and enjoy certain genres or types of gaming style.  However, it would be folly for me to expect them to do so.  Instead, the best I can hope for is to showcase my ideas and hopefully they will come.  Getting out my ideas and letting people see them IS the battle.  Getting them to accept and like it however is up to the mainstream audience.  If they like it, great, but if they don't oh well.

So in this case, the mainstream simply thinks D&D IS roleplaying.  Perhaps this is because through whatever means they have not been exposed to different kinds of games.  Now who's fault is this?  I"m not sure...perhaps several.  It could be the gamers themselves for only choosing games like GURP's or D&D, therby only letting non-gamers see these kinds of games.  It could be the designers for not producing more varied game types and producing incestual bastardizations (clones) of previous games.  But to counter my own suggestion, I find blaming gamers themselves somewhat hard to swallow.  For example, if I loved martial arts movies, then I'm probably going to hunt and look around for different martial arts movies.  Without this inborn interest and curiosity, I might be stuck thinking the only kind of martial art movies there are are old 70's kung fu flicks, Bruce Lee and Jean Claude Van Damme.  Never mind Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao or Sammo Hung.  

So should we blame the designers for not being creative enough?  I think this is akin to the chicken and egg question.  On one hand, designers want to make money....and they know product X is succesful, so why not regurgitate product X?  It could also be the case that they simply think, well, product X IS roleplaying, so we just have to alter it because well, that's the only way you CAN make a game.  However, I think that's a discredit to the ingenuity and creativity of designers.  So that leaves a more easy to swallow answer that if games like GURPS and CoC have influenced game design, it's because it is what the designers themselves like.

In essence, people will gravitate towards what suits their perrsonality.  If someone is already interested in the hobby, then they will seek out as much variety as they can until they find something that appeals to them the most.  I think there already is a good deal of variety (at least if we count OOP games), so I think the the real battle isn't changing games they way they are now, but simply presenting them to the public in a way that will strike their fancy and make it seem socially acceptable.

I think I have a nifty little insight into all this. And I'm going to agree with Marco. Well, only insamuch as I disagree with Ralph on where to lay the blame.

As John points out, these games hit the shelves and were popular in their time, and still are today. So, the fact that follow ons were not so different isn't too impoprobable. But there's a problem here. If the mainstream was getting into RPGs, and then there was this left turn away from what RPGs were, then who was it who was buying these new RPGs?

It was us nerds, AKA, the GMs.

See, I've never seen a player buy an RPG. The only people that I know who've bought RPGs were GMs. Oh, sure, there are exceptions, but I'll bet that for the most part that GMs represent 90% of the market. So these are the guys to market too, right?

Well, there's your problem. See, the GMs are they guys for whom the "order of magnitude" of preparation is a neat thing. But then they take and present this new way of gaming to their mainstream players. And what happens? It dries up.

It's GM's not anticipating what their "mainstream" friends (or not caring) wanted to play that caused the problem, IMO. We did it to ourselves. By selecting more and more complex games with more and more prep time, play time, and other barriers to the "normal" folk, we sequestered the hobby from them.

We asked for GURPs. Hell knows I did. I was overjoyed when I got my first copy. Then I was surprised when it started to get hard to get players. I shoulda known it had something to do with that Cubing of the Mass in KG in the Damage die calculation in Villains & Vigilantes, but I kept telling myself that I could do all the math for the players. Nevermind that they were bored out of their skulls as I sat and did the calculations.

The designers can't be blamed, nor the games themselves. Things did take a left turn in the early 80s: right where we wanted it to go. It was our own shortsightedness that doomed the hobby to it's continued niche status.

OTOH, I have no problem with that.  

Mike

Mike, I think you make a good point about the game market: that only a small number of people we'd call gamers actually purchase product, and they're the ones who don't mind demanding or difficult material.

This puts the industry in a catch 22.  Cater to the ones who are buying and keep the status quo going, or cater to the ones who aren't buying in a futile attempt to change the status quo.  In the former scenario, you eke out a few sales.  In the second, you usually don't even do that well.

Of course, I still think Atari (followed by SEGA, Nintendo, and Sony) are more to blame than anyone else.

Anyway, there is no lack of products have tried to reach the larger audience with simple, quick and GMless games.  Take the "How to Host a Murder" games for instance.  Is it a dinner party?  Improv theater?  An RPG?  All of the above?  And they sold reasonably well, enough that I saw them in places like B&N and Wal-Mart.  

The bottom line is that RPGs cater to a relatively small segment of the population.  I don't think anything has particularly hurt the hobby.  It just hasn't grown much because that small segment of the population reached saturation pretty quickly.

Quote from: ValamirHey John, glad to see you jump in.  I know you have a pretty extensive knowledge/database of gaming history to draw upon.

I'm actually currently inclined to setting that transitional period at somewhere in the mid 80s.  From my own recollection (which is a bit fuzzy because I was pretty young in the hobby late 70s / early 80s) supplemented by that least rigorous of investigative techniques --- the anecdote, the time before the mid 80s seems to be a pretty eclectic mix different ideas and techniques with the period of the late 80s and 90s becomeing more and more homogenous.  

I suppose this is a pretty fair assessment.  While most trends were set earlier, the mid-80s at least still had a bunch of relatively user-friendly games like Marvel Superheroes (1984), Toon (1984), and Ghostbusters (1986).  

The early 80s had a fair amount of diversity. On the one hand, you had fairly complex games like Rolemaster (1980), Champions(1981), and many FGU games like Aftermath (1981).  On the other hand there was a push for more simplicity with games like Toon, Marvel Superheroes, Chill, and others.  

By the late 80s these differences essentially drew together.  The boxed set format like Marvel or Ghostbusters was abandoned in favor of a single core rulebook, increasingly hardbound.  Efforts at the espionage genre and other non-fantasy/scifi genres disappeared.  The simpler games like Toon all but disappeared, such that Vampire in 1991 could somehow pass itself as "rules-lite".  Having unified resolution mechanics made thicker rulebooks more palatable and the standard.  

On the other hand, I assume that there were market forces here.  The simpler games presumably didn't sell well, despite push from TSR (the only big company at this time) for their games like Marvel Superheroes and The Adventures of Indiana Jones.  Really, D&D was something of a fad which rocketed in popularity during the late 70s.  For example, E.T. (1982) portrayed ordinary kids playing D&D.  The 80s games tried different approaches to try to transform that fad into a lasting market, but none of them really took.  

Quote from: ValamirI tend to view the less than promising results of some of the games you mention as largely being the result of that growing homogenity which penalized games that didn't fit the mold.  I'm inclined to believe that those games may well have been more successful if that trend hadn't evolved as it did.  

It seems to me, at any rate, that OTE is actually a much more highly respected and admired game today than it was when it was released.  

Well, what would penalize them?  I don't see any reason to suspect those games were targetted by any group or company.  As far as I can see, they failed because they weren't viable.  And this is the dilemma of design: if you take chances and break new ground, you'll get a lot of failures for every success.  I think it's worth it -- then again, I'm not a game producer taking chances with my releases, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Quote from: jdagnaAnyway, there is no lack of products have tried to reach the larger audience with simple, quick and GMless games.  Take the "How to Host a Murder" games for instance.  Is it a dinner party?  Improv theater?  An RPG?  All of the above?  And they sold reasonably well, enough that I saw them in places like B&N and Wal-Mart.  

Well, I know a little bit about this (cf my Murder Mysteries page).  Though I don't have any inside sales information, it seems to me that the "How to Host a Murder" designs have stagnated even moreso than the tabletop RPG industry.  The main designs like Decipher's series are extremely formulaic, and they don't seem to get any promotion.  

They have some mainstream channels like WalMart because they are easy-to-use, but I wouldn't assume that they outpace the RPG market.  For example, Decipher seems to put more effort into promoting its RPG line as its Murder-Mystery line.

Quote from: Mike HolmesThe designers can't be blamed, nor the games themselves. Things did take a left turn in the early 80s: right where we wanted it to go. It was our own shortsightedness that doomed the hobby to it's continued niche status.

This is basically what I said in my post above, though not in these exact words.  So I agree entirely with Mike.  

Also, I think John's right, Ralph, that there was nothing to doom those simpler, more accessible games than the fact that they never found their audience.  I don't think this is because gaming doesn't have the potential to reach a large audience, but that those games never found the people who really wanted to play them.  Heck, I played Toon almost non-stop during middle school, with all kinds of people, including many who thought roleplaying was lame before playing Toon.  But they would never have encountered it without me and the other gamers showing it to them.

Quote from: MarcoI do wonder what the mechanism is that promotes homogeniety and penalizes innovation (especially considering that CoC was innovative, Vampire was innovative, Champions was pretty innovative--and all of these were *rewarded*--and fairly handsomely for it).

The answer has been hinted by others, but to put it up front, it's risk. Every innovation you put into a new product increases the level of risk. Sure, you are more likely to hit big if it all works together, but less likely to hit at all.

In Multiverser, one of the modifiers that sometimes comes into play is what we call a threshhold defense: the defender must roll the dice equal to or less than his defense skill, and then the attacker must roll his dice greater than the defenders but not greater than his own skill. Because a higher successful roll means a greater success, the threshhold approach eliminates all the low levels of success, leaving a much smaller chance of success but only with the big numbers.

Innovation is akin to a threshhold roll. Once you put it there, you've decreased the possibility that your game is going to be accepted as another of the games ordinary gamers pick up and play. You've got to make that roll high enough to succeed at all, against the possibility that you'll roll too high.

Well, something like that, anyway. The point is, games that are less innovative are aimed at doing what  has been proven to sell. Every game has to be a little innovative, or it's not really a new game; but the more innovative it is, the further it is from expectations, and the more likely it is that people who do look at it will be put off by the differences. Businesses like to be conservative--they like to publish stuff that is like stuff people are buying. In fact, Paramount made the first Star Trek movie because Star Wars was raking in big bucks for 20th Century Fox and they wanted to get into the space race quickly with something they already owned. Make something successful, and people will copy it to ride your coattails. Make something innovative, and everyone watches to see whether you're the next set of coattails to catch or the flaming wreckage to dodge.

--M. J. Young

Ok, I'm coming into this a little late, but here's what I've been trying to finish and post since Ralph made the following point:

Quote from: ValamirIt takes a long time after the purchase of a game like GURPs before a GM is ready to run the game competently, especially if the GM isn't experienced with other games either.  It takes a long time to successfully prepare for a game even by a competant GM.

Only RPGs (and wargames) ask you to spend hours and hours studying the rules and then hours and hours getting the game into a format where you could start playing.

When I bring an RPG book anywhere and there are non-gamers about I whom I know, they invariably ask, "What's that?"

When I respond, "A game." the answer is always (always) a look of fear and shock, accompanied by the statement, "I'd never play a game that required me to read something that big to play!" (or a similar)

RPGs, particularly mainstream RPGs, are confined to a niche industry because of the one things most game geeks prize: their size/page count/density of information. Unfortunately, these are not an asset, not for luring in the new consumer.

My own gaming group was struck by this last year, when two of the players meant to bring a new person into our group. They had a friend who was an absolute "Wheel of Time" fanatic, and who had expressed interest in joining our WoT RPG group, which she had heard about from them -- even though she had no idea what RPGs were beyond "a game of pretend."

So, my friends brought the WoT rules to her...I knew this was a mistake, but I didn't have the chance to warn them not to do it, and the next session they reported that their friend had taken one look at the rulebook and said she really didn't think she wanted to play after all. The exact same thing I've always heard.

I have found the only consistent way to get a new person into gaming is through verbal introduction, rather than textual or game-piece introduction. I have never seen the "Read This Book" method work as a lure for new gamers.

This is also why I always shake my head when I read those "What is role-playing?" and "How do you role-play?" bits in the front section of $30 hardcover games. The text is useless and annoying because it doesn't apply or inform the vast majority of those individuals who purchase the item.

It would be like placing the basic instructions on computer-use with a server -- wasted paper: the folks who are going to be buying, setting up, and dealing with that server invariably already know the information given.

You see, I would bet my left leg that had the woman in the anecdote been invited to a session, asked what kind of person she'd like to play -- ie: "I'd like to play an Aes'Sedai (and etc.)" -- and had a blank sheet of paper handed to her on which to write information about her character as it was necessary to the game (ie: attributes, skills and levels of such, weaves known, etc) we would be plus one player right now, regardless of the size of the rulebook.

The same if the tactic had involved a blank sheet, or one already filled out, with the statement about it, "Don't worry about the numbers. We'll explain stuff as it comes up. Just tell us what you want her to do and what she says and does."

I have never seen the "Read This Book" method work, but this verbal introduction through play seems to work every time, when done correctly (that is, the individual is not swamped with information or rules).

So, when Marco makes the following off-hand comment in the same thread:

QuoteIt's sort of an article of cannon around here that if games were more like, say, indie (sorry, alternative) designs, they'd be more popular.

I am forced to reply: The only reason that is thought is because indie games, as a whole, tend to be more accessible intellectually to the public than traditional games, precisely because of their typical anti-gamer bias: short page count, simple game systems, and non-"campaign" orientation (not that this is true of every indie game).

The non-gamer is not likely to blow money on a $30 rulebook, or even a $20 rulebook, because that's a good chunk of money they could spend on something they already know they like, or something they think they could get into.

Hence my anecdote above about the friend and our gaming group. A "simple," interesting RPG existing as a small, digest-sized book is the hook for new players. Or a boxed "board" game, with a short rulebook of only a few pages of concrete rules.

Quote from: greyormRPGs, particularly mainstream RPGs, are confined to a niche industry because of the one things most game geeks prize: their size/page count/density of information. Unfortunately, these are not an asset, not for luring in the new consumer.  

While I agree with this to some degree, I think it oversimplifies.  Lack of data can just as easily kill a game.  There are plenty of minimalist RPGs which have been published over the years, and none of them have done particularly well in breaking in new consumers.  Hand a bunch of non-gamers a copy of "The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen", "Pantheon and Other Games", or "Puppetland" ...   They are likely to be pretty lost as to what to actually do.  

I've heard this logic before.  For example, in Interactive Fiction #4 (1995), Jonathan Tweet carefully explained his plan about how Everway was going to appeal to new consumers by its simplicity.  However, despite plenty of initial publicity and gloss from Wizards of the Coast (who were riding high on Magic at the time), the sales were apparently quite poor.  

Quote from: greyormThe only reason that is thought is because indie games, as a whole, tend to be more accessible intellectually to the public than traditional games, precisely because of their typical anti-gamer bias: short page count, simple game systems, and non-"campaign" orientation (not that this is true of every indie game).  

