The difference with the Wii, I believe, was the ‘breakout technology’ it introduced to the medium. Everyone else was refining their technology, better graphics, faster controllers; Nintendo skipped chasing that goal and subverted the whole thing. Back in the day, all the pundits said it was a big mistake and that Nintendo was going to lose big in the ‘arms race’ of consoles.

Personally, I think the time for refining these four qualities has past. I believe that TSR-WotC-Hasbro has the money and the branding to keep refining (like Playstation and Xbox). I think we need a break-out product.

I realize that nay-sayers here don’t agree that Magic: the Gathering was such a breakout product. I guess they don’t see how it’s producer completely usurped the industry. I guess they don’t agree how many consumers made the switch from CCGs to RPGs. I’m willing agree to disagree; this isn’t my central point.

My point is we need something new. Radical kinda new. Not something anyone in the industry would be willing to call an RPG. Mebbe a ‘toy’ ala Will Wright; who knows? A few years back, I demonstrated my inability to produce under deadline when my wife made note of a new author who she thought would supplant the Goosebumps teen-fiction marketing bulldozer.

Imagine the Harry Potter Game. Assured sales, it gets racked with the rest of the franchise and bought by all the collectors. Sigh. That ship has sailed.

So far, in terms of licensed products, I’ve yet to see something contemporary turned into something other than just another D&D clone. (I mean, Star Wars? That’s thirty-two years old!)

I personally don’t have a clue.

But I toil away. I watch other sources of role-playing that most of the ‘insiders’ poo-poo as not ‘real’ RPGing. Things like Civil War reenactors, model railroaders who write bills of lading and use ‘fast clocks’, the SCA, paintballers, ren festies, (up here in the mid-northwest) Rendezvous and of course the ‘How to Host’ games. (I’m also looking for more.) Who knows what the break-through vector is. Not me.

What I do know is that ET the Extraterrestrial was the breakthrough moment for D&D and Reese’s Pieces. Which one made it?

Fang
Now accepting playtesters for the Scattershot Role-Playing Games

p.s. Oh how I wish I could figure out that brainstorm.

p.p.s. Remember when Hero-Clix broke out? Everyone thought that would be it. It brought in a large number of comic book collectors, but it didn’t ‘stick’ and has been sold off.

Let’s start by listing the reasons that the Wii is the Wii of Video games:
1- Reduced Barrier to entry
2- Made fun important
3- Gimmicy
4- Appeal to a younger/broader demographic

Now, how did the Wii achieve each of these?
1- Reduced cost of console, made games simpler (notice the Wii has the least buttons?)
2- Focused on Fun during production, kept things simple, exciting, colorful, etc…
3- Used Gimmics, several of which were “Holy shit, What?” gimmics to get attention and convince people to give it a try
4- Kept things thematically appropriate and exciting for younger demographics.

Now how do RPGs do the same thing?
1- It has to be cheap, fast, and easy. You need to be able to buy a copy for $20, you need to be able to play on a moment’s notice with 0 prep. Ideally, you should be able to have a satisfying solo experience as well.
2- Ditto. Every aspect of game design, the question should be: “Is this as fun as possible? For everyone?”
3- No idea. but it has to have something that makes people sit up and say “What the crap is this thing?” Preferably several of them, in different ways and different areas to hit different audiences.
4- Ditto. Keep things both thematicly appropriate for and appealing to, younger audiences.

Now, are there any RPGs in existance that fit all those criteria? If there are, I don’t know of them (and hence, they fail the “Gimmicy” criteria right off the bat, for those keeping score at home).

But can there be? Sure. Why not?

Let’s hear some ideas people! The Wii of RPGs starts today!

> Think about it, there isn’t a version of D&D in any other language than English, whereas even the lamest of video games usually gets SOME kind of international documentation.

Umm….. that’s far from true. D&D is and has for each edition been available in many different languages. The sad news is that the German translators have recently pulled out, apparently due to poor sales for 4e.

