It's A Hard Game

Will Dungeons and Dragons be the next [insert high-impact fantasy franchise here]?

This article in TIME is a better-than-average mass media assessment of D&D's impact on the popular landscape.What I appreciate is its clear analysis of the game's simultaneously pariah and ubiquitous status. D&D has a clear and massive legacy, a definite mandate as a cultish hobby,  but an uncertain future as a mass phenomenon.

I sometimes think the often-repeated cries for these kinds of games to regain their fad status are misguided. The days when people just broke out the D&D and played were days without wide access to more immediately involving interactive games. Let's not forget that tabletop games are hard. They can be hard in an easy way or hard in a hard way, to be exact.

The easy hard way is playing with the tons of rules that some approaches to gaming demand. It's easy because it requires the same cognitive skills as understanding how to play Monopoly or World of Warcraft, just multiplied by a factor of however many. It sometimes seems unnecessary when you can play computer games that take care of the drudgery, but nonetheless we see people drawn to the rule-based approach because they have the brainpower, the obsessiveness, or the ability just to sit back and let other people coach them.

The hard hard way is letting go the rules, finding a gamemaster who is capable of doing more than we did just breaking out the rulebooks in high school, and accepting his or her authority. The "authority" part is the really hard part, especially for adolescents. I know I remember things that way, anyway. In fact, the revival of stripped-down D&D may be a better thing for parents playing with their young kids and friends. The chain of command is already clear there. The kids don't demand much in the way of continuity, emotional depth, grandiose sociopolitical thematizing, and other quintessential adolescent ohmygod-so-serious concerns.

As I've argued before, we could get more players for our games if we made it clear that the DM handles most of the rules, and you just tell us what you're doing and how - but that assumes enough maturity on the part of the players. I don't know, I think we can get enough of those players to come around. It might take a shortcut around the stigma - call it the "survival game," give them modern equipment and problems, only slowly introduce the weird. Or the hell with it, embrace the weird, let your own maturity as a person open eyes and make it okay for them.

Just never let them see the damn gaming forums, okay?

Role-Playing Futures

There's been a conversation going on at the RPGsite forum about the possibility of adapting social mechanics from other games into D&D. This suggestion spun off from another, rambling discussion about what if anything can save D&D 4th edition from its less than stellar sales figures. Based on a Wizards market survey from 1999 that segments the tabletop RPG market, Ryan Dancey (architect of the Open Game License) thinks that the players who just want to hack and slash or play cool characters have been lost to MMOs, and games need to focus their rules on the other motivations, like story play.

Well, I have bad news for the tabletop RPG market. You can do a perfectly good story and character driven game without selling a single rulebook, die or figurine. Thousands of fans have been doing this for years now online. Their "sourcebooks" are popular anime/manga or fantasy fiction series. I hope to soon have a guest article or two about this interesting scene that may be one future of roleplaying.

Really, what we know as a role-playing game wraps an unstructured character interaction and problem-solving system around a quite structured combat and adventure game core. I'll say it again: you don't need to structure the social game with rules for it to happen. Thinking you that do, as a tabletop game publisher ... turning to the dark and clever arts of the Forge school of social mechanic design, in hope of breaching the mass market ... sorry guys, that's like being a ragtime piano roll publisher in the 1920's and thinking that you can overcome the wireless and phonograph by getting more into Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

(I mean, I handle live theory for a living, as an academic. I know the temptation to believe that by having the coolest theory you can master praxis. But it ain't necessarily so.)

I like the hybrid of improv and rules because it lets people participate on different levels. I think Zak intuits this too, in his recent must-read post about creativity in rock bands and gaming groups. I realize other people may lean more toward pure rules, or pure improv, and that's fine. Imagine if the previous generation of Fletcher Pratt naval wargame players had butted in on the D&D generation, demanding Wellsian skill-fire procedures and ballroom-sized dungeons, dammit! I don't want to be that dead hand of the past.

From the industry side, the money is obviously to be made from selling an "official" structure of rules and paraphernalia; people are not going to pay a red cent for something they can just do with their friends on line using shared canon knowledge from media they have already consumed. The real question is not market segmentation, but how you adapt a game to the new generation of users, where people spend a lot of time on-line just because it's convenient, and want their face-to-face activities to be short, well-defined and conclusive.

That's my opinion, anyway. But now I put it to you: What would you do if you were running Wizards of the Coast right now?