Monte's Leaving WOTC, my take

Hearing this makes me a lot less interested in 5e.

If a designer I know is quality is willing to turn down contract work with a prestigious employer on a prestige product in this job market over matters of opinion that bodes ill for the solidarity a project this scale needs.

Now there are going to be some quality people on board no doubt but losing Monte is not good at all

This could be the golden age of gaming Part #2-1 People

The only thing that is keeping this from being the golden age of gaming for sure is the people problem. As I mentioned in Why RPG's are Good For You.. our social networks are fragmented.

What we need to do is to make our hobby bigger. This is not an incermountable task as many might think but it does require some effort.

To make our hobby strong we need to invite new people and lapsed gamers into the fold. This recession leaving many people time rich and cash poor provides us with a bit of an opportunity. Also this being a sci-fi rich age many more people have been exposed to the kind of things games are made of and as such, might be open to the unique and wonderful experiences our hobby provides.

Here are some tricks I suggest to help us do this once you've conned a few people into a game.

#1 Be a smart recruiter and be prepared with fun. Have pregens snacks and soda and a clean play space. Heck have some board games too in case the RPG tanks. That way you can salvage some fun and they might even be willing to try again some other time.

#2 To be cold, don't invite the Morlocks. Many groups have a player with weak social skills who simple weirds non gamers out. Don't invite them. They will scare away recruits. Instead have them join another time for another game with the regulars.

#3 Keep communications open. This means get cell phone #'s and E-Mail contact info and though its a pain and you shouldn't have to d this follow up.

#4 Hide the distractions. This means video games, Internet, everything. Put it under wraps.

#5 Manage your jargon. Gaming like every other hobby is full of in jokes and jargon. Some of this is inevitable but try and make sure your newbies don't feel left out.

#6 Lead if you need. Player of GM it doesn't matter. Keep th game going and keep it fun.
Now gaming may not click for everyone but at least you'll have done it right.

#7 Have a fun scenario and play the heck out of it

Any other tips?

This could be the golden age of gaming Part #1 Material

Gaming is not as big as it was in the 80's where a lot of kids in fairly small generation dabbled in the hobby. It will probably never be that big again.

However this is truly the golden age of gaming, material wise. Here's why..

#1 More games now are in print at an affordable price than ever before.

#2 Almost every game that is out of print is easily acquired either in PDF or print.

#3 Contrary to what some pundits think, there are tons of quality games to suit every interest. They range from board game like games (like 4e) to retro clones to esoteric Indy games I don't even understand. There is so much abundance and a lot of it is good and cheap.

#4 There is a ton a free stuff. The Free RPG blog, so many of the companies on my front page and dozens of us in the OSR. Its like having an endless game store and access to every GM's Notebook out there. You could game a lifetime on just the free/legal stuff alone.

#5 Miniatures and Dice are easy to get. I remember when this was not the case. Now even with the sad decline of the FLGS getting dice or miniatures is easy.

So materially we have abundance so whats next, the social aspects. Thats where we as a community have work to do which we will discuss this in a later post.

Three Simple Reasons why Tabletop RPG's are good for you

#1 We as a society (especially in America) are starved for real human contact. As Bowling Alone notes our social networks are fragmented and we spend far too much time in front of screens or by ourselves. This is not healthy for people.
RPG's are social and even open to people , able or disabled with strong or weak social skills and little or lots of money. They are an very egalitarian activity that gives us time with friends, fun and laughter. Thats something everybody needs and can benefit from

#2 They work the imagination in ways that more passive media (TV. Movie or Video Games) don't. Gamers may not be more imaginative than they general population but we use our imagination a lot more.

#3 They encourage reading and learning about all sorts of things. In the past this meant cracking books, reading Tolkien, Howard and Vance, obscure History books Osprey and more. Today it may mean Wikipedia. It doesn't really matter. This can spur a love of learning that can keep the brain healthier for a lifetime and make a better person to boot.

WOTC and the pulling of Crystal Keep

OK here is an interesting story first from ENWorld and reposted here for your convenience/

Not that long ago there was a site called Crystal Keep that posted a bunch of text files that contained crude reference charts for almost everything from 3.0 and 3.5 including ,uch closed content.