Interesting how you say RPGs aren’t mainstream, then cite mmoRPGs as being far more popular. MMORPGs are RPGs, tailored for a mainstream audience, by definition.

WOTC hasn’t even penetrated an international market. Here’s one thing- RPGs are incredibly difficult, if not impossible to translate. There’s definitely a required English fluency requirement to play.

Think about it, there isn’t a version of D&D in any other language than English, whereas even the lamest of video games usually gets SOME kind of international documentation.

Think about it- if Video games were ONLY accessible via an English Speaking audience, where would they be? Fully 2/3rds of WOW’s online population is Chinese or Korean.

Let’s face it-PnP RPGs are vastly a niche market. PNP will more than likely be subsumed by video games within the next 20-30 years or so. Yeah, that’s what they said in the 70′s, but you know what? It’s true.

MMORPGS ARE the Wii version of PnP, a fairly low cost, easily accessible alternative everyone and their mother has played.

The fundamental factor missing is robust content authoring tools, and while they are no means anywhere near the level they need to be, games like NWN and SecondLife have shown significant progress in that direction.

Once you can use the computer to generate custom graphical user content as easily as say, someone can do with paper and pencil, I would say that the era of PnP RPGs is dead.

Mind you this isn’t anytime soon. Software and in particular content generation software doesn’t progress nearly at the speed of our computer hardware. But I think by the time your great great (Great?) grandkids are running around pen and paper RPGs will have gone the way of the silent movie.

@Raf: That might be true, and I do consider myself lucky, but really, it’s all about the pitch. You gotta recognize what there is in RPGs for everyone to like. Elements of the hobby exist everywhere, because everyone wants to be creative. Look how many amateur novelists exist out there. Could these people not be convinced that certain roleplaying games are an excellent exercise in creativity and collaborative storytelling? The exact same goes for fan-fiction writers and forum roleplayers.

My main technique in getting people into the game is realizing what appeals to them, and what they’re comfortable with. My inner-city experience comes from asking people “Isn’t the best, most interesting part of Grand Theft Auto playing through the whole story mode?” This conversation ultimately leads to talking about urban-set, modern geared PnP RPs, and once they get it, they’re hooked.

We can come up with tons of theoretical reasons as to why RPGs don’t appeal to the main stream, but there’s a problem to address long before we ever get to that subject, and that’s that people simply don’t even know who we are! They don’t know anything about tabletop RPGs. My experiences explaining D&D mostly lead to the inevitable conclusion of “Really? Wow, I’d didn’t know that anything like that exists.”

People don’t know anything about PnP RPGs. We have no presence in the mainstream. Look at /any/ article in a major news source (like the few that popped up at 4th Edition’s release). They all include a paragraph describing what an RPG is. You’ll notice that video games don’t have this problem. We might blame this on mainstream appeal, but let’s point to the obvious, like the fact that Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all have _commercials_, and _billboards_, and _magazine advertisements_.

The mainstream marketing issue is that no one is taking any initiative. Look at D&D basic starter set, and where they advertise it. Enworld, RPG blogs, and their own site, places which are populated solely by people who most likely already have a comfortable familiarity with D&D 4th Edition, if not owners of PHBs.

Maybe I’m just caught in a rant here, so to sum it up…

How can we know what mainstream appeal we might have if there’s absolutely no mainstream presence. Maybe we need to make a bit of a splash first before deciding “Maybe people just don’t like RPGs”.

I don’t think that a unified-field-theory of RPGs exists. There is one core difference between RPGs and video games that makes this so in my mind, the creativity. RPGs, through the GM and players, are a cooperative creative endeavor. While most GMs cut their teeth on modules, every adult GM that I know eventually begins adding some creative elements to the module:

“I didn’t like his dialogue there, so I rewrote it.”
“That plot line didn’t fit for your characters so I tweaked it.”
“I didn’t like that feat progression, so I dipped into a PrC instead”

Most RPGs and modules have sidebars or box text to encourage or aid this creativity. And since all players groups are unique, so are the needs of that group. Since the delivery of the session ultimately comes through the GM, players expect some adaptability.