The non-gamer is not likely to blow money on a $30 rulebook, or even a $20 rulebook, because that's a good chunk of money they could spend on something they already know they like, or something they think they could get into.  

Hence my anecdote above about the friend and our gaming group.

While I appreciate anecdotes, they don't constitute much evidence.  Jonathan Tweet gave very similar anecdotes when he predicted that Everway would be a success to draw in newcomers.  This was also the logic behind Hogshead's "New Style" line, which also has a small niche of players but doesn't seem to have broken out in any way.  

I think that there is something flawed in the logic here.  While I would like these to succeed, but they don't seem to have done that well.  Meanwhile, a game like Vampire is one of the few which seems to actually have drawn new blood into the hobby (if you'll pardon the pun).  I think that $30 cost and moderate rules are not nearly that big a barrier.  The far more important barrier is the newbie reading at the book and trying to picture what play is actually like.  How do you generate adventures, and how do you resolve real situations?  A great many indie games skimp on absolute essentials for beginners like "Who is this GM person?" and a sample adventure.  

While I don't like where the mainstream is these days in terms of being newbie-friendly, I don't think the answer is as simple as shorter rulebooks.

Quote from: M. J. YoungThe answer has been hinted by others, but to put it up front, it's risk.

*snip*

Well, something like that, anyway. The point is, games that are less innovative are aimed at doing what  has been proven to sell. Every game has to be a little innovative, or it's not really a new game; but the more innovative it is, the further it is from expectations, and the more likely it is that people who do look at it will be put off by the differences. Businesses like to be conservative--they like to publish stuff that is like stuff people are buying. In fact, Paramount made the first Star Trek movie because Star Wars was raking in big bucks for 20th Century Fox and they wanted to get into the space race quickly with something they already owned. Make something successful, and people will copy it to ride your coattails. Make something innovative, and everyone watches to see whether you're the next set of coattails to catch or the flaming wreckage to dodge.

--M. J. Young

I don't think it's risk. There are all sorts of things companies do on a daily basis to try to limit risk that the RPG industry mostly doesn't (focus groups, target market research, limited release to check response, etc.). If it were risk we'd see nothing but pop-fiction licenses and, maybe, no RPG's at all (I think on a risk-benefit analysis almost anything else is a better bet).

RPG's are a labor of love, MJ. You know that as well as anyone here.

And risky RPG's get made and released all the time. Whether it be Unknown Armies, Over The Edge, or Prince Valliant ... those are radical (yes, I know, they're not Narrativist, but that's hardly the only way, is it?).

Because I can tell you that V:tM *was* innovative. And it was expensive. It was new, it was different. It appealed to people who didn't play traditional RPG's. It was successful. It even tapped into a Narrativist vein (boy, it's hard to talk about it without some kind of pun) while retaining the traditional mechanical outlook.

The only way it wasn't an "alternative" design was from a GNS mechanical perspective.

-Marco

Some good stuff here.  It won't be any surprise that I think Raven's comment above is pretty spot on and highlights what I think one of the key choices the industry made that damaged its own growth potential.  

John, you're point is a good one, but I think the failing of games like Everway commercially  is a failure of marketing and distribution not necessarily of the game.  Tweet designed a game to appeal to non gamers and then it got sold through traditional gamer channels.  Its failure was almost a forgone conclusion.  I think the built up prior history of the hobby that had shut down most (not all but most) non gamer focused channels, and the lack (as Marco notes) of anything resembling real corporate marketing campaigns is going to make it extremely difficult for a game to break into the mainstream at this point (one of my points in this thread is that I think there was a time/opportunity in the hobby where this wouldn't have been true / as bad).  If Hasbro got a hold of Everway, gussied it up, launched an ad campaign, and slammed it through their distribution channels it probably would have been one of the most successful RPGs of all time (it still would have likely been a tiny drop in the bucket for Hasbro who would have then promptl dropped it, however).  The point being that what it takes to reach a mainstream audience is a lot more and alot more expensive than what it could have taken 20 years ago.  


To clarify some of the aspects of what I've been talking about.  I'm not nostalgically envisioning some ideal time where the games were perfect and wonderful and then they got bad.  Rather there were alot of strands about what games were and how they were put together that arose in the 70s and early eighties.  By the mid eighties several of those strands got braided together into "industry standard".

Imagine instead how different the game industry would have looked if different strands had been pulled together.  Say FGU's boxed sets with OD&Ds booklet size books (which were standard for alot early games), with the one man band production of Jeff Dee's V&V, with the stripped down "just the essentials" mechanics of Toon.  Envision for a minute what the rope braided from those elements might have looked like if that had become the industry standard.  One can repeat this excersize with just about any combination desired.  I'm not about to pick one and try to claim "if only...then everything would be perfect today".  Nonsense.

The point is that there were many strands to chose from and the ones that were chosen were almost all ones that shut the industry off from the broader market.  Mike's points above about the process being GM driven is a good one.  I'm in complete agreement with that.  But GMs didn't determine which strands became the rope.  GM's just tugged on the strands they liked.  It was the game companies that decided to respond to that tugging and cater to a particular niche of the overall potential market.  

If the computer industry had done the same thing we'd still be using unix machines...or punch cards.  The hard core computer users of the 70 and 80s had no real use or desire for mice and GUI interfaces.  Microsoft didn't simply cater to the existing hard core base to deliver more of what they wanted.  They went out and opened up the industry to the mass public by delivering a product that appealed to people who didn't even know they wanted it.  Gaming, by contrast, catered to the hard core base of existing devotees, and so...never grew beyond that base.

As for the comments that started this off.  I'll admitt my choice of calling GURPS "damaging" was perhaps a bit intentionally controversal.  But I do firmly believe that it is the poster child for this process of giving the hard core niche exactly all of the specifications they want, without worrying about features that would have made it appealing to a broader range of customers.  For me it was GURPS that took all of the individual and pairs and trios of strands and selected for those that the hard core was clamouring for and brought those strands together into the rope that we've been hanging ourselves with ever since.

So now what.  I guess this is the point where I should be launching into a plan of action on how to make things better and what we need to do about it.  Honestly.  I don't know that's its possible to do anything about it.  I love this hobby but I think the ship has pretty much sailed on any future chance of being mainstream.  I think there's alot that can be done to help make the industry healthier...but will it ever be "popular"...I think the window is largely closed on that opportunity.  I think there was a time when the window was open, but IMO it shut a good while ago (to continue that analogy a bit, I think V:TM made a great effort to take a crowbar to it and pry it open again, but it was tied down by that rope of standards and got yanked back before it had crawled more than halfway out).


One final note.  The comments about what's "innovative" and such I think are completely missing the mark.  I'm not talking about innovation per se.  The process I outlined above wasn't one of "stagnation" vs. "innovation".  It was the normal, expected, process of standard setting that every industry goes through and by and large is a good thing.  What standard will DVDs take, what standard will MP3 players use, etc.  Most industries start with a shotgun blast of ideas and eventually must evolve a standard to be viable.  So the issue to me is that the standard we chose as a industry (as exemplified by games like GURPS and CoC) was not a good choice for the continued growth of the industry...it may well (and likely was) a great choice for many of those already here.

The failure of Everway, as John Tynes wrote, was that they couldn't pack a GM in the box.

The failure of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was that Baron Munchausen is unknown to 90% of non-gamers.

As far as I know, Soap is the only game ever produced that meets all the criteria listed in this thread for a game to be loved by the masses.  How is it selling?

EDIT to note cross-post with Ralph and Jonathan's comments above.

Quote from: John KimWhile I agree with this to some degree, I think it oversimplifies.  Lack of data can just as easily kill a game...

...There are plenty of minimalist RPGs which have been published over the years, and none of them have done particularly well in breaking in new consumers.

I agree, however I think most of your answer is confounding dissimilar items; 1) what the problem is, and how people go about 2) fixing the problem. More to the point, there's two parts to RPGs: their design, and their marketing.

In looking at your responses about "what happened to product X," I don't see the relationship of your points to one another: what I see is arguably good design coupled to poor marketing to the intended audience (non-gamers / current non-consumers). What I do not see is, as you appear to be claiming, "Minimalist systems aren't the answer because they didn't sell." This is a leap of logic that simply doesn't pan out when all the variables in-between are examined.

The biggest part of the problem is that RPGs aren't pitched to the mainstream with the regularity via wide media channels and common market exposure via everyday stores. You can have the greatest game in the world, that would appeal to the average consumer, and if they don't know about it, they'll never buy it.

If your consumer doesn't know your product exists, then of course you won't sell it to them...which explains the various publication attempts you have brought up (Hogshead, et al). If the intended consumer doesn't even know about the product, of COURSE you won't sell any copies...you can't interest new buyers without advertising to them.

RPGs don't advertise in the places they need to: television, magazine, and newspaper inserts. Same places video games do. Repeated exposure in everyday life.

They aren't available in the places they need to be: Target, Wal-mart, etc -- the same places video games are available at. Stick the RPGs right up there among the board games! Repeated exposure in everday life.

Marketing, of course, is only half the picture, and thus here's the question you need to ask yourself during the design phase of an RPG you intend to be for a wide audience: knowing nothing beyond the packaging and the size of the product, given a choice between (say) Puppetland and D&D 3E, which would the average consumer choose?

What's that tell you? Maybe a little about style preference, but change the question a bit: given a choice between Blackjack and Fizzbin, which is the average consumer more likely to choose?

I claim the "minimalist" approach does work, and I cite board games. Board games are established "games"...everyone knows what they are and how they work (board, pieces, quick rules), and are thus willing to buy them when one of them catches their eye.

People don't want a lot of rules...it's their free time, and they'd rather play than study (which is what book-learning rules for a game is perceived as). Only gamers want lots of rules and mental acrobatics before the fun even begins.

To an extent, this is one reason why card games are so wildly popular, and moreso than RPGs: simplicity. No one is afraid of cards. Even "weird" CCG games like Magic:tG is "just cards"...and that's a bonus to the consumer. The other reason: all the hot card games are available or advertised in all the places I described above.

So, how do we explain Vampire's success?

Vampire had one thing going for it: wide exposure via the wildly popular Goth subculture fad of the time.

But how many people who began playing actually bought the book for $30?

I'll bet it was those who would become the GMs and Storytellers, not the large influx of players, who were created BY the purchaser rather than by the book.

Why do I say that? Typical gamers, and consumers, don't spend money they don't have to: the GM buys the book, everyone else borrows it. This occurence is a well established (and unfortunate) fact of the hobby. That's the status quo, and I've no reason to believe otherwise without evidence.

Now, here's an intersting comparison to our hobby: console video games. These lost out for a long time because of their lack of instruction, their difficulty for the average consumer, and their lack of mainstream marketing.

Apparently, the industry learned from this and is doing things now such as: including tutorials in their games, as part of play and marketing up the wazoo in traditional wide media channels. The difficulty levels are still too high, but you see bigger sales to non-traditional console gamers than you did even a few years ago.

The console video game industry has figured all this out...so why haven't we?

What we have with Everway was an attempt to fix the problem solely by redesigning the game, and then marketing it in the same old channels, hoping that somehow the intended audience would find it.

Had the video game industry done this, and followed the logic you've used "not selling = the fixes weren't the answer" would be meaningless because the marketing would have been to the wrong people (those already buying the current games, who required no "fixes" to them).

QuoteI've heard this logic before.  For example, in Interactive Fiction #4 (1995), Jonathan Tweet carefully explained his plan about how Everway was going to appeal to new consumers by its simplicity.

Everyway is anything but simple. I own Everway. It isn't simple: if I can't teach it to my 7 year old, it isn't simple.

Everway is the antithesis of what I've described as marketable to a wide audience. In fact, it suffers from being too indigestible to the average consumer, and containing too much text product.

And from what you describe, it sounds as though Mr. Tweet was expecting that his design would sell itself...call it marketing naivete on his part. The fact that gamers don't swarm to the hobby via buying production books is irrefutable. Consumers prefer less complex games (or introductions), and I base this on personal experience in the hobby, particularly in trying to interest new players as to what has worked and what has not, and upon successful products in other markets (similar and dissimilar).

So, again, there's a two-pronged assault that needs to occur for gaming to attract a wider audience, which has thus far failed due to the use of only one prong in any given situation.

Quote from: greyormWhen I respond, "A game." the answer is always (always) a look of fear and shock, accompanied by the statement, "I'd never play a game that required me to read something that big to play!" (or a similar)

RPGs, particularly mainstream RPGs, are confined to a niche industry because of the one things most game geeks prize: their size/page count/density of information. Unfortunately, these are not an asset, not for luring in the new consumer.

My own gaming group was struck by this last year, when two of the players meant to bring a new person into our group. They had a friend who was an absolute "Wheel of Time" fanatic, and who had expressed interest in joining our WoT RPG group, which she had heard about from them -- even though she had no idea what RPGs were beyond "a game of pretend."

So, my friends brought the WoT rules to her...I knew this was a mistake, but I didn't have the chance to warn them not to do it, and the next session they reported that their friend had taken one look at the rulebook and said she really didn't think she wanted to play after all. The exact same thing I've always heard.

I have found the only consistent way to get a new person into gaming is through verbal introduction, rather than textual or game-piece introduction. I have never seen the "Read This Book" method work as a lure for new gamers.

This is also why I always shake my head when I read those "What is role-playing?" and "How do you role-play?" bits in the front section of $30 hardcover games. The text is useless and annoying because it doesn't apply or inform the vast majority of those individuals who purchase the item.

It would be like placing the basic instructions on computer-use with a server -- wasted paper: the folks who are going to be buying, setting up, and dealing with that server invariably already know the information given.

I know this is absolutely true because I have experienced it over and over again in my efforts to get the non hobby shop crowd into the hobby.
People DO react negatively to the size and amount of prep necessary to get into rpgs.  I regard this as a bedrock fact.

I also regard as a bedrock fact that arguments about the relative popularity of 'high crunch' games are irrelevant because non-gamers never see the rules-lite games. They are soley marketed in places where the only people who see them are hard core game.

The 'read this book' model doesn't work because very few people want to 'read this book'. They look at it , make a rueful face and put it down because they don't want to perform an activity that looks more like boning up for a physics final in their spare time.

Quote from: quozlThe failure of Everway, as John Tynes wrote, was that they couldn't pack a GM in the box.

The failure of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was that Baron Munchausen is unknown to 90% of non-gamers.

