Into the Wasteland?

Well, there is a bit of a buzz this morning about the comments of our old pal, Ryan Dancey, on ENWorld.  Basically, he said that WotC appears to lack direction and that Pathfinder is now outselling D&D. Some have said this is the herald of the end of D&D. I think they may be right. And if you know me very well, you know that I actually look forward to this kind of thing.

Are we entering a brave new world sans D&D?

There is an interesting video about what the speaker calls his Comparative Theory of Superpower Collapse that I think has a lot of teach us here about how to deal with what we face as a hobby. The speaker talks about how when the USSR collapsed, they had systems which were inefficient for a superpower but were ideal for surviving economic collapse. For example, people had their own small plots of land to grow their own vegetables because the economy could not provide reliable access to them. After the collapse, these gardens proved vital in keeping people alive in the face of economic disfunction. The major point of the speech is that the USA lacks these inefficiencies and thus social collapse will be much much harder on the US than it was on the USSR. It is this idea that inefficiencies today may actually prove beneficial tomorrow when the context changes that I want to highlight here in relation to the RPG industry.

I think it is starting to become evident that many of the traditional structures we believe will always be present in the RPG industry may actually fall to the wayside. Ryan Dancey is certainly not the first to have such opinions. The last few "big arguments" in the blogosphere have been about such claims; whether from GM Skarka or Malcolm Sheppard. And if we are not prepared to deal with the reversal of our assumptions, we may find ourselves in a very harsh predicament. So lets look at some of the assumptions that we make.

Note that I am not challenging the truth of the assumptions per se, as much as I am asking you to consider the possibility that they may be wrong and what the consequences will be if they are wrong.

Assumption 1: D&D will remain the keystone of the RPG industry forever
There is a lot of evidence that undercuts this assumption. Pathfinder outselling 4e certainly is a powerful indictment of what many have been saying for quite some time; that 4e is a different and worse version of D&D and that it will not survive long term. If this is the case, what are the consequences?

Perhaps RPGs will withdraw from the public marketing world as a form of entertainment. It will become like Bridge or Conasta. There may be some virtues to spending time out there in the wilderness. It cuts out all the people who are looking to make a quick buck. Those that remain are looking to create strong viable long-term gaming systems. Perhaps that will be a good thing.

Remember that RPGs didnt exist before 1971. It is now 2011. That is only 40 years. Perhaps D&D was the first clumsy attempt at RPGs and that we will look back at it as just the beginning, much like we look back at the Telegraph as the inept predecessor of the Telephone. Would you mourn the loss of the telegraph now? Probably not. Lets try to keep this in perspective.

If that is the future we are looking at, then all those passionate weirdos out there that are held up as our own worst enemies will be the people who are left to carry the flame through the dark times. We need that passion. Nobody is going to carry a fad into the future like that. Fads come and go. But the fans of RPGs are strong enough to survive a dark age.

2. RPGs are best played around a physical table
It may be that we are right now in that clumsy beginning. We developed this game for the table because we didn't have the internet. Maybe the best way to play these games is over the web. My wife has told me that she doesn't want to play RPGs at the table, but if it was over the web she wouldn't feel as goofy pretending to be someone else. Maybe the anonymity of the internet is an essential ingredient in moving the game forward, in getting away from the idea that we are unshaven pigs living in our parent's basement.

Consider for a moment that maybe we are just too short sighted now to not realize this is the case. What are the consequences? Well, we dont need the RPG industry very much anymore. We can use PDF materials that already exist or that can be created for much lower costs than hard cover books. We can jettison problems of scheduling, children, interpersonal conflicts, body odor, and so on. All of that can be wished away. And maybe if it is on the web as the primary medium, we can recruit many more people back from the MMOs.

All the complaints about how online gaming is destroying brick-and-mortar would then become irrelevant. Brick-and-mortar wouldnt matter anymore. The problems of finding a group to play in your area would cease becoming an issue. Gaming could penetrate into the most isolated of locations, so long as they had a reliable internet connection. People who have been divorced from the hobby due to living in a small town can now get back in the game.

3. The interests of the RPG industry coincide with those of the RPG hobby
This has been contested for a long long time, most eloquently in my opinion by Odyssey. If the 2nd assumption here is untrue, then this is really really really even more so the reality. We are not dependent on these companies, we only believe ourselves to be. If we are running on an internet platform, we don't really need minis. Even if we wanted minis, there is enough on the shelf out there to last us a long time. And if there is a demand for minis, then they can be made by a company that doesn't give 2 shits about RPGs and we can buy them from that company. If we are going to be spending time in the wilderness, it will essentially require giving up any serious idea of having an industry in the first place. You can't wipe the slate clean if you keep some of the writing on there.

As far as I can tell, the existing industry is out of ideas. They are innovatively bankrupt. When was the last time you got the new edition of a game and said "wow, this is really a lot better than the predecessor". I will admit, much as I loathe to, that 3e has a shit-ton of innovation compared to 2e. Solid, value-laden, innovation. 4e? They changed all the wrong things in all the wrong ways. New WoD is more clumsy and poorly designed than Old WoD. So really, what are we losing here.

The great innovations in RPGs in the past decade have come from independent designers. Are all of them good? No. But that is the nature of independent design. You have to cut the wheat from the chaff. That is just part of the deal.

All these independent designers are no longer distracting from the big game, they ARE the big game. They are the future. Their strange ideas are no longer distractions, but the main events. They are the fuel for the hobby going forward.


Conclusion:
Some may think we are headed out into the Wasteland. That without D&D, the world is desolate, cold, and barren. I actually don't think that. I think we are entering a bold new era. Those things that we think are holding us back are actually going to start propelling us forward.

Come walk with me, forward.