Politely and respectfully, WOTC sent a C&CD order to Crystal Keep something they had every right to do BTW and away went the files.

This would seem like no big deal except that those files have been up there for more than a decade and its been quite some time, what 2 or 3 years since 3.5 was out of print.

It struck some as petty and many (myself included) as essentially pointless.

This comes after a couple of other off PDF decisions including pulling all legal PDF's, suinga couple of infringers who posted on SCRIBD and pulling its old 3.5 archives.

Folks over on ENWorld have been asking why and especially why now... To save y'all a trip I'll answer here


AFAICT There are two reasons behind the PDF related decisions.

#1 is protecting IP

#2 is "edition channeling" Hasbro/WOTC was counting on an upgrade cycle to drive sales, most of the 3.5 players would move on to 4.0 and thus they'd recapture the old play base and gain some new younger players.

However a mixture of the OGL, global economic woes (the young were particularly hit) PDF warez , a different market (video games hurt TTRPG's) and the jarring edition transition (4.0 is not like older editions all that much) have all hurt sales.

There were at least some stories out there suggesting that Pathfinder was selling as well as 4.0 at a times . That that is a big big deal in an industry where its expected you were the #1 at all times.

So Hasbro/WOTC being a big organization and less than nimble they controlled what they could control.

They cut off the legal PDFs (for old and new editions) , went after that guys that posted on SCRIBD, went after Crystal Keep , and took out the old archives (which is also a cost savings measure)

The problem is that none this matters or will help.

The warez world has pretty much everything ever in PDF with a few exceptions of obscure direct to PDF releases and very obscure and expensive RPG's.

For those who don't choose to be involved in that, there are plentiful retro-clones for every edition save 2.0 (its being worked on though) and cheap books a plenty. Its even possible to find players ...

As for driving 3.5 to upgrade to 4.0 , well no. The natural 3.5 upgrade is Pathfinder +OGL not 4.0 which is a large change, not an upgrade

What we see is a company relied on a business strategy (edition upgrade) that was obsolete with the OGL and as soon as it became fairly easy to scan and download books and as such got caught behind the adaption curve.

Now this doesn't mean WOTC won't make money hand over fist or that D&D won't stay number one. Its just means Hasbro/WOTC will have to try harder and I think thats just fine.

Why is Gaming such a PPCOC Industry ?

From a discussion at Big Purple.

Gaming is Poor Pay Clean Out of Cash simply because its a small hobby. When a hot selling supplement for a well known game (GURPS Spacehips 4 say) is 600 or so units in PDF, the money just isn't there. Sure a few freelancers might pick up a few bucks or even make a living but it can't support a real industry.

That anyone gets paid anything is almost a surprise to me. The amount of free and legal games (not to mention pirated ones) these days is astonishing. The Free RPG Blog has so many listed that there is no way anyone could play even the best of them. I can find something for any genre I can think of .

For those with less ethics and access to a printer, well ..I need say no more.

If we as gamers would like an industry as vs a hobby it falls on us to increase the buyer pool.

World of Warcraft which is broadly similar to an RPG has nearly 12 million players and Second Life has at least 18 million accounts.

If say 10% of those numbers were added to the buyer base, we would see the hobby become 3 million buyers and popular games could have 300,000 print runs -- thats real money -- such a hypothetical company could make (in a lower cost distribution system than the three tiered one we have now with ten $40 books a year) a gross income of 60 million ! -- this is about 20x larger than SJ games and could support probably a hundred decently paid employees.

The problem here is not getting people to roleplay, many people enjoy this activity or something like it . The problem is getting them to make the sacrifices needed to meet face to face and then getting them to buy stuff .

Even without the distractions of the Internet its a daunting task. The US culture is not very sociable as Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone.

an example from his web page

Declining Social Capital: Trends over the last 25 years
Attending Club Meetings 58% drop
Family dinners 43% drop
Having friends over 35% drop

And its not a gamer thing, other social hobbies are having the same problems.

If we can rebuild social capital, rebuild the economies of the world and tap off a fraction of the likely market and then turn them into buyers we can actually make real money.

Like I said daunting.