As far as I know, Soap is the only game ever produced that meets all the criteria listed in this thread for a game to be loved by the masses.  How is it selling?

90%? I think you are being charitable here, in my estimate it would be more like 99.99999% !

Just what masses are seeing it or have any chance of hearing about it? Hell i'd say 90% of the people on rpg.net have never heard about  Soap and they represent the hardest of the hard core of the subculture.

Quote from: b_bankhead

Quote from: quozlThe failure of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was that Baron Munchausen is unknown to 90% of non-gamers.

90%? I think you are being charitable here, in my estimate it would be more like 99.99999% !

Just what masses are seeing it or have any chance of hearing about it? Hell i'd say 90% of the people on rpg.net have never heard about  Soap and they represent the hardest of the hard core of the subculture.

Yes, I was being charitable.

As for Soap, I'm genuinely curious at how much exposure Wingnut Games is able to give it.

To make a comment about Everyway's marketing, it was carried by Kay Bee Toys for a while. I bought mine whenthey clearenced priced it to $5.00 from KB.  So it was available in mainstream channels. It just wasn't picked up by the mainstream. And most roleplayers had no idea what to do with it. Character creation by looking at a picture? Later, dude.

Quote from: Jack Spencer JrTo make a comment about Everyway's marketing, it was carried by Kay Bee Toys for a while. I bought mine whenthey clearenced priced it to $5.00 from KB.  So it was available in mainstream channels. It just wasn't picked up by the mainstream. And most roleplayers had no idea what to do with it. Character creation by looking at a picture? Later, dude.

How many people walking into Kay Bee toys even knew what Everway WAS or was for?  Marketing consists of more than putting something on a shelf. And more than putting it on the back shelf of a closeout store at that.

And by the way I used to create characters by looking at pictures all the time.  Some of my favorite rpg characters have been derived from artwork.

Quote from: b_bankheadHow many people walking into Kay Bee toys even knew what Everway WAS or was for?

My point exactly. Everway got into mainstream sales channels, not unlike D&D products in K Mart, but this was not enough to sell it to anyone. Getting a product into a store alone doesn't sell it. It needs to be promoted. You have to get people to want it.

(Actually, remember how D&D products were cropping up in KB at significant markdowns? Unless I am totally wrong, this was due to TSR's distributing deal with Random House. This eventually led to TSR going bankrupt again and then bought up but Wizards of the Coast)

Sorry for weighing in so late in the thread. It's been a very interesting discussion on all sides.

To illustrate how I see the problem, I'm going to step back to the exchange between Ralph and Marco about systems for the creation and/or description of vehicles.

Here's the problem. I'm a player (possibly but not necessarily the GM) and I've evolved a situation in which further exploration requires the introduction of an appropriate and cool vehicle. Perhaps because the player-characters want to build or obtain one, perhaps because they're about to encounter vehicle-borne enemies, perhaps for some other reason. Doesn't matter why. The question is, where does the vehicle come from? In other words, how do I and the other participants go about imagining the vehicle?

I submit that all answers to this question that are embodied in current role playing game systems and resources have drawbacks that disqualify them from "mass market appeal."

75-page vehicle construction rules: Too hardcore. Too many rules to learn; scares off the potential players when they see the book.

75-page rules, but the GM designs the vehicle beforehand: The GM must then force the situation to match the vehicle. Railroady.

75-page rules, but the GM knows them so well he can design and describe the vehicle off the cuff during play to match the situation: Great, if you have the genius GM. But you're "mass market" players, so you don't.

Big Sourcebook Of Vehicles: Too hardcore.

Big Sourcebook of Vehicles, but the GM chooses the vehicle beforehand: Railroady.

Big Sourcebook of Vehicles, used by the GM on the fly during play. It's awkward; the tool wasn't designed for it, so you still need the genius GM.

Rules-lite, just pick a few key stats and the rest is description: Unsatisfying. As a mass market newbie role player, it's not enough for the system to just let me do what I want, it has to take what I want and amplify it and tell me how cool it is. Basically, the problem John Kim described: doesn't tell the players what to do. Or more precisely, doesn't give them feedback that confirms that what they're doing is cool. (And if you think that's an absurd expectation, think again about what "mass market" means.)

Rules-lite, GM facilitates the imaginative heavy lifting and/or provides the hey-that's-cool feedback: Great, if you have a GM who knows how to do that.

Rules-lite, overt player consensus mechanics: "Huh? We just kinda vote on what the vehicle is like? What kinda game is that?" Role playing without the semblance of objectivity in the imagined space is not mass-market accessible; really, it's hard-core in a different way.

So, my surprising conclusion is this: Mass-market-accessible role playing games haven't been invented yet. That is to say, not in any general-solution way. You can't portray any setting, style, or genre you want in a role-playing game and have it be mass-market-accessible. There is no mass-market-accessible role playing game system that has customizable vehicles, for instance.

There is one role playing game that is anywhere close to an unquestionable mass market success: AD&D "1e", the original three 1987-78 hardcovers only. Which I'm going to refer to as MMPHDMG after those three books.

The key to the mass-market accessibility of MMPHDMG is that the setting is a microcosm, complete and yet amazingly limited. Okay, there's a lot to read in those three books, but when you're done you've been told literally everything there is to know about the setting. The rules tell you all the abilities your character can have or might eventually obtain, every creature dangerous and otherwise, every object your character might come across in your adventures, what your character eats for dinner and how much it costs.

Sure, to some, the lists and descriptions in MMPHDMG are only a starting point, only a limited window into a much larger quasi-medieval fantasy universe. But the important thing is, they don't have to be. Does the world contain oppossums, outhouses, or dandelions? You can answer yes or know as you like, but you can also choose not to ask the question. Even without a module or other supplemental materials, the GM and the players alike can, if they so choose, make every single decision needed to set up and play the game, as a selection of one of a small number of specifically enumerated options. Need to design a non-railroady adventure? Grab some graph paper and start placing rooms, doors, corridors, pits, and poisoned needles. Need a complication on the fly? Pick a monster. There are only a few hundred of them, which you can easily narrow to a handful based on terrain and experience level. Time to reward the players? Roll on the treasure tables.

You want a vehicle? Here's a horse. You want a bigger vehicle? Here's a big horse. You want an armored vehicle? Here's a horse wearing armor. You want a vehicle with cargo capacity? Here's a horse pulling a cart. Simple, simple, simple. Limited as hell, but it doesn't look nearly as limited as it is, because it's not like you were expecting to find humvees or learjets in a "medieval fantasy" world.

Only a few role-playing systems ever had this quality of "finite setting." Besides MMPHDMG, there was Tunnels and Trolls and The Fantasy Trip. Paranoia and Toon came close, and Call of Cthulhu was in the ballpark. These were either too overshadowed by MMPHDMG or too special-interest in genre to be mass market contenders. Settings and genres with wider recognition, like space adventure (Traveller), just couldn't be (or at least weren't) summed up in easily managed lists and tables the way D&D's medieval fantasy was. Even the TSR other-genre extrapolations (Boot Hill, Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha) were so much more open-ended that you just couldn't play them with the same techniques as MMPHDMG -- or if you did, such as by re-creating dungeon crawls with alternate genre trappings (a lost mine in Boot Hill, a derelict spaceship in Metamorphosis Alpha), it felt like you were missing the point of the genre.

Alternatively, you could use modules (which, because they had to constrain an infinite world of possibility into a definable module, came off as much more railroady than a basic dungeon-map module). Or you could make stuff up. Which was a wonderful revelation for many players but, sorry to say, also takes the activity right out of the mass market. Or you could decide that the failure of the game text to enumerate absolutely everything possible in the game world was a shortcoming of the game system, to be corrected by a system of construction/description rules, leading to the "hard-core" route and the 75 pages on vehicles.

Even in MMPHDMG itself, the prospects for "finite play" were short-lived. Quite likely, "finity" was never intended to be a quality of the system. The DMG itself has "finity leaks," rules such as temple building that to put into effect pretty much requires interaction with the larger world of open-ended possibilities. And supplements were on the way. Some types of supplemental materials (such as Grimtooth's Traps or magazine articles describing a dozen or two new magic items) do not, in moderation, make the game more difficult to manage. But major supplements, as well as certain other kinds of magazine articles such as treatises on different types of medieval city governments, rapidly undermine the notion of a complete self-contained setting in favor of the game texts as a limited (though ever-growing) window on a fundamentally unlimited world.

(When I say "world" in this context, I'm not just referring to the imagined setting itself. I mean the universe of possibilities for all that can happen in that setting as well.)

Adding open-endedness to AD&D's setting was completely understantable and worthwhile at the time. Only Gamist play can continute to meet player goals in a finite world over the long term. Most long-term players had already come to see the setting as an open-ended world. The fad was due to peak anyway, and the business needed to sell supplements. But, open-ended settings are far more daunting, either in the amount of rules that must be used to cover a wide range of possibilities, or in the amount of improvisation, judgment calling, and decision-making that must be brought to bear to create and resolve elements not covered by rules. Too daunting, it appears, to have led to any mass market success so far.

Some partial successes with partially open-ended worlds, though. Vampire: finite choices of character stats, along with an intense focus on the characters. Despite the system's coherence problems, it's pretty clear that if you're designing custom vehicles in Vampire, you're not playing to the system's strengths. But the world is open-ended (it's reality plus); too much falls on the GM for the game to be mass-market accessible. It's a near-miss on the too-open-ended side.

Champions succeeded in abstracting the world to the point of finite simplicity (stop the bad guys' latest plan in a generically urban-downtown setting), leaving the characters and their powers as the focus. The powers system is also, technically, finite. Champions is not very much more challenging (tactically or creatively) to GM than it is to play. But making the rules a complete description of all possible powers required those rules to be extensive and complex. It's a near-miss on the too-hardcore side.

But for the most part, the mass market was lost when role playing systems came to be seen as partial descriptions of unlimited worlds, instead of as complete descriptions of limited worlds. Role playing prematurely ceded the latter domain to computer games.

But hey, does it matter? I'm not sure there are many mass markets left out there for products other than SUVs, soft drinks, heartburn drugs, tooth-whitening strips, and fast food. At least, that's what most TV commercials seem to be for nowadays.

- Walt

QuoteAs a mass market newbie role player, it's not enough for the system to just let me do what I want, it has to take what I want and amplify it and tell me how cool it is. Basically, the problem John Kim described: doesn't tell the players what to do. Or more precisely, doesn't give them feedback that confirms that what they're doing is cool.

This reminded me of a quote by R. Sean Borgstrom:

"Why do the rules exist? Today I think it is to get the players to feel cool and clever on a regular basis."

Shreyas' responding comment in this thread (http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=7188) was:

"Think of what the statement implies - it is possible for the rules to obstruct enjoyment of the game, making the players feel thick-witted and uncool."

I think this is what you get with heavy tomes that don't cater to a new audience.  You get games that are disempowering -- making players feel thick-witted and uncool -- instead of empowering.  And this is where you lose the mainstream, when you can't empower people.

Jonathan, doesn't that maxim also imply that feeling cool may be more important than acutally doing cool things. That is, your point seems to be a cry against thick tomes.

However, a very thin tome might also craft rules such that players get glassy-eyed, but then are later disappointed because they really didn't get to do anything they wanted. This could be the case very easily in som "lite" illusionist game, for example.

Quote from: Walt Freitag

75-page vehicle construction rules: Too hardcore. Too many rules to learn; scares off the potential players when they see the book.

75-page rules, but the GM designs the vehicle beforehand: The GM must then force the situation to match the vehicle. Railroady.

75-page rules, but the GM knows them so well he can design and describe the vehicle off the cuff during play to match the situation: Great, if you have the genius GM. But you're "mass market" players, so you don't.

Big Sourcebook Of Vehicles: Too hardcore.

Big Sourcebook of Vehicles, but the GM chooses the vehicle beforehand: Railroady.

Big Sourcebook of Vehicles, used by the GM on the fly during play. It's awkward; the tool wasn't designed for it, so you still need the genius GM.

Rules-lite, just pick a few key stats and the rest is description: Unsatisfying. As a mass market newbie role player, it's not enough for the system to just let me do what I want, it has to take what I want and amplify it and tell me how cool it is. Basically, the problem John Kim described: doesn't tell the players what to do. Or more precisely, doesn't give them feedback that confirms that what they're doing is cool. (And if you think that's an absurd expectation, think again about what "mass market" means.)

Rules-lite, GM facilitates the imaginative heavy lifting and/or provides the hey-that's-cool feedback: Great, if you have a GM who knows how to do that.

Rules-lite, overt player consensus mechanics: "Huh? We just kinda vote on what the vehicle is like? What kinda game is that?" Role playing without the semblance of objectivity in the imagined space is not mass-market accessible; really, it's hard-core in a different way.

- Walt

This is a well reasoned and well illustreated point. Thank goodness our rules come in at a crowd pleasing 74pgs.

But honestly. A discussion with SJohn Ross brought up this:

He's doing a game set in a hard-boiled San Francisco. This is going to be one of the most meticulously researched games ever released (my assessment, not his words--but I've followed what he's done with it). In this game the characters want "a car."

They go to the book and find three or four different sedans. Generic sedans (Generic luxury 4-door: PRICE ###.###).

Then they turn to the back of the book and find every real-world sedan in that class with a complete pure English description of it.

(Now, to get these prices he did all kinds and brands of research--number of vehicles on the road by make and model, adjusted prices, adjusted again for the game's wealthy system, etc.) The generic model has the stats. The specific one has the English.

Now--this will not work so well for a Fenris Assault vehicle with twin swivel rocket pods and a Grav-Beam on the front. It will, for one thing, be difficult to research the real ones to get your baseline. Secondly, the "wing" on the back that gives better handling at 90+ mph will be hard to model if there's nothing but an English description of it.

So his idea has some, perhaps, limitations--but it occurred to me that it might come closer to a mass-market appeal than, say, what we're  doing (me and my team).

I have another experience to relate.

In the post-app game we're playtesting a new--but avid and quick-study gamer brought his girlfriend. She was newly arrived from Latin America--with no idea of even what D&D was.

The characters were shopping and I gave her the "giant book of weapons" (over 100, 50pgs with rules and armor listings). She was told she could choose from like 5 of them to start with (first page of handguns and rifles).

She examined the book and begin reading it. "How do I get the rest of these weapons?"

She was serious too--it wasn't a pure effectivness thing, I asked about that (and explaned that the guns she could buy were plenty effective)--and it wasn't a "character image thing"--she was a gunslinger and wanted the sixshooters. She found the whole thing interesting and engaging and was interested in 'going out and getting some of those things.'