Where the Wii innovated by tapping into broad appeal, RPGs compete by doing the opposite, they tap into progressively more narrow appeal. That even happens with D&D, though its survivability is in self-renewing waves of conformity with new editions. But with each campaign expansion, 3rd party publisher add-on, supplement, & option rules change, D&D tears down its edifice once again, ever anticipating the new edition if it hopes to maintain a bulk of market share.

So, in my opinion, the real revolution in RPGs has already occurred via internet chat groups, gaming networking sites like this one, blogs, and more. That is, by connecting GMs with each other, we keep each other fresh and supported. We renew our creativity. We remind each other of the basics. We have an infinite vault of ideas and limitless 24-hour “tech support” for the games we run.

-zerfinity
http://zerfinity.blogspot.com/

@Fang Langford – I’ll second JackSmithIV’s comments re: MtG. Magic did a lot for GenCon and for gaming in general, and even allowed WotC to buy the financial basket-case that was TSR. (And by doing so, kept D&D alive; kudos for that alone.) But I don’t see many TCGers turned into RPGers; I suspect that the net effect is the opposite. Regardless, the same could be said for Everquest or World of Warcraft: They’ve brought a lot of people into a hobby that shares its roots with tabletop RPGs. (Eww, did I just say that?)

@JackSmithIV – I’m definitely giving 4E credit for innovation and making the game simultaneously easier and more fun (IMHO). But I don’t see it as being the “simple but fun” thunderbolt that was the Wii.

Again, thanks for the opinions, even when I don’t share them. I’m not even sure if there is an answer here, or if (in a long tradition of geek philosophy) I’ve found an analogy that falls apart well before it can be applied to the real world.

@Fang: I think you’re missing the point a bit. Magic: the Gathering is NOT an RPG. It may be the greatest TCG ever created, it may have spawned an industry, and it may have changed the face of gaming forever, but it is not an RPG, it does very little direct good to the RPG business, and the core demographic is in no way the same people. It is entirely separate. It has nothing to do with preference. I like the game quite a lot! But you can make a better case for J.R.R. Tolkein’s books being the Wii of the RPG industry. And that wouldn’t make any sense either.

@Kurt: I agree with you on all points, except for one: you discredit 4th Edition too quickly. While no where near the goal of what we’d need to save the hobby, they have taken HUGE steps towards making the industry ready for that kind of transition. The new system of community interaction and support paired with the simply IMMENSE amount of content they release IS revolutionary. I’m not trying to harp on with fanboyism, but in the RPG industry, this level of constant development and content has never been seen before. They’re completely overhauled their system, with a sexy new rules system, new online tools (no matter how slowly they seem to be coming), and what seems like a solid game plan for the next few years.

And like I said earlier, even though they don’t have the product or the marketing momentum, they at least are getting closer to the right idea. It’s like that slogan… “Get together. Roll some dice. Have some fun.” My god, if we could put in some magazines or on some billboards, wouldn’t there at least be some new attention?

I don’t think D&D is the product. But it has the most powerful brand equity of any RPG on the market. Everyone has heard of it, but no one is really sure of what it is if you aren’t familiar with the hobby. If the average person sees my Player’s Handbook, they’ll ask me what it is. Even in an inner city school, or Central Park, or a knitting store, or the gym… I always have people walking away going, “Wow, jeez… that sounds kinda cool. I’ll have to check that out!” It’s visibility! The most important thing we can achieve!

I think the biggest problem with our hobby is that we don’t have a plan. And too much goes on behind closed doors. No one knows who we are, and we’re in the perfect position to let people know. And never think that we can’t go mainstream.

Raf: you say that you don’t think imagination runs rampant enough through the broader culture these days. Look at how to host a murder games. Look at fantasy football for gods sakes. Imagination is everywhere. Adults these days especially are looking for all sorts of new ways to recreate. Or think of it this way: how many people love deckbuilding and tactical card games? Is that more common among the development in your average person than playing pretend?

We can do this. And damnit, shouldn’t we?

