Evolve or Die: forces Driving the Evolution of RPGs

[b_bankhead]

Recently a major game store in my area moved three doors down in the same strip mall to new digs.  Where the first location was notable by it's large and well appointed gaming space, this new area is notably smaller, almost entirely given over to retail space with one small room and one table devoted to instore gaming.

   I am not privy to the financial statements of the owner. I presume he did so because the values of the additional gaming space was not showing up in his bottom line. It has been often stated (somewhat dogmatically) that offering game space builds the game community, which builds sales, but considering the number of game shops that come in and out of business ,it's really problematic to say yea or nea.  Of the game shops I can remember in the columbus area personally, going back to 1977 its difficult to discern any clear relationship with gaming space and durability.

         Like anything else it is governed by variables, putting a roof over the head of gamers is a not trivial expense. Like any other expense if a game shop cannot draw some kind of balance between the cost of offering game space and its income it goes out of business.  I wonder how many of the failed game shops of the last 15 years went under partially do to the cost of providing game space?

   In my previous essay I mentioned the increasingly negative attitude in the shops taken toward rpgs, largely due to the rapid ascendance of other,more profitable game styles.  I think part of the issue is that some shop owners are becoming privy to just how little they are getting by providing game space to the typical solidified rpg group.

   Secondly, the recruitment model of the miniatures and CCG helps the Shopowner more.  In my first essay I quoted an article that discussed the very different attitude the W40K groups take to new faces. Well the reasons run deeper than the structure of the play....

   For the Warhammer 40k player a new face in the hobby shop really does mean new gaming oppportunities whether allies or enemies (both are equally important and valuable!).
But for a solidified D&D group it really doesn't. In fact a new face means competition for gaming space!  This is important as rpgs tend to have LONG sessions and need gaming space open for those long intervals.  This can lead to a where the rpg groups kind of turn the shop into their own private club.  They arent really taking new members and by their nature clog the growth of the shops player community.  This is tolerable for a shop set up on the hobbyist model, but how long can someone with the idea of being a real retailer tolerate a situation like this? So you slash your rpg lines,push what's left in the back, put the cards and Chaos Eldar Silly Death Machines in the front glass display counter, and chat up the latest Clix, and for Gods sakes dont even MENTION rpgs to anybody not specificaly asking about them...... Am I delusional, or is this not what we see happening?

   My discussion of the issues with regard to rpg structure are prescriptive I have no faith they will change the behaviour of the shop-based rpg culture.  Which given the direction things are going may not exist much longer.......

        Over on rpg.net another never ending debate is going on on the 'merits' of the whole D20 thang.  On my local game shops even contact sheets for 3EAD&D rot on the boards for six and eight months. I have spent as much as thee saturday afternoons in a row  over  period of years,  smoozing around local games stores without seeing much in the way of a new rpg gaming faces. Over a period of two years s  I think I have seen 5 actual D&D groups and even they had solidified.

        The biggest arguments for it's'merits' are that it dominates the market and you can always get a game up. But from what I see locally even I was reducing myself to D&D after 21 years of avoiding the game wouldn't be all that easy to get a game together. I could ****ALWAYS***** get a card game or a Clixi or a Warhammer bash anytime I wanted if I gave a damn about those forms.  
      D&D dominates the hobby shop based rpg hobby.  SO WHAT?  From what I can see that's like being Captain of the Kobyashi Maru. The referendum on D&D and rpgs structured like them is being written by those who are turning to the other forms which locally I would say is happening at a rate of at least 6-8 to one against rpgs.

   I expect that the reader might have thought that this part of the essay would be a checklist of what the ultimate rpg would be like, well I gave the checklist in the last essay. This essay's purpose is to call to question whether ,for the uses of the rpg innovator, the hobby shop culture is even worth the trouble of marketing to if you are competing for a stagnant status quo?  

        The real point of the essay is to point in a different direction. Hence my next essay
'Outside the Shop: The new gaming Mainstream'.

[clehrich]

You know, it's funny.  My own experience of the hobby has been radically different, and I sort of thought the whole Game Shop Club thing died some time ago.  It's nice to hear it's still going on at all, frankly, but I agree with you that the mainstream is outside the shop.

From my perspective, the mainstream is students.  You get a campus RPG club or something of the sort, and they try to become (and remain) a nexus for all campus RPG play.  With luck, and the willingness of campus police, they also draw in some folks who aren't students; some schools make this easy by having a large body of "lifers" who sort of hang around after graduation (or never graduating!) for many years.

My only problems finding gaming have come since I've left the student body.  I can't, at my current university, play in student groups -- this would be seen as sort of like fraternizing with the enemy, more's the pity, and I'd likely lose my job.  So now I have to go with the whole "troll for players" thing.  And you know what?  I find that most of the groups are in some way or another attached to some university or college campus.

Now I realize a lot of this is conditioned by my being an academic, and thus spending my entire life in close proximity to a university of one sort or another, but I'm honestly surprised to find that the Old Game Shop still functions ever as a nexus for anything except sales.

In addition, I think at least part of the problem for such shops is the same one that faces bookstores, especially specialty bookstores: online sales.  I'm not complaining about this; I'm just saying that the problem may be endemic to the book trade rather than specific to RPGs.

At any rate, what do others think?  Is the Game Shop still functioning, was it ever (see "Nuked Applecart"), and does it have any bearing on RPG sales?

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, I think that Chris may have a good point there. In looking at the FLGS problems, doesn't that obviate the fact that for many gamers, and maybe most of them, have never organized play through the FLGS?

I've played SFB at one of my FLGS, but never an RPG. And I think I'm hardly unique in this, either. Not only do people organize via university groups, but there is also just work of mouth. I play mostly with people I started playing with in high school, and all the other people I've played with...I can't even remember how I met many of them. But I can tell you that not one of them was via my FLGS. All just friends of friends.

So, the question is, how common are my experiences, and is there some other model that needs looking at than just why these games don't work in the FLGS situation. I mean, if my FLGS went out of business today, it woudn't impact my play one bit. I'd merely have to order online. Which is what I mostly do now, anyhow.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

When I was playing with more people outside my family (hey, when you've got five teen-aged sons, you've pretty much got a gaming group on call--they were playing in the van as we drove to visit their grandmother the other night), it was over half an hour to the nearest FLGS, in any direction.

For the first several years of my gaming, I didn't know there was such a thing--we bought books and dice at the bookstore in the mall, which was only fifteen minutes away.

My first gaming group was a group of friends who played games together and then added RPGs to the mix. Probably if there was a specific kind of game we played most before RPGs found us it would be board games. RPGs sort of took over the group, although we still played other kinds of games from time to time.

I was in the second group because a bunch of kids wanted me to teach them to play, but discovered it was more fun to get me to run the game for them. They were all friends of friends; probably they were playing at my house for a year before they made the long trek to the nearest game store across the river in the next state.

A year or so ago I ran a demo in a gaming store. It was the first time since I started playing in 1980 that I ever played anything in a store.

Maybe at this point it's the people with the unusual experiences who are speaking up; but I don't think I've met any gamers in a game store with whom I later played. I did meet some in a donut shop once. Oh, and there's a guy who wants to play with me whom I met in Staples, but I've misplaced his number.

--M. J. Young