So I do think that the big book of cars/guns/gear/spells/mutations/etc. *is* to a degree newbie-friendly. Mass-market friendly. Choosing from lists--where the author has made some attempt to make each list item "sell itself" (we re-wrote the list of super powers in our suppliment to go from 'the character can move in all three dimensions' to "You've got the power of flight!") is less daunting than it might first appear.

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoSo I do think that the big book of cars/guns/gear/spells/mutations/etc. *is* to a degree newbie-friendly. Mass-market friendly. Choosing from lists--where the author has made some attempt to make each list item "sell itself" (we re-wrote the list of super powers in our suppliment to go from 'the character can move in all three dimensions' to "You've got the power of flight!") is less daunting than it might first appear.

-Marco

You are right.  Just look at all the "monster manuals" there are!  In fact, it was looking through the original Monster Manual that got me wanting to play an RPG.

Interesting theory, Walt. Upon reflection, you may be right. Thing is, I don't think just lists will work with the mainsteam. Simple lists are. McDonald's made billions all because they introduced a limited menu of only 7 items. Some complained, but many more bought it. So I think it's possible to overload the mass market with choices as well. With finite, well designed choices, you will get the public attention.

The 3e PHB went multi-platinum. The only reason it was not a commercial success in an absolute sense is that their pricepoint was too low. I'm not saying this because I like 3e, but I think that it's wrong to leave the 3e PHB out of any description of 'mass market' success in RPGing.

In general, I agree with Marco and Jonathan. Lists-of, big-books-of, tables-of, catalogs-of (I'll just call 'em: enumerations of) game elements are relatively newbie-friendly and mass-market friendly. My main thesis here is that AD&D (the MMPHDMG version included) is mass-market-friendly, and it happens to be stuffed full of enumerations. Most notably, the spell lists, magic item lists, and monster manual; but also the shorter shopping lists: character races, character classes, armor, weapons, misc. equipment, etc. What's really unusual (how odd it seems to be thinking of AD&D as an unusual role playing system, but a shift of mental gears and there it is) is that these enumerated things -- monsters, magic items, spells, weapons -- are what the game is all about. Plenty of derivative games also have lists of things (sometimes even the exact same lists, as Ron pointed out in the first Heartbreakers essay), as do later interpretations and versions of AD&D, but most of them are really all about some form or another of plot that has to come from outside the enumerated stuff.

For comparison, Marco's example of the sedans from Ross's hard-boiled game does sound pretty useful and friendly, and an excellent tool for color. But I wonder, how much does it actually help you to set up and play the game? It might help a lot, if the game is mostly about this sort of trappings (aka color). But if the game is all about solving cases, I'd probably be more impressed with a catalog of cases or of components of cases (deeds, motives, clues, complications). It would be nice for a GM to be able to put a "case" together as easily as he can open up the AD&D books and match up a monster, its treasure, and the trap on the door to the room where it lives. I know that is a very tall order. I know it because I'm trying to do almost exactly that for Precious Fluid, which is about solving cases.

Similarly, a big sourcebook of vehicles would be helpful for making a game that's all about vehicles more mass-market-friendly. The reason I included that sourcebook among the less mass-market-friendly options is that it's more common for such a sourcebook to be one of many sourcebooks covering many different aspects of the same game world (one for vehicles, another for buildings, another for personal gear, one each for several different classes of weapons, one for major religions, etc.). To the point where it becomes a major task to decide which sourcebooks to use, and the massive array of possibilities becomes burdensome seemingly long before the material becomes complete enough to provide what you're actually looking for.

The real problem that undercuts mass-market-friendliness is open-ended scope of decision-making. Enumeration-type sourcebooks don't cause that problem, they actually do help, but they can only help so much.

Which speaks to Jack's point as well. Yes, simple lists are mass-market-friendly. But I think more extensive lists can be mass-market-friendly too, if they're important enough to play to focus a lot of players' attention on. (How many Pokemon are there now? They started with 150. I suspect that they're now up to a sufficient number to discourage new players.) That is, if there aren't too many of them, and you know which one to use when.

- Walt

QuoteSo I do think that the big book of cars/guns/gear/spells/mutations/etc. *is* to a degree newbie-friendly. Mass-market friendly. Choosing from lists--where the author has made some attempt to make each list item "sell itself" (we re-wrote the list of super powers in our suppliment to go from 'the character can move in all three dimensions' to "You've got the power of flight!") is less daunting than it might first appear.

I actually would agree with this.  As long as the book is at least partially illustrated, has plain english text with interesting factoids and is not littered with space saving abbreviations that most people won't get...this would be (of Walt's) list something that I think would have mass market appeal.

I know several people who can't wait to get their new edition of The Sportsmans Almanac or Joe Bob's Book of Guns You're Not Allowed to Own, or even just the latest issue of Car & Driver.

I think people do like flipping through a big book of stuff (after all what's more mainstream than a catalog)...as long as the presentation doesn't go overboard on the geeky stuff I think this could easily be an effective technique.

Quote from: Walt FreitagWhich speaks to Jack's point as well. Yes, simple lists are mass-market-friendly. But I think more extensive lists can be mass-market-friendly too, if they're important enough to play to focus a lot of players' attention on. (How many Pokemon are there now? They started with 150. I suspect that they're now up to a sufficient number to discourage new players.) That is, if there aren't too many of them, and you know which one to use when.

I can see this kind of thing developing into a game were the core book has the simpler options and then the company releases suppliments with more extensive options.

What?

Already done?

Walt mentions Pokemon - anyone notice how like a list a deck of cards is?  And how similar building a deck is to picking some things from a list?

Spin Magic/Pokemon/etc. more towards RPG'ing (Nar, if you like), maybe put 'em in a box with a board (scene elements placed by the GM, character actions placed by the players), and sell 'em as a hybrid between those CCGs and Monolpoly/Trivial Pursuit/etc.  But make sure it fully *is* an RPG, by whatever sense that is important to you - shared creation of story, maybe.  Or S, or G, or some blend.

Do that - do it well, in both creative and business terms - and if it doesn't succede, then we'll prove the "general public" really is just not interested in that kind of game.  If I hit the lottery, I'll give it a shot myself (yup, gotta design percolating that could work for this).

But it may not be possible - a game somewhere close to Monopoly or Risk and etc. in terms of complexity, that still provides all that is needed to fully support a GNS goal.  Only way to find out is to try, though . . .

We had a thread a while back where I referred to Greg Costikyan's "Grognard Capture" notion.  I translate Ralph's post into that concept - that building something to appeal only to the more extreme elements of your potential fan base ends up excluding the non-extremists.  I think it is entirely reasonable to wonder if those non-extremists even EXIST (in large numbers) for RPGs, but to the extent that GURPS (or whatever) led to a constricted understanding of what an RPG *must* be . . . sure, that's a negative.

Gordon
(back from vacation - appologies if I missed some of the posts over the last few weeks that bear on this issue)

I've been following this thread with a great deal of interest, and regarding the popularity of tome-like RPGs like D&D and White Wolf's games, I think it has to do with being able to gradually introduce new players to different levels of complexity.  It's one thing to just read the book, but in my experience, the best way to show newbies how to play is to show them during game how things work a little bit at a time.  D&D and WWGS are both good at teaching newbies, little by little, how to play the game and what you are expected to do in a game.  I believe this last point is more pertinent than anything else regarding the number of pages the book has or how simple the mechanics are.  It's easier to introduce newbies to a game where it's easy to figure out what they can do then learn how they can do it.  A better way to say things is that D&D and White Wolf do a great job of showing players what they can do because they: have clearly written rules (though not always concise), give plenty of examples (even short ones), and repeat vital information throughout the piece.  While it would seem inefficient to us experienced gamers, looking at things as a complete "foreigner" to the "language" of RPGs, I can see the necessity of doing so.  Since most newbies have at least glanced at a textbook, they can easily determine how to find the information they want and to apply the things they know as they learn them.  Mainstream RPGs, in a sense, are really good at teaching the activity of roleplaying, albeit they do so with frequently narrow visions of what roleplaying is.

In more freeform or rules-lite systems, though, that process is not described in enough detail.  People new to roleplaying, while they could get the gist of it, don't fully understand the idea until someone is patient and generous enough to take them under their wing.  In my game (http://www.geocities.com/kathanaksaya), I have attempted to alleviate this by giving analogies to activities more well-known to the general public, or by giving more detailed examples throughout the text.  I am not sure how successful I am at it, though.

Quote from: Gordon C. LandisSpin Magic/Pokemon/etc. more towards RPG'ing (Nar, if you like), maybe put 'em in a box with a board (scene elements placed by the GM, character actions placed by the players), and sell 'em as a hybrid between those CCGs and Monolpoly/Trivial Pursuit/etc.  But make sure it fully *is* an RPG, by whatever sense that is important to you - shared creation of story, maybe.  Or S, or G, or some blend.

This was actually done already by Wizards of the Coast.  Take a look at the Pokemon Adventure Game, which I can pick up at my local KayBee Toy Store for about $2 now.  Supposedly, it sold really well but they never put out a follow-up product like they planned.  There's a good thread or two about it on rpg.net if you care to search for them.

Quote from: GreenI've been following this thread with a great deal of interest, and regarding the popularity of tome-like RPGs like D&D and White Wolf's games, I think it has to do with being able to gradually introduce new players to different levels of complexity.  It's one thing to just read the book, but in my experience, the best way to show newbies how to play is to show them during game how things work a little bit at a time.  D&D and WWGS are both good at teaching newbies, little by little, how to play the game and what you are expected to do in a game. .

Actually I have to take exception to this. D&D and WWG are NOT good at doing this, rpg PLAYERS are.  Which is why the worst possible thing you can do for an rpg 'virgin' is shove the book under their nose without preamble. The overwhelming majority of rpg players learn how to play by playing not by reading.  As I have said the 'read the book' model doesn't work because very few 'virgins' won't bolt when they see the book.

Quote from: ValamirIf you're going to retreat into the tired old "the more popular it is, the more it must suck" defense* as indicated by your "lowest common denominator" quip, then there really isn't anything more I can say to you on the issue.

You certainly assume a lot about other people, Ralph. Too bad. In my experience, you're usually dead wrong.

I don't think the hobby should cater to the lowest common denominator, not because I feel superior or that other people may not appreciate it. My reason is that too many products (not just games) take the approach that they must "dumb down" the material in order to make it palatable to a wider audience when all they really need to do is change focus to more mainstream topics.

I'll go so far as to play Devil's advocate here. Why is it that Advanced Squad Leader has less of a following than a fantasy football league? Rules complexity is a small part of the issue but, let's face it, sports seem far more interesting to mainstream members of society than World War 2. Yet we don't see any sports roleplaying games. Why is that, Ralph? I'd love to know.

Actually, I have an answer. It's because gamers don't want to play games about those things, and they're the ones who write the games. Face it, the hobby won't become mainstream until its subject matter does or people decide to explore beyond their video- and computer games, DVDs, etc. A fortunate thing that so many former RPG designers are out making computer games with which to convert the masses.

(King of Dragon Pass certainly did a lot to increase HeroQuest's profile...)

Quote from: RaconteurXI'll go so far as to play Devil's advocate here. Why is it that Advanced Squad Leader has less of a following than a fantasy football league? Rules complexity is a small part of the issue but, let's face it, sports seem far more interesting to mainstream members of society than World War 2. Yet we don't see any sports roleplaying games.

While I think your point about more mainstream game subjects is absolutely valid but this point is out.  Consider which is likely to gross more at the box office: WW II movie or sports movie?  But at the same time which will attract participants more reliably - WW II re-enactment at the local park or football at the park.  I don't think the subject is the most important factor, necessarily.

The most popular films of this year will be, almost certainly, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Terminator 3 and the two Matrix re-whatever films. Lord of the Rings tops the list of best books in the BBC's The Big Read, with Harry Potter and His Dark Materials up there in the top ten.

Who says Science Fiction and Fantasy don't have market appeal?

Quote from: RaconteurXYet we don't see any sports roleplaying games. Why is that, Ralph? I'd love to know. ...Actually, I have an answer. It's because gamers don't want to play games about those things, and they're the ones who write the games.

I think you're totally off on this point.  Roleplaying games are 30 years old.  JUST 30 YEARS!  The styles of play and subject matter available has consistantly expanded over that time period.  No sports RPGs?  Give me a year or two.  I can only handle one project at a time.  That's one of the projects on my backburner, and has been for a while.  You know what?  There's no sports cartoons either (unless you count the anime series "Slam Dunk" which was INSANELY popular among high school students when I was in China 2 years ago).  Like cartoons and comics, roleplaying is a young medium that hasn't yet expanded to cover the range of literature or film.  So what?  That doesn't mean that this won't happen eventually or that there's something about roleplaying games that mean sports RPGs or romance RPGs or science RPGs won't ever happen.

Your point is only true if roleplaying continues to be incestuous and game designers continue to only come from people who like traditional styles of gaming.  I would think, hanging out at the Forge, it would be clear that this isn't always going to be the case.

Quote from: Mr JackWho says Science Fiction and Fantasy don't have market appeal?

I don't think it's a matter of sci-fi and fantasy having mass market appeal so much as we already have fantasy and sci-fi games, but not many games in other genres.

Quote from: Ian CharvillConsider which is likely to gross more at the box office: WW II movie or sports movie? But at the same time which will attract participants more reliably - WW II re-enactment at the local park or football at the park. I don't think the subject is the most important factor, necessarily.

Perhaps not. I remember a few years ago someone posted an idea for a sports hero gamin in the indy design forum. I was mostly disappointed to find that by "sports hero" they meant sports-themed super heroes, like Casey Jones from the Ninja Turtles or the member of the Bionic Six who wore a batting helmet or Sporty Spice or the Marvel Comic Kickers Inc. It thought it was going to be the Babe Ruth RPG.

But let's consider for a moment, how many people in the mainstream would want to pretend to be a sports celebrity? They may wish to actually be one or imagine it inside their own head, but would they do so with a group?

If we want to find mass market appeal, we need to find what the mainstream audience wants to be, or more accurately, pretend to be.

Interestingly enough, there is going to be a collectable miniatures baseball game soon, by the company that does HeroClix. (For those who aren't familiar, the basic game design uses minis with a 'click' wheel at the bottom that gives statistics and abilities modified by damage taken.)