And then that “just another card game” bought TSR.

There were enough overlaps that M:tG greatly expanded the people RPGs reach and that’s what we’re discussing right? Let’s put personal tastes aside, okay?

@JCDietrich – And yeah, LARP might qualify for that too. More like the Jakks Pacific Plug‘n Play games. Vampire: the Masquerade LARP did bring more players to the hobby, but no where near as many as M:tG

What we really need is a Harry Potter for RPGs.

Fang Langford
Now recruiting playtesters for the Scattershot Role-Playing Game

@Kurt You do realize that RP in LARP are the same thing as RP in RPG don’t you?

As a matter of fact LARPs share the same type of difference that sets Wii apart from the and “traditional” video game systems: gets you off your butt, moving around, and it has a more “natural” interface (wanna swing a bat, swing the wiimote – want your character to cross the room and talk to so and so, do it!) They both have some elements similar to their more traditional ancestors (the settings, the story telling, the role playing, action resolution) They both get scoffed at by the “hardcore” fans.

Quick story: I went to a martial arts seminar in another town, and saw a huge school with dozens of thai pads and other gear. I asked about it, and found out that the owner teaches a ‘fitness class’ that is a simple muay Thai workout with lots of reps and a lot of energy. The vast majority of his ‘fitness’ classes are female (unusual in a martial arts school), and they account for 80% of his students. By stepping away from the fierce competition for the 5% of the population that wants to be a martial artist, and pursuing the 95% of the population that simply wants to have fun getting into shape, the owner made tons of money. He blew away his competition, and has enough disposable income to have better seminars and competitions, buy better gear for his ‘hardcore’ students, take his students to bigger events, etc.

RPG publishers are doing the exact same thing: They’re fighting over RPGers, who are less than 5% of their potential market. Who is going to appeal to the other 95% of the market? I really do wish I had an answer to that question, but I don’t see anything right now that will do that.

The state of the hobby right now seems to be at a bit of a dead end. 4E is a bit innovative, but it’s not revolutionary in any sense of the word. The indie games movement may well be the birthplace of the next generation of RPGs, but most of what I’ve seen is far too genre-specific to have any broad-based appeal (and don’t even get me started on the postmodern attitude that seems to follow the movement). Magic the Gathering was/is an innovative game, but frankly it’s just another card game; poker has more roleplay. The ‘murder mystery dinner’ approach may hold something, although it may just descend into a LARP.

I hate to be a cynic, but I do occasionally worry about the future of the hobby.

I’ve pretty much thrown a murder mystery dinner once a year for the past several years and people always love it.

The down side is that much of the game is prescripted and there isn’t alot of room for exploration.

However, could you imagine taking your favorite role playing game night and putting it in a bunch of little books (one per character) and letting another group act it out? Throw in a few dice rolls and it could get interesting ….

Just thinking out loud.

Wizards of the Coast has already published the Wii of role-playing games: Magic the Gathering. It was as innovative as the Wii by comparison; it brought tonnes of people to the hobby, many of which never touched FRPG products before (a lot coming from the trading card hobby).

So-called ‘indie’ games targeting the ‘mainstream’ are doing it all wrong. As said above, they cannot be the nintendo of RPGs; they don’t have the power influence and well, branding. If you want to make an ‘indie’ game that cracks the mainstream, be the Brain Age or Cooking Guide of ‘indie’ games. Small press is pretty much the DS cartridges in this market.

If you want to step behind the hobby and see how little it has innovated, read through A Thing of Beauty is a Stout Green Toy by James Wallis. He’ll give you the history of the industry like you’ve never seen before (a non-American view at that), but he’ll show you what true innovation might look like.

Fang Langford
Now recruiting playtesters for the Scattershot Role-Playing Game

I would also like to point out the problem of competition: In most rpg’s there is no competitive element. (At least not officially) Most people however play games to win and gloat over the loosers. Descent adresses this problem but it is far too complicated to apeal to a very large audience.

Ok, enough ramblings for now, I’ll try to order my thoughts for the next one, promised!