They've definately thought of a way to get mass market appeal, I think, given that sports collectors may very well buy these whether or not they play the game. (I remember hearing the Star Wars CCGs owed a lot of their success to the fact that many people bought them solely to collect; that may apply here.) In any case, it'll be interesting to see how their attempt to bridge the gap between sports fans who play things like fantasy baseball and tactical miniature wargamers.

I personally see a connection with the new Marvel RPG here -- it's a brightly colored book with lots of illustrations, sold in places like comics stores and Wal-Mart, and is intended to reach people who aren't traditially RPG players.

I find myself agreeing with Jack Spencer--while I'm no poster-guy for a sports-game, I know some *serious* sports fans who also game (won a giant TV off Fantasy football--and it it wasn't "just luck"). While I can't speak for the guy, I imagine that a sports RPG wouldn't especially interest him (his appreciation of the games is not personal to the star players--although he does appreciate them--I don't think he fantasizes about *being* them to any degree that a traditional RPG would imply).

Now *some* sports (wrestling, mixed martial arts) are interesting from an RPG perspective (over-the-top characters ... and those already kinda *are* stereotypical RPG characters) and the XXX movie featured an X-Tream sports champion--and that'd be a good character to play in, you know, GURPS or whatever--but I think playing a basketball star, leading the basketball life would be an odd mix of a gamist/sim sports engine and then some real-life stuff I've got a hard time picturing (Scenario 3: vist the sweat shop where they make your clothing line. Scenario 15: your mistress is gonna go public ...)

So yeah, a good fantasy ("mmm...rich sports hero") doesn't necessiarily make for a good troop-style game.

On the other hand, the "what is an RPG?" question comes into focus here. John Kim has convinced me that there are some things in that category (at least judging by the words Roleplaying and Game) and I would not associate with gaming as I do it.

Things outside that zone--the zone wherein all traditional and even most radical designs exist might be the mass-market sweet spot.

Of course that'd be a hobby that would be so substantially different from the one I'm in that it might as well be CCG's at that point.

-Marco

Walt is convinced AD&D was a mass market accessible RPG and thus close to a mainstream game...to that I say: hell, no! It isn't. It might have certain design aspects which make it more worthy of investment by a consumer (the limited number of books necessary to have a coherent vision of the whole) -- but this is only a selling point if the consumer ahs already been introduced to the product and understands what that even means. As far as being an item that will draw non-gamers into the fold, it can't do it. Why?

Same problem with all weighty tomes -- back in the day, my 1E AD&D books recieved the exact same reaction other game tomes recieved: "Too many pages." and "I have to read all that for a game?!"

Thus, as standard, there is no mass market appeal in the game's physical presentation, and the only introduction to AD&D which works consistently is the standard oral, by-play introduction. But the books themselves are not the hook, which remains, as it almost always has, friends playing rather than the product itself.

The perfect introduction to gaming for non-gamers is actually the old D&D Basic set -- the "Red Box." Why??

1) Packaging. It LOOKS like a board/party game, though it isn't.
2) Presentation. You start playing the minute you pick the book up (via the introductory solo adventure).
3) Placement. When it first came out, you could find it everywhere: bookstores, toy stores, game stores & department stores. It had widespread, repeat advertising in non-industry comics and magazines.
4) Marketing. It wasn't pitched as an RPG (because "An RPG? What's that?" or these days "An RPG? Like those stupid video games?"), but an "adventure game."

Simply, the point Walt is missing in his analysis is where the introduction itself comes from. In order to move people to a product, you have to be able to get the product to sell itself to them. AD&D won't do that, other gamers will -- and that's the problem we've always had.

Too many rules, or rather, too much reading = fewer sales. Period. No way around it. This is why the oral, by-play introduction works orders of magnitude better at bringing new people into role-playing and the products themselves don't, and this is the problem.

(With the other problem being the marketing of the product itself, of course, because you can fix all the above, fail to fix the marketing approach utilized and thus not sell.)

Quote from: MarcoIn the post-app game we're playtesting a new--but avid and quick-study gamer brought his girlfriend. She was newly arrived from Latin America--with no idea of even what D&D was.

The characters were shopping and I gave her the "giant book of weapons" (over 100, 50pgs with rules and armor listings). She was told she could choose from like 5 of them to start with (first page of handguns and rifles).

She examined the book and begin reading it. "How do I get the rest of these weapons?"

Here's my question: would she have ever, ever picked the book up off the shelf and decided to pay for it and bring it home? This was my point earlier, but first, a question:

I'm betting on a couple things here in your answer, but I want to hear more about this tag-along girlfriend. How did she end up at the game and how did she end up actually playing? What were the social dynamics involved in introducing her to and instructing her in play? Why did she start playing?

Quote from: greyorm

Quote from: MarcoIn the post-app game we're playtesting a new--but avid and quick-study gamer brought his girlfriend. She was newly arrived from Latin America--with no idea of even what D&D was.

The characters were shopping and I gave her the "giant book of weapons" (over 100, 50pgs with rules and armor listings). She was told she could choose from like 5 of them to start with (first page of handguns and rifles).

She examined the book and begin reading it. "How do I get the rest of these weapons?"

Here's my question: would she have ever, ever picked the book up off the shelf and decided to pay for it and bring it home? This was my point earlier, but first, a question:

I'm betting on a couple things here in your answer, but I want to hear more about this tag-along girlfriend. How did she end up at the game and how did she end up actually playing? What were the social dynamics involved in introducing her to and instructing her in play? Why did she start playing?

The book in question was a print from a PDF--so it is unlikely that she would have found such for sale in a store (the question is unanswerable--the document was not designed to be sold in a store).

I will be happy to answer your questions--but before I do so, I'd like to know what your assumptions are.

-Marco

Quote from: Andrew NorrisInterestingly enough, there is going to be a collectable miniatures baseball game soon, by the company that does HeroClix.

It may be successful, but I've heard some scuttlebut in the fan base that it a bit negative. The reason it's being done is that Topps bought WhizKids so they could combine their expertise in baseball trading cards with WhizKids' abilities in miniatures games. There's a lot of respect for the guys at WhizKids, but whether they can pull this one off is in doubt.

It's not as if the guys making miniatures games decided that a baseball game would be a good idea. It was that the guys making trading cards thought they could make more money if they sold miniatures, and that a game was kind of necessary to market the miniatures, so they bought someone who could do that for them.

It remains to be seen.

Quote from: Reverend DaegmorganWalt is convinced AD&D was a mass market accessible RPG and thus close to a mainstream game...to that I say: hell, no! It isn't.

Im not so sure.

I had a guy join my OAD&D game in about 82 or 83. He was a disk jockey with whom I worked, and he'd expressed a casual interst in finding out what it was about--but the kicker that started him did not come from me. Someone else he knew told him about this fascinating book she had found. She had been in a bookstore and seen this thing on the shelf, wondered what it was, and started reading it--and half an hour later found she was still standing there engrossed in this fascinating volume, wanting to read more.

The book was the OAD&D Players Handbook.

The person was his forty-something Jewish mother.

Now, certainly there are people put off by reading. I've played a lot of board and trivia games with people who want you to read the rules and tell them how to play, because it's too much work to read the inside of the box lid. There are also people who are put off by lots of pieces (what are all those things?) or unusual randomizers (cards? where are the dice?) or indeed by anything that is different from what they know (a new game? can't we just play Clue again? I like Clue.). But if the housewife of a doctor picked up the book in a bookstore and found it interesting, I'd say it had appeal beyond the geek subculture.

And for what it's worth, once again I'll state for the record that I am that guy who never knew a soul who played role playing games, heard about D&D from a completely non-gaming source (a Psychology Today article on teenager group therapy), and then went out and bought it, read it, and started playing it.

I will agree that the basic version (although in my case it was the old blue box set) was a good starting point. I understand that 3E has a starter set; I really wish I could think of how to make one for Multiverser.

--M. J. Young

MJ,

While I appreciate the anecdote, and realize my own are the same, from what I've read and seen and heard from others, your story is atypical of the norm -- as is your experience with the hobby.

Of course there will always be individuals who break with the standard, but we're talking about the standard here, not the deviation -- we're also not dismissing the latter, but it simply isn't relevant to the answer for obvious reasons.

I really wish we had harder numbers on this, but the general consensus in all the forums I have been on where this subject has come up is that gamers are introduced to the hobby via their friends in tandem with actual play, and that non-gamers do not "understand" the large size of gaming books and are in fact scared off by such.

Anyone want to run a study?

Marco,

I'm sorry, but no, I won't go into what I'm thinking occurred. Such would only be assumptions about variables, which would do nothing but distract from the actual discussion.

Basically, I would like untainted data from you; telling you what I think happened would make your answer all about exposing, reversing, or supporting those assumptions, which would dilute the usefulness of your answer as data points.

As well, telling you what I think happened would introduce irrelevant discussion to the question of how her playing actually came about. Simply put, it would be pointless and ultimately unproductive.

If you want, I'll tell you afterwards and we can discuss my assumptions in comparison to the actual occurence then and discuss. Facts are what I'm interested in, not the discussion of intuitions or foundless belief. That would be far more productive.

Quote from: MarcoThe book in question was a print from a PDF--so it is unlikely that she would have found such for sale in a store (the question is unanswerable--the document was not designed to be sold in a store).

The question was very simple and is very answerable: if she somehow saw this material somewhere, would she have been interested enough in it of her own accord enough to pick it up and even pay money for it?

IF it were for sale as a book on a shelf, would she have... IF. That is in no way unanswerable. The question stands regardless of whether or not it is currently for sale, currently a PDF, currently on Mars, currently not published, etc, because it should be fairly obvious what I'm getting at in the asking of it. In fact, change it a little, do YOU think she would have if it were?

So think it over. However, I'm really more interested in the questions above about how she entered into the game itself. I'd really like to hear about that and discuss it.

Quote from: greyormToo many rules, or rather, too much reading = fewer sales. Period. No way around it. This is why the oral, by-play introduction works orders of magnitude better at bringing new people into role-playing and the products themselves don't, and this is the problem.

Empirically, I have a hard time believing this.  The two games which have had the largest are AD&D and Vampire: The Masquerade -- both of which I believe you categorized as being solidly in the category of too many rules.  Outside of Basic D&D (which still lagged behind AD&D), virtually all of the top-selling RPGs have been at least this rules-heavy.  

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that someone can't come up with a revolutionary new rules-light RPG which becomes the next big thing and dwarfs D&D in sales.  However, I think it is wrong to generalize that thick rulebooks = fewer sales, because historically the thin rulebooks have sold if anything worse than the thick ones.  

Quote from: greyormI really wish we had harder numbers on this, but the general consensus in all the forums I have been on where this subject has come up is that gamers are introduced to the hobby via their friends in tandem with actual play, and that non-gamers do not "understand" the large size of gaming books and are in fact scared off by such.

I already covered book size above.  

Re: Introduction to the hobby.  I don't think anyone disputes that historically, most gamers have been introduced to the hobby by their friends.  However, I would say that out-of-the-box playability is still vital.  Unless someone can pick up the game and play it with their friends, the chain of friends-playing-with-friends never gets started outside of the designer's home town.  You're left with the network effect and incidentally Ryan Dancy's argument that D&D/D20 is the best way to introduce new gamers.

Quote from: greyormMarco,

I'm sorry, but no, I won't go into what I'm thinking occurred. Such would only be assumptions about variables, which would do nothing but distract from the actual discussion.

Basically, I would like untainted data from you; telling you what I think happened would make your answer all about exposing, reversing, or supporting those assumptions, which would dilute the usefulness of your answer as data points.

As well, telling you what I think happened would introduce irrelevant discussion to the question of how her playing actually came about. Simply put, it would be pointless and ultimately unproductive.

If you want, I'll tell you afterwards and we can discuss my assumptions in comparison to the actual occurence then and discuss. Facts are what I'm interested in, not the discussion of intuitions or foundless belief. That would be far more productive.

Quote from: MarcoThe book in question was a print from a PDF--so it is unlikely that she would have found such for sale in a store (the question is unanswerable--the document was not designed to be sold in a store).

The question was very simple and is very answerable: if she somehow saw this material somewhere, would she have been interested enough in it of her own accord enough to pick it up and even pay money for it?

IF it were for sale as a book on a shelf, would she have... IF. That is in no way unanswerable. The question stands regardless of whether or not it is currently for sale, currently a PDF, currently on Mars, currently not published, etc, because it should be fairly obvious what I'm getting at in the asking of it. In fact, change it a little, do YOU think she would have if it were?

So think it over. However, I'm really more interested in the questions above about how she entered into the game itself. I'd really like to hear about that and discuss it.

Here's my take on this:

1. The weapons book is stand alone (50-pg separate pdf) with no painted color cover art (the only of 5 books without it). I don't think she'd have bought it as it stands.

But the game would, ideally, be released as either two or three slick hardcovers or a boxed set. Painted color covers, lots of fiction--few rules (on a page-by-page basis, if you discount gear-lists where the gear is without specific rules nd the vehicle rules which would be separate, I think it's under 20%). Color interior art? I think there's a chance of a sale on the basis of the art alone if she paged through it.

I'll have to ask her.

I think what sells a game in a major bookstore is the cover, the text on the back (which would, IMO, probably differ by target audience) and layout inside. Chances are, if she opened the book she'd find fiction and art--pretty eye-catching art, IMO, and I suspect this would have as good a chance of selling her as anything. She's said she likes the fiction. She's said she really likes my writing.

This formula is what sold me Warhammer 40K. I had very little idea what the game was (I only vaguely understood minatures gaming when I bought it--I looked at it and went 'I don't know if I'll ever figure out how to play this')--but one look at that original hardcover and I *had* to have it. Even though I had a sneaking suspicion I'd never play it--and it was worth it--the read along--even skipping over the rules. And it was expensive. And I know my experience is not unique.

Artwork Does Matter.
Fiction Does Matter.

Want to know more about the tag-along? Firstly, I'm glad she doesn't read these boards. My words were "avid" and "quick study"--that you translate that to "tag-along" is, in my part of the world not flattering (over here that means someone who sort of wandered in after, in this case, her man, for the purpose of following *him* rather than coming for the main event).

This is one reason I'm unhappy with a stated, but not explained preconception about what you think happened.

From what I know (I'll ask them next week when we reconvine after a halloween hiatus) C. (her boyfriend) had, on the phone (when she was in Latin America), told her about this amazing new hobby thing he was finally getting into (he had played 1-session D&D a few times in college and had never gotten past "you all meet in a bar." (my paraphrase, he said he'd looked at the books and sat down to play but never played).

So he told her about it enthauistically.

She was intrigued. When she showed up we walked her through char-gen and she ... started role-playing. When her harassment-level enemy showed up in town, she laid low. When haughty NPC's annoyed the group, she was kinda cooly laconic back (instead of gunning down the pilgrims she was supposed to be escorting--which is a good sign).

She's asked questions. She got the handle of the dice mechanic after being showed one (there's only one in the game we're playing).

The math for char-gen was done by her boyfriend so I've no idea how inclined she is.

During a battle where the characters were fighting things on a higher-up level (and tactical representations were shown by chess pieces) she took someone's dice box and put two on top of it (to depict elevation). That was when I knew she "got it." That was first session.

She took notes, drew diagrams of rooms, solved a color-wheel based logic puzzle, and asked quesitons about the back-story.

She has, so far, done relatively little "speaking in character"--however it's a pretty big group and I find that in larger groups there's less of that for some reason (my feel is that it has to do with combining action and intent during one's time-slice--but that may just be my perception).

How'd she score?

-Marco

Quote from: John KimEmpirically, I have a hard time believing this.  The two games which have had the largest are AD&D and Vampire: The Masquerade -- both of which I believe you categorized as being solidly in the category of too many rules.

I would agree with you that my claim was false, if I were saying that more rules = less sales because of the number of rules...but I'm not. I'm not sure how to restate my point to get you on the same page, but I'll try:

The key is that games are successfully introduced to new players orally, via actual play or play example, not via the books. This is the established method of marketing and sales for RPGs, and shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone here.

What RPG books don't do is sell themselves "off the shelf" to the general, non-gaming public. For the general public, the games require too much reading (ie: have too many rules) to interest them, hence the all-too-common, "That's a GAME? Too much reading for me to want to play!" response.

Right...so why are AD&D and Vampire so popular? Like all RPGs, they're "popular" because of their network, and because they were taught orally to nearly everyone who plays them. The majority of consumers did not pick the game blind off the shelf and start playing it out-of-the-box with no other introduction to RPGs, or without a friend who interested them in the game first.

Now, yes, a percentage of people took the game off the shelf and bought it with no previous introduction to gaming, or because a friend told them it was cool, but the percentage of people who did that isn't the majority, and the majority is my concern in regards to this situation.

Games with "too many rules," like Vampire and D&D, are taught to a new individuals by individuals who have already played or bought the books, and gain sales that way. Those aren't the people we're concerned about here, because they're part of the network. The problem is attracting people outside the network without the use of the network, which doesn't happen because of the size of rulebooks and the perception of how many rules there are.

With me so far?

QuoteYou're left with the network effect and incidentally Ryan Dancy's argument that D&D/D20 is the best way to introduce new gamers.

Yep, possibly the only thing I agree with Ryan about; and the only reason D&D is such a popular seller is because of its network share.

Keep in mind, though, popular does not equal mainstream. D&D may be popular, but it is not a mainstream game...and that's what we're discussing: selling/marketing gaming to the mainstream. Selling/marketing to gamers is easy, by comparison, because you already have a foot in the door.

The presentation of and number of rules present a hurdle to selling off-the-shelf to the general public, however; and thus you require the network to do your marketing for you.

Now, importantly, it is the perception of the amount of reading that must be done which stands as the hurdle to overcome, because while gamers know that only a few pages in an RPG rulesbook contain all-important, need-to-know items...but non-gamers don't, and react accordingly, believing they have to read (and memorize/know) a hundred or more pages of rules just to play a game.

So, where did all those new AD&D and Vampire players and consumers come from? From friends and actual play, not off-the-shelf sales. Until a game can sell itself to a large percentage of people without needing the network to do it for it, RPGs are doomed to be a non-mainstream item.

In order to be viable being marketed to the populace, an introduction to gaming needs to substitue this oral teaching method, as well as appeal to the buyer before they know what they have (this replaces the network), as in the example of the the D&D Basic set.

A little anecdote: gaming in my town started with me. I bought the Basic D&D set, played it with some friends. They told their friends about it and one of them went out and bought the books themselves, and suddenly there were three groups where there'd been just me before.

The key here: other than myself, no one in those three groups learned to play by reading the rules, by taking the books home with them. Everyone learned to play via play.

We're talking a good fifteen people, of whom, only two actually bought the books. That number later increased as new groups formed, but never significantly, and the number of people who bought the books always remained disproportionately small in comparison to the number of players.

That's a very important point, actually. It means that none of the individuals who failed to buy the books even after exposure and long-term play would ever have bought them. Additionally, none of them bothered to read the rules, except on an on-the-fly, as-needed basis when necessary.

Now, I realize this is just an anecdote, but from what I've gathered over the past twenty years, this is also standard behavior on the part of gamers.

The conclusion is simple, straight from the facts: the majority, though regular players, would never have picked the books off a shelf, paid money for them, and brought them home to read just in order to learn to play.

These were the people, the majority, for whom there was "too much reading" to create an initial interest without some other impetus (friends coupled with the oral teaching method), and this is why "You want to play, here, read THIS" fails to work, and scares away potential gamers.

I hope that is clearer, John?

To recap, I'm not saying that games with "too many rules" will not sell, I'm saying they will not sell themselves without the consumer being shown that they don't have "that many rules" (or require "that much reading") after all -- which occurs via introductory play, not actual reading.

Quote from: MarcoI think there's a chance of a sale on the basis of the art alone if she paged through it.

I think what sells a game in a major bookstore is the cover, the text on the back (which would, IMO, probably differ by target audience) and layout inside. Chances are, if she opened the book she'd find fiction and art--pretty eye-catching art, IMO, and I suspect this would have as good a chance of selling her as anything.

Artwork Does Matter.
Fiction Does Matter.

Fuck yes. Complete agreement from me.

For mainstream games: if it doesn't look good, if it isn't pretty-as-anything, if it's just text information, you might have the established geeks, but that's it. (Which, incidentally, is why I chuckle and shake my head whenever I hear from game designers --  and players -- that, "I don't like alot of art in my games.")

QuoteWant to know more about the tag-along? Firstly, I'm glad she doesn't read these boards. My words were "avid" and "quick study"--that you translate that to "tag-along" is, in my part of the world not flattering (over here that means someone who sort of wandered in after, in this case, her man, for the purpose of following *him* rather than coming for the main event).

Hrm, different cultural standards, then. A "tag-along" is just someone who shows up somewhere with someone else, for some other reason than the event -- regardless of what happens later or if they get into/show interest in the actual event. It's just an explanation of their initial reason for arrival.

The reason I chose the word "tag-along" is because that's what it sounded like the situation was from you first post: someone who came along with her boyfriend and then became interested, but her inital reason for coming was not the game.

I assumed that from the statements you'd made that she had no prior experience of gaming, and didn't even know what it was (quoting, "with no idea of even what D&D was.")

But given your explanation, I'd say that wasn't the case. They both showed up for a game, expecting to learn (to learn) to play a game (rather than clueless), so she wasn't uninformed about what the evening was all about, even if the details were unknowns, and showed up specifically to learn about it.

Given the rest of your explanation, and other than the derailed assumptions above, my bets as to her introduction to gaming were pretty much dead on. Friend interests individual in game. Individual shows up to game relatively clueless. Group teaches individual game via play. Individual has a good time and gets into it.

By all accounts, basically a pretty standard introduction to the hobby.

The reason that's important is because of the whole idea of trying to sell to the mainstream without this standard intro. That's why I'd asked, because while you proffered that the book (specifically list books) were mass-market friendly, and used her introduction as an example of why it was, I disagree, because it didn't really sell itself to her. The network did, the actual play did. Just like it does with all other gaming books.

Oh, BTW, you called the girl's boyfriend "avid" and "a quick study," not the girlfriend (quoting: "a new--but avid and quick-study gamer brought his girlfriend."). If you meant the girlfriend was avid and a quick study, that sentence should have been, "a new -- but avid and quick study gamer accompanied her boyfriend." So no shaking your finger at me that I translated those descriptions into "tag-along." So, I hope you can see why I translated your text the way I did.

Granted--about the verbiage--I re-read quickly to say if I'd used that. Her boyfriend had "played"--she had not. Basic concepts like GM and Player had to be ironed out (this was mostly done by her boyfriend).

So she was (unless I've been given bad info) completely ailen to gaming. Her boyfriend was not totally new but the game we were playing qualified as the first one that "had gone more than one session" (or had gone anywhere).

-Marco

Well, I'm going to put in my two-cents and quickly fire off some ideas before work.

What is mass-market?  Why do you want it?

At what level do you consider a game to be mass-market?  100,000 sales.  1 million, 20 million?  Excluding necessity items and fads, I think all markets are narrowing and specializing, especially in entertainment fields.

There's an assumption going on here that board games and the like are mass-market, but I wonder how well they really sell and are subsequently played.  I own one board game, and I haven't played it in 6 years.  I own one card game, and I've only played it once.  Of the twelve friends I see the most, none have any board games that I've ever seen.  I'm thinking most board games sell to children or families with children.  

I'm also thinking that most near mass-market rpgs sell to teens.  The biggest constraint on most adults I know from buying more rpgs is lacking the time to play them all.  We're busy.  Modern life is increasingly fast paced with lots of quick and easy entertainments.  Our job hours lengthen.  Spouses and children and houses, etc.  Old players get transferred and we struggle to get new ones and then they move on, and the cycle keeps going.  We just don't have a lot of demand for rpgs.  Yes, we still play but we have to struggle to get in that weekly game session some times.  Why own more than two or three good games?

Video games you can play by yourself or online with some guy living across the states from you.  And I have to mention that between work and rpgs, I've had to sacrifice video games.  There's always an entertainment sacrifice.  But for some people, it's hard to spend $35 on a game they may not get to play and only when everyone can get together instead of a little more money on something to entertain them every day after work.

And lots of current sales go to people like me who like to read games that they know they will probably never get to play.

As for rules-length, whatever works works if it's well made.  Axis and Allies is a classic game with a lot of rules while Scrabble is relatively easy.  You're going to appeal to certain markets using certain techniques whether it's a large market or not.

Look at other publishing areas.  Sf and fantasy books for instance.  LotR sells like hotcakes, often multiple copies to the same old folks but what about the other books, some of which are just as good, often many that are better?  Tens of thousands.  Hundreds of thousands makes you a top-seller.  

Not everyone has time to read or likes to read.  Reading in general is obviously mass-market.  But is reading epic fantasy mass market?  And btw, how many of those epic fantasy readers play epic fantasy rpgs?  Not as many as you might at first think is my experience.  Numerous attempts to bring those folks in to roleplaying have failed, though they are obviously the most likely targets.

I think the rpg industry needs to maintain a solid, realistic focus but remain open and accessible to new blood as it trickles in.  A specialized market must maintain a specialized focus.  One day a fad might strike again, but then things will die back down.  

Rpgs offer a level of sophistication and adaptability that no other form of entertainment offers.  That makes them a little more complex and repels folks who are a little more unimaginative who like simple entertainments.  Another episode of Friends and a game of Hearts is just fine for them.

Finally, most games could do a little more to make their presentations and rules a little more outsider friendly.  

For instance, most game companies don't have clue one about graphics and text layout.  Most of the ones who do the best job only focus on one aspect, either graphics or text, to the detriment of the other.  I get a headache when I try to actually read some of the fine-print, broken-lined WotC books.  What does that do to average-joe browsing the shelves?

Wow.

Two hours ago, I discovered this thread. After some reading, I find some of my own, not yet finished, ideas in this thread. Some time ago, I´ve had asked myself how one may introduce new gamers in the hobby and started to think about small, stand-alone games, maybe even just adventures.

I don´t know if gaming has the potential of becomming mainstream (I´d rather say no.), but I think it could become bigger as it is at the moment. I totally agree with those people who think that one problem of gaming is that the hobby produces games for gamer, thus limiting itself. I also agree that one prerequisite of games for mass appeal would be its ability to sell itself. It would have to break with industry standards, not in necessarily in a controverial or "innovative" sense, but it would have to be written for someone with no knowledge of gaming whatsoever. And it would have to look fucking great. Its pictures would have to say "Look how cool I am, you could play someone as cool, so buy me and show me to your friends."

M

One more thought.  I think that if designers want to broaden the appeal of rpgs they should clearly define the point in playing their particular games.  What makes the game successful, what constitutes an ending?  How far off is the ending (rough estimate of the norm)?  Etc.  GNS helps a lot in this regard.

Perhaps the problem that began this thread lies with the Simulationist design takeover of the 80s.  The average person may not like the ideal of "Well, the game keeps going as long as we keep dreaming it and besides the point is how much fun the dream is."

Quote from: greyormThe key is that games are successfully introduced to new players orally, via actual play or play example, not via the books. This is the established method of marketing and sales for RPGs, and shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone here.

What RPG books don't do is sell themselves "off the shelf" to the general, non-gaming public. For the general public, the games require too much reading (ie: have too many rules) to interest them, hence the all-too-common, "That's a GAME? Too much reading for me to want to play!" response.  

OK, I'm with you on the first part.  I completely agree that RPGs have historically have sold via networking of players.  

However, you're trying to add in an assertion that this is (primarily?) because of the length of the game books.  I'm saying that short RPGs have sold through networks just as much as long RPGs, if they have sold at all (which they generally haven't).  So while the next big thing might be a short little booklet, I am not sure of that.  I don't know what -- if anything -- will make RPGs sell to the mass market.  It could be lots of things.  However, I am also skeptical of anyone else's claims to know.  

Incidentally, the public does read for entertainment.  There is usually a stack of novels beside the checkout counter at the supermarket.  Arguably, if a game book is pretty and entertaining to read, then its length may help sales rather than hurt them.

Interesting discussion, but I think an important part of my hypothesis about AD&D (1e, 3 hardcovers only) being more accessible than almost all other role playing games is being missed.

Sure, the books are long. But the books contain mostly lists of things. By picking things off these lists (either at random, or based on some idea in mind), you can create your own dungeon crawl adventure. You can do this without having to make up any plot. Ever. Not in preparation, not in play. Nobody has to author anything.

That certainly isn't everyone's ideal form of play, but it is a form of play. (And once you learn to do it, you can move onto other forms, if you want.)

Try this with a superficially similar game like Boot Hill and it just isn't the same. You can't design a Western town the way you can get away with designing a dungeon. In the town, things have to make a modicum of sense. The guys playing poker in the saloon can't plausibly ignore gunshots in the street outside. NPCs have to move around and do things. Most importantly, there has to be (or players tend to think there has to be) "something going on." Unless you make the intuitive leap directly to no-myth or some form of director stance play (any of which require going against most of what the game text is telling the GM to do), or immediately commit to pure open sim (which, unlike in a dungeon, will usually result in all the player characters quickly getting killed), you need to author some kind of coherent plot. (The plot might possibly be open-ended, but it still must be an authored plot). Or you need to use a module. And then you need to deal with the impossible thing / interactive storytelling problem. when you try to put that plot into play.

Haunted houses, lost mines, and derelict spaceships can be a lot like dungeon crawls. But usually there's the expectation of at least a "something going on" plot (even if it's just a backstory) in those milieux. With a nice old-school dungeon you don't have to worry about that if you don't want to. You can throw a bunch of stuff together (clever stuff if you want, random stuff otherwise) and let plot take care of itself.

In '77 I played OD&D for a year before any notion that play or preparation for play had anything to do with stories or storytelling crossed my mind.

Can't do that today with just about any game system on the market, including recent editions of AD&D. The price of admission is higher.

- Walt

Quote from: Walt FreitagSure, the books are long. But the books contain mostly lists of things. By picking things off these lists (either at random, or based on some idea in mind), you can create your own dungeon crawl adventure. You can do this without having to make up any plot. Ever. Not in preparation, not in play. Nobody has to author anything.

BL>  Thank you.  That just smacked me upside the head with a 2x4 about some of my own design decisions.

mmm... lists.

yrs--
--Ben

I share Raven's experience of getting into roleplaying via buying the red D&D basic set and working out how to play with me, my brother (as GM) and my friend Lee and his sister Donna and sitting around a table playing.

(That's not 100% accurate - I bought the Basic and Expert sets together, cos I happened to have the money and we started play at - I think - 3rd level with the Isle of Dread adventure that came in the expert set.)

For a long time (years at least) our standard mode of play was (1) everybody reads the rules book (2) group character generation (3) play via prewritten adventures.

I'm not sure the length of the book is anywhere near as important as how daunting the whole thing looks - and how unlike the games we have played in the past and had fun with.  The length and textbook-like appearance of most game rulebooks are pretty daunting.

QuoteIn '77 I played OD&D for a year before any notion that play or preparation for play had anything to do with stories or storytelling crossed my mind.

Not to devolve this into reminiscings and anecdotes, my early play of D&D looked like this also.

We played for many a moon with nothing more than a maze one of us had doodled in class (back then I seem to remember drawing mazes and challenging your friends to finish them faster than you could finish theres was a typical waste-time-in-class activity).  To this maze one would draw in iconic pictures of the monsters we had (a circle with triangle pointy ears for an orc).

That was the extent of the prep.  We'd then virtually travel through the maze "we go right...always go right" and whenever we got to a picture...bam time to fight however many monsters there were...which was always a random roll on the no.appearing line followed by random treasure roll..."Man Type T...I hope its Type T"

It was really a game...almost identical in nature to the old Electronic D&D game (with the red plastic wall pieces and the big dragon mini).  We won if we could get out of the maze without getting killed and after each of us had had a turn "DMing" (and actively trying to kill the other players) the one with the most loot won.

It was basically HeroQuest (the board game) long before there was a HeroQuest.

Story?  I don't think any of us had even heard of Lord of the Rings yet back then, we were only in 2nd-4th grade or so.

I agree with John that at least some people have to be able to pick up the game and play it out of the book, or it never goes anywhere. I will certainly concede that the majority of gamers learn from friends--but frankly, this doesn't really mean anything. I'm sure that the majority of board games and card games are learned the same way. It's likely that a large number of authors gain their followings by people mentioning them to other people, or by borrowing books. Most people have their first experience in bowling or miniature golf because someone they know invites them to play and tells them how its done. It's been a very long time since I learned to play baseball or football, but my impression is that I learned from kids in the neighborhood who had older brothers who taught them how to play. I know I learned to play knock-hockey down at the pool from kids who played there (I'm not sure I ever read the rules, although I did eventually own a table)--and speaking of pool, I think my uncle taught me.

Most people learn most games from people who already play. That's an important part of the deal.

It's still true that some people pick up the games originally and learn on their own, and that's what brings it into new places and introduces it to new people.

There's a guy down in Tennessee I've never met. He heard about Multiverser bought it, read it, and runs it at conventions in the south. A lot of people have heard of Multiverser because he runs games. There's still him. There's always still a him, a guy who picked it up and learned it first. I'm sure that there are some people on this list who can trace their role playing game introduction back to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (who taught Joe, who taught Bob, who taught Jack, who taught Peter, who taught me)--but I'll bet that there are a lot more people in this hobby who played their first game with someone like me, who bought it and read it and started playing, or from someone who learned from people like me, or the from people who learned from them. Those "starting people" are certainly the minority, but they are the critical minority--and we do exist, and we do actually buy things like OAD&D because they look interesting.

Sure, I'd bet you could create new role playing games in shorter format rules/scenarios books that would reach people that the current books don't reach; the problem is trying to introduce people who know nothing about role playing games to a playable game without making it long. These are people who need that paragraph on what are polyhedral dice and where do you get them, and a wealth of other things that experienced gamers probably don't need. Cut too much and you wind up with this really looks interesting; I wish I knew what it was.

--M. J. Young

Quote from: Walt FreitagSure, the books are long. But the books contain mostly lists of things. By picking things off these lists (either at random, or based on some idea in mind), you can create your own dungeon crawl adventure. You can do this without having to make up any plot. Ever. Not in preparation, not in play. Nobody has to author anything.

There's at least one modern game built on this model, Robin Law's Rune.  I just figured it was a marvel of re-inventing traditional Gamists styles, but now I'm feeling its more like a return to roleplaying's roots, rather than a re-invention of anything.

Quote from: Walt FreitagSure, the books are long. But the books contain mostly lists of things. By picking things off these lists (either at random, or based on some idea in mind), you can create your own dungeon crawl adventure.

Nonetheless, it doesn't matter that the book is mostly lists, because of the perception of what the book is. Non-gamers don't know that the book is mostly lists because they don't know what it is beyond that it is a game. The non-gamer consumer thinks: "This is a game. This is the rulebook for the game. All these pages are the game's rules. That is a lot of rules." So, unless they actually read it and play it, they'll have the feeling that the book is all rules, and you have to know the rules to play a game.

Most consumers will balk at having to study that many rules in order to play a game -- ie: relax and have fun. It doesn't matter whether the game actually consists of that many rules or not, the perception (uniformed as it might be) will be the consumer's valuing judgement about the product, and thus whether they will buy it or not.

Quote from: John KimHowever, you're trying to add in an assertion that this is (primarily?) because of the length of the game books.  I'm saying that short RPGs have sold through networks just as much as long RPGs, if they have sold at all (which they generally haven't).

Marketing, John, marketing. As I've already (repeatedly) stated: short game books aren't going to sell any better than long game books just because they're short. Remember my statement about the two-pronged assault?

Marketed correctly, a shorter rules-set for a game has a better chance than a longer one. However, the RPG companies that produce short games do not have the marketing budgets of the larger companies...

Both companies are thus still selling to gamers: the small company because it can't afford to break out of the niche, the large company because it is creating products for the niche. The small company can't sell its short product to niche gamers because that's not what they want, but it can't get at its real market.

QuoteArguably, if a game book is pretty and entertaining to read, then its length may help sales rather than hurt them.

There's a big difference here, however, game books and reading books are not one and the same, nor seen as one and the same. "Book" does not mean the same thing as "game" to the public, and the public doesn't parse a game as a book, or vice versa.

Pitched as a game, an RPG suffers because of its length because "nobody wants to read that much to play a game." Period. That may bother some of you, but based on experience and extensive supporting evidence, this point simply isn't arguable -- it is unquestionably the general response to RPG books in the wild.

(Yes, not all of them, but, again, we're talking the majority here, the general trend, not any minorities or specific individuals.)

Quote from: MJ YoungThose "starting people" are certainly the minority, but they are the critical minority--and we do exist, and we do actually buy things like OAD&D because they look interesting.

MJ, here's the deal: again, no one is decrying that the network exists, or that starting people exist, or that games are spread via an oral, experential tradition.

The network is a problem though -- the small amount of individual buyers who get friends into it -- because that's all the hobby can rely on to sell itself. That -- the reliance -- is the problem from a market-share standpoint.

Yes, those people are good for the hobby and they're the ones right now who keep it going, but there's a wider world, a wider market out there that those people aren't reaching and can't reach (such as cases where folks attempt to introduce friends to the hobby, but the large size of the books scares them away -- a regular and inarguable occurence). So the fact that "starting people" exist and are the driving force behind the current network has nothing to do with anything and doesn't dismiss that RPGs could gain greater market share by changing the items I've listed elsewhere.

You are right that many hobbies and products rely on word-of-mouth advertising -- friends showing friends -- but the most successful ones do not rely on it for sales. They make their own sales. Miniature golf, for example...miniature golf makes sales as a sport via exposure to the masses and common experience. Same thing with board games.

People buy and play board games they've never heard of in far greater numbers than they buy RPGs. Board games do not rely on the single individual introducing friends to the game to sell it -- that's a bonus part of selling it to one person -- board games sell themselves in greater numbers than RPGs, and this is because of their presentation and marketing -- because what the consumer thinks they are sells them to that consumer.

RPGs lack this. End.

Note to everyone: I'm getting the strong sense that many of the reponses to my statements are meeting with reactionary criticism rather than examined criticism. That might sound a little insulting, but the fact that I've had to repeat (not defend or redefend, just repeat) all the main points of my arguments no less than four times already as they apply to a profferred criticism pretty much sinks that as what's going on in at least some of the situations.

Please, think about what you're posting in regards to the whole of my statements, rather than choice responses to bits. Having to reply "Yes, but you're forgetting X...So how does that stand up when you consider this part of my point?" is getting frustrating, as I hope you can understand.

Thanks, everyone.

I'd just like to present an observation, one which perhaps supports Raven's point.

Whenever a group of our "mainstream" counterparts opens up a new boardgame only to find themselves ambushed by a 10 page (or even 5 page) booklet of rules they balk. One person (and this is inevitably the same person every time this happens) skims the rules and then explains how things work to everyone else as they play.

Now, assume that the person who "teaches" the game to the others is not the person who bought the game. I don't know about you, but I wonder if the game would even have been purchased had it been known before hand that there were a whole 10 pages of rules to learn in order to play.

You can argue with that observation all you want, but when you do so realize that the very fact that you're here discussing this means that you are hardcore. Hell, if you play non-rpgs with non-gamers YOU may be the one who always reads that overwhelming little booklet of rules.

-Chris

I agree. Lengthy rules can be off-putting and are therefore a barrier to accessibility. I didn't mean to suggest otherwise.

My point is that lengthy rules aren't the only barrier to accessibility, and might not be the most significant one. Another barrier is the need for authorship, which introduces into the social scenario the potential for the same sort of discomfort that can afflict students having their essays read aloud in class.

Even if the rules fit on a playing card, if one of those rules is, "first, someone come up with a clever, original, interesting adventure idea..." or "first, someone come up with an emotionally relevant situation to explore..." there's not going to be mass-market accessibility.

In my opinion, anyway. We have one example of a role playing game with remarkably lengthy game text, but minimal need for authorship by participants, that got closer to mass-market success than any other.* When I see a role playing game (or any game of any type, for that matter) with brief rules and a high requirement for authorship come anywhere near it, then I might revise my assessment of which factors have the biggest effect on mass-market accessibility.**

- Walt

*I think that other non-RPG entertainments also provide parallel examples. The expectation that intricate rules or lengthy texts must always be an insurmountable barrier to wide accessibility has led observers to be amazed that so many players have been willing to learn the encyclopedic details needed to play Magic or Pokemon or Fantasy Football effectively, amazed that so many kids are willing (to say the least) to read Harry Potter novels, and amazed that so many people in all walks of life have been able to learn to use their personal computers. These occurrences run so counter to some people's assumptions or expectations of what people (especially kids) are able or willing to read or learn, that they prefer to surmise that the game or activity must be exerting some malevolent supernatural influence. What amazes me is that people continue to be amazed by the same phenomenon over and over again.

**This topic sounded familiar, so I went and found a previous post of mine on the relation between arcana (rules), creative demand, and accessibility. A somewhat edited version of that post follows; I've done this rather than link to the original because the original post uses (and even misuses) some now-obsolete terminology.

Arcana and Accessibility: The Fortune-Telling Analogy

I question the idea that rules-lite play and design is more accessible to non role-players than play and design entailing detailed rules and/or encyclopedic enumerations of detail such as spell lists or power modifiers lists. (I'll collectively refer to general rules and enumerated specifics, that need to be read and learned for effective play, as "arcana").

Accessibility has a somewhat more complex realationship to arcana than simply "less of one means more of the other." In my experience, both extremes of the arcana spectrum have accessibility problems, for entirely different reasons. High-arcana play has the problem of too much arcana to learn being off-putting. Low-arcana play has the problem of being, for many audiences, too creatively demanding.

Arcana aids in creative imagination. Well-designed arcana does this by constraining the scope of the individual imaginative acts or decisions required, and by providing a framework for assembling the individually limited imaginative acts into a whole.

The interaction of arcana and imagination can be a wondrous and joyful experience. An excellent example is Tarot card reading. The meanings encoded in cards and layout positions are specific enough to provoke ideas, and varied and flexible enough to allow the reader to fit those ideas to conform to the reader's intuitive perception of the person being read. This results in a reading that accurately addresses the concerns of the subject, which the reader picks up from subtle cues. This works so well that most psychologist believe that many, perhaps most, Tarot readers really do believe that the insight in the outcome is coming "from the cards" through supernatural means, rather than from their own thought processes.

Doing the same thing without the cards is called cold reading. It's less popular because it's less accessible in certain subtle ways. Some who are good at reading Tarot cannot cold read because they need the random input or "noise" of the cards to stimulate ideas. Others could cold read if they tried, but don't believe they have the ability to learn to do it or don't have enough confidence to perform it for an audience. Or they find it simply not as much fun, either because it's more strenuous or because it lacks the intriguing "color" of the Tarot's designs and traditions. All these cases have their analogues for low-arcana role playing, I believe.

I can tabulate several different methods of this particular type of interactive storytelling as follows:

Technique      Arcana      Accessibility

COLD READING   NONE        LOW

TAROT          HIGH        MODERATE

HOROSCOPES*    VERY HIGH   LOW

*Full casting of individual horoscopes based on exact birth date and planetary positions; this is far more arcane than daily newspaper "horoscopes" based on sun signs alone.

The accessibility of Tarot is moderate because the arcana of the cards must be learned, and because the basic talent or skill, the real-time perception of subtle clues to what the subject wants to hear, must be there. In fact, it's important to note that in all three cases, successful results are entirely dependent on the exercise of that "core ability." Horoscopes are less accessible for two reasons: the arcana is more difficult, and the arcana involves so much focused attention that the opportunity to read (perceive) the subject is curtailed.

The arcana of the Tarot and astrology both have one other major benefit: they provide a path for a reader to develop or discover the "core ability," by starting out focused on the arcana alone. Both methods produce superficially impressive results from the purely mechanical manipulation of the arcana alone. Astrology more so than Tarot, which is why most astrologers believe astrology can be effective without the subject present and without knowing the subject. Those results encourage the practitioner to practice. And only those that practice will have an opportunity to notice improvements in the results when and if the core ability emerges.

Now, consider a technique between cold reading and Tarot on the diagram, with a low-to-medium level of arcana. Such as, a simplified Tarot with, say, twenty cards each with a very specific meaning. Or palm reading, for which the basic lines and their meanings can be summed up on a wall poster. Shouldn't those be more accessible by virtue of their lower arcana investment?

Yes and no, depending on what results you're looking for. Yes, it's more accessible to perform the arcana. No, it's not more accessible to do so in a way that engages the core ability to create results comparable to the other three. Many schoolchildren "learn" to palm-read at some time or another. Most impress their friends for about a day, after which their friends and eventually they themselves lose interest in the "predictions" they're making, which are either dry and meaningless or arbitrary. The core ability that would make it interesting, the actual reading of the person, is never engaged. Unless, that is, one of three things happens: the reader has such a natural intuitive reading ability that it comes into play anyway; the reader's interest is deep enough to delve into additional arcana beyond the basic wall poster, which re-creates the same case as Tarot; or the reader explicitly learns or has learned to apply cold reading techniques as a separate matter beyond the palmistry.

I submit that this is closely analogous to role playing games and accessibility. Just to lay it out:

- The "core activity" in role playing is different from the "core ability" in fortune-telling. Instead of perception of subtle cues, it's imaginative exploration of setting, character, situation, and color.

- Up to a certain point, the ability to perform the core activity is assisted by arcana (rules and enumerated elements, and their manipulation in play), making it more accessible.

- There are some for whom the ability to perform the core activity, and the joy of doing so, is intuitively obvious and/or already known. (Probably a higher percentage than for cold reading ability.) Others, though, must learn/discover this by practicing it. Up to a point, more arcana promotes this leap by rewarding players with superficially interesting results even before the core activity is engaged.

- At the same time, the arcana itself makes the whole activity less accessible.

- When there's too much arcana, it may crowd out the core activity, and certainly will decrease accessibility. (However, for some, manipulation of the arcana can become sufficient end in itself, even if the core activity is marginalized or omitted completely.)

- This suggests that maximum accessibility will be found at an intermediate position on the arcana spectrum.

Walt's post is a better way of saying what I did when I said the gating factgor was GM's (and I agree with Walt that AD&D with it's big lists and nonsensical dungeon motif is very newbie accessible on *that* front).

I agree with Raven as well that large volumes of rules are (often) offputting--but I (as with Walt, it seems) don't think they're the major factor. I think the problem is the creative story-creating effort involved with being a traditional GM (not to mention the learning curve of figuring out how to conduct a game).

But if the tiny phamplet that comes with a boardgame is too much for most people that's not an argument for rules-lite games--it's an argument for no mainstream RPG's period (even pocket universe won't fit on a playing card, will it? and does it tell you what a GM is?)

-Marco

Quote from: MarcoBut if the tiny phamplet that comes with a boardgame is too much for most people that's not an argument for rules-lite games--it's an argument for no mainstream RPG's period (even pocket universe won't fit on a playing card, will it? and does it tell you what a GM is?)

Actually, I think it's more of an argument for exploring new formats, for rules presentation and design.

-Chris

And it's also an argument that all you need is one person to read the rules, not all of them.  :)

(Though a lot of board games have the rules distributed in a lot of places, for instance with one and/or a multiple deck of cards, where the effect of the card is clearly enumerated on the card itself)

Quote from: LxndrAnd it's also an argument that all you need is one person to read the rules, not all of them.  :)

This is a good point. Often the buyer of the board game is often *not* the rules reader, IME. Hmmm ...

I knew someone who (she and her friends) got the Elfquest RPG in ... middle school? I don't know. They dearly wanted to play but no one would read the rules (they didn't understand the basic concepts either, exactly).

Now, I realize this example is a big strike against traditional games being main-stream and no joke: even with adherents to the license, a (I think) moderately pretty book, and, I suspect, a lack of differential equations in the resolution system (I don't know the game--but I doubt it was uber-crunchy ... surprise me)--it never really had a chance (not with the group anyway).

But ... it *was* a sale.
And ... they were looking for that 1-rules-reader.

Maybe the 1st page should say:
"This game is not all that complex, but the quick-start rules should be read before trying to play. Find that ONE PERSON YOU KNOW who will read the rules and hand this book to them--or call our toll-free 24/7 hotline to speak to a technical support operator who will explain them to you verbally."

Mmmm 24/7 RPG support help-line ... MMmmmm... :: imagines it ::

-Marco

Yeah.  I got pounded by the two proto-goth girls in my school to teach them Vampire... but we never got around to an actual game.  *sighs* Too bad.

You know... a 24/7 rpg support line isn't exactly a bad idea.  It'd probably have to be entirely volunteer-supported though, which makes things spotty.

Make WotC, White Wolf, and Steve Jackson chip in if they want their games supported :)

-Marco

Quote from: C. EdwardsActually, I think it's more of an argument for exploring new formats, for rules presentation and design.

-Chris

I quite agree. In a way, getting to this point is the whole reason for discussing the question (that is, which if any past games have been "popular and damaging" to the hobby or the business) at all.

Keeping in mind, of course, that all this is based on the assumption that being "more mass-market" is a reasonable and desirable goal for rpg publishers in general, and indie rpg publishers specifically. Something that, I suspect, few here will accept without at least some skepticism.

- Walt

QuoteKeeping in mind, of course, that all this is based on the assumption that being "more mass-market" is a reasonable and desirable goal for rpg publishers in general, and indie rpg publishers specifically. Something that, I suspect, few here will accept without at least some skepticism

I'm thinking there is a lot of room between growing the hobby to a size where it becomes viable as an ongoing healthy industry (as opposed to the shambling mess large parts of it are today) vs. becoming mass-market.  

The latter I think is unlikely in the extreme.  The former I think is possible and necessary.

After reading this I had the odd image of people gaming the same way many people play cards (poker/bridge/whater) now, i.e. they basicly get together and socialize and the actual game is mostly ignored.  (Which is I think was Valamir was saying in a different way). Trying to find an actual gaming group when most people just use the game as an excuse to hang out would be annoying.  

I  like Marco's comments about people reading...I suppose you could make a game with vidio tape directions or maybe a disk with the manual.

Wow, there's a lot to catch up on here on this thread.

A few points that occurred to me in my reading:

I don't think that GURPS and Call of Cthulhu were the turning points in RPGs not being accessible to the "mass market". I honestly think AD&D was a big turning point, but not in that it was the perfect marriage of system and intent. IMO, the Basic and Expert boxed sets were far more effective in teaching new players *how* to play. AD&D marked, for me, the point at which RPGs consummated their war-gaming roots and left behind any desire to attract the "average joe" to the gaming table.

GURPS, as the first universal RPG that I knew of, certainly led the way for FUDGE and d20 after it. But I think that was a good thing. I feel that RPGs need to step away from system in order to pull more gamers from the masses. As a non-gamer, nothing makes my wife's eye's glaze over more than explaining rules. I see rules-sets such as the Pool, HeroQuest and even Christopher Kubasik's Story Entertainments as a step in the right direction. The core of the game, IMO, should be consistent and simple. I believe deeply that whether you're swashbuckling on a beam over a flaming pit, shooting down enemy starfighters, or engaging in a courtroom debate Perry Mason-style, the rules should remain consistent. I also think Over the Edge was on to something with its 2 page rules summary. However, these types of games will not (always) appeal to the core group of hardcore gamers who come from a war-gaming or CRPG background, IMO. These gamers, from my experience, respond more to rules-heavy/chart-heavy games like Mekton Z and D&D 2nd Edition. The two groups may have some overlap with players like me, but I don't think that we'll ever be able to create a game that appeals to both the grognards and the unwashed masses.

Regarding Call of Cthulhu, I don't think it was so much of a handicap either as it was the penultimate expression of one of the biggest turn-offs for most people I know who have actually *tried* to play an RPG: the GM's ego. Call of Cthulhu brought the "GM as god" into the setting in a way no other game had/has done. Portraying creatures like Nyarlathotep or even Cthulhu itself, CoC institutionalized the "GM as god" into not just the rules but also the setting. The players were helpless and often hapless. Although I dearly love Call of Cthulhu, I also recognize how it put an exclamation point on this style of play. On VH1's "I love the '70s", there was a brief capsule on D&D. The socially challenged GM that is interviewed talks about how he liked to GM because he was "like a god". So this obviously goes back prior to CoC. But I have certainly seen it manifest in games as recent as a week ago, where the GM uses system and setting to stroke his own ego and diminish the players' role in the story (if not outright humiliate them).

So, for the record, gaining mass market appeal and maintaining appeal of hardcore gamers is not necessarily the same thing, nor are the two objectives even necessarily related to one another...and...IME, the role of the GM (or rather the power-trip of the GM) is also an obstacle to gaining mass appeal.

Further, I think a number of points on this forum have highlighted what a mass-appeal RPG would/should look like.

First, lists are a must. But not book-long lists ala Shadowrun's Weapons Guides. IMO, the lists should be short and sweet in description and mechanics but long in options. Also, the development of "plots" or "adventures" using lists could be a good thing, akin to the AD&D "make your own dungeon" lists or Cyberpunk 2020's background lists. Such tools would also reduce, even eliminate, the prep time needed to play (a good thing, IMO) and perhaps diminish the role/power of the GM as well (another good thing, IMO). Also I have found that Templates are great for newbies. Lists of character types complete with ability scores, etc., ala Feng Shui or WEG Star Wars. Anything that speeds up getting to actual play can only help, from my POV.

Second, examples. The solo-adventure walkthroughs in the old WEG Star Wars boxed set were great tools for learning the game, as well as getting the group started on a plot thread that suggested further adventures. Examples of *actual* (not imagined) play are also invaluable, IMO. Without the transcripts in Nobilis, I would've been completely lost (and I do not feel that I am alone in that statement). Entertaining and accurate examples, IMO, are a must. Personally, I look forward to the day when the page count of the intro fiction and examples exceeds the page count of the rules themselves.

Third, as has been stated before, art is key. Big maps. Great pictures. These are invaluable in my opinion.

And, lastly, non-dice based mechanics. I know a number of people who do not play RPGs simply because they *don't like dice*. Card-based mechanics, ala Castle Falkenstein, even resource based mechanics, like Nobilis or MURPG, aren't such a turn-off, but, for some reason, I've known a number of people who associate dice with something negative. I don't know why. But it's what I've come across. It's a prime reason why a number of individuals from a former LARP that I ran did not cross over to table-top. Is "Rock-Paper-Scissors" any more adult than a d20? I personally don't think so, but, for some reason, they did.

Also, I think it's possible for a game like The Pool to catch on. With good art and better examples, I think that it would be easier for individuals new to the hobby or just flirting with the hobby (i.e. GM's girlfriends) to grok the rules and feel proactive. Games such as the Pool could also prove to be a significant value over other, more traditional, games. For instance, D&D3e fits rules, treasure, monsters and little else in over 300 pages at a cost of $90. By contrast, the Pool could fit in the rules, a number of sample campaigns, settings, characters, monsters and adventures in a modest 150pg. book (if that). When faced with a choice between buying a $15 dollar book that gives you the capacity to play Gamma World, Call of Cthulhu, Fantasy, Cyberpunk and Super-Heroes or place a downpayment on a $35 Players Handbook, I think a large number of prospective gamers would take the former option. But, then, a lot is decided on art. Despite the admonition, I know many people who *do* judge books by their covers.

A final thing to consider, however, is advancement. I like the Pool but most likely would play the Puddle because I feel it handles advancement better. Although I do not like Levels and Classes, I think that such things should not be overlooked in a game designed for mass appeal. They certainly contribute a great deal to extended play.

Well that's my 2 cents (and then some).

Thanks for reading,

Scott

This is an interesting thread.

One thing that I think is being underestimated is how odd RPGs are. They are activities that require people to act or describe pure fiction, with no coherent end of the evening goals, under various strictures, and under moderation. It's very strange indeed, and doesn't really resemble other hobbies. There's a level of shared intimacy that's unusual. In our society, we reserve straight out oral exposition for a small set of activities. Miniatures and cards have an advantage here, because we can use them to really relate to others via the medium in a more concrete way than we can with RPGs. There's the option of a more impersonal style of play with these tools that RPGs can't take total advantage of, because even at their most "gamist" there are abstract decisions involved that the player must own to a degree they don't have to in games with more straightforward, mediated forms of play.

The public's tolerance for lots of rules is actually quite high. We caqn see this in CRPGs, certain FPS games, card games, minis, and even pro sports. Aside from the advantage of mediation I just mentioned, much of the burden of play is really shifted to a set of tools (computer apps, for instance).

Plus, of course, an intriguing concept will trump trepidation about the rules. Most new groups play games with half the rules missing and the other half wrong, then tune up over time.

RPGs could do with a chapter on how to get players and how to run a game for a new player and as a new GM. Experienced gamers tend to gloss over advice like this, but plenty of folks don't; when I was asked to write GMing advice for one of WW's games, I was advised to aim for a middle group: Folks who are just getting comfortable running a regular game of *any* kind, who needed something to spark further development and commitment to their games. The core book, by contrast, is mostly a grab bag to tell folks the cool things they can do with the game. It's to reassure people that they own it and they can run all sorts of things.

It's important for a game book to be a good read; good enough that people keep coming back to it. It has to be appreciated as a *book* to a certain extent. The hardcover format works rather well for this because the book stays noticeable, reasonably attractive and encourages people to haul it out.

If you can't go for that, then, yes, go for brevity, sample adventures and examples of the game in action. DnD box sets were eally quite good at that; subsequent introductions weren't so good, because they were too simple and the gap between the starter and the full game was too big.