There is a phrase used to denigrate rich heirs, "they were born on 3rd base and thought they hit a triple". It is a baseball analogy that represents the fallacy of thinking that you got somewhere on your own merits alone, when in reality there were powerful factors in your favor. My personal favorite observation of this effect was in a talk given Michael Sandel at Harvard about Justice. He asks how many people in the audience (almost all are Harvard students) whether they believe that they are at Harvard because of their own abilities or due to matters of chance. Almost all of them raised their hands for "their own abilities". Then he asked how many of them were first-born children in their family. Almost all of them raised their hands. They didn't realize how important just a tiny quirk of chance like birth order might impact their entire life, give them access to more resources and education than other people. I think the basics of this principle can extend far beyond your personal fortunes in life and remain applicable.
I bring this up because I think that except for a few rare individuals; Gygax, Arneson, Rein-Hagen, Peterson, Weisman, and a few other premier-level designers; most people working in the RPG industry today were born on 3rd base. I say today because I think it might be less true in the past. But these people by and large didn't come up with the basis of these fantastical ideas, these great designs, etc; they were bequested a success and they merely continued it. And while that is admirable, it causes them to lose sight of the nature of their situation.
In the case of Dancey and Mona, I don't think they truly understand why their properties are successful in the first place. This is not a slight against them, but a matter of perspective. They are not designers, they are publishers. They are business people. They own the golden goose, they are not the goose itself. They don't understand the magic or where it comes from. And that's why they ride on the success of others.
But don't take my word for it. Take theirs. Dancey has stated he believes White Wolf is just an imprint (i.e. just a brand) and Mona has stated publicly that he doesn't think Pathfinder could be as successful as it is without having inherited the abandoned 3rd Ed community. These statements imply that these guys simply do not know where the magic comes from. They cannot recreate it, only milk it. Dancey cannot go out and make the next Vampire and have it be successful without having it tied to the legacy of White Wolf's work. Mona cannot go out and make the next great fantasy RPG without the legacy of D&D to build off. They don't have the magic. They don't understand how the goose makes the golden eggs. They just know how to pickle them so they last longer.
And yet, many people look to people like Dancey and Mona in the industry who don't know where the magic comes from for guidance on how we should move forward. These kinds of people give talks at conventions and the community looks to them for guidance. Let me be clear, I think they have a lot of interesting things to say. I think they are very smart people with some very interesting views on a variety of topics. But not on the future.
The future of RPGs will probably be made by people who are NOT working in the industry.
People born on the home plate, who have to struggle just to make it to first base after they actually make a hit of their own, they are the future. Or designers that have been successful and are now bored. The great designers of RPG's past all appear to have gotten bored and moved on to form new companies or work on their own on new projects. They are not content with making the golden eggs and trying to keep the flame alive forever. They hunger for new projects and they move on.
Those who build businesses around the legacy of these people should be recognized as just that. They are not entrepreneurs or innovators anymore. They have become risk-averse. And as happens with almost every business that grows, inflexibility sets in and innovation dies, unless the owner is truly unique in their gusto (e.x. Steve Jobs). We should not expect great things from them. That is just not what they do. It is not something they can do anymore.
The great successes in the RPG industry didn't come out of large firms. So why do we expect the future to do so?
Why do people even waste time speculating on what 5e D&D will look like? Whatever it is, it will just be one last flailing attempt to milk the golden eggs of Gygax and Arneson for one more go round. Yet people care for some reason. The 2nd most viewed post on my blog is my April Fools joke about what 5e D&D will look like (#1 is my argument with Zak). Just within the past few weeks, a thread linking it was resurrected on the Paizo boards and I started getting new traffic for it.
And that is what D&D has become now, folks. A joke. Because of the stupidity of people who lacked the vision to create it in the first place.
Ryan Dancey said the below in the comments I linked at the top of this post:
Don't make spaghetti sauce. Don't make another minor variation on a theme. Think about diversity, not similarity.
The spaghetti sauce problem is an illusion: People like spaghetti sauce, so when you test a variation, you're just getting confirmation of the existing obvious fact. You're not getting data about YOUR sauce.
Think about the successes in the hobby. They tend not to duplicate existing successes. There's only one successful Giant Mech game. There's only one successful Vampire game. There's only one successful Samurai game. There's only one successful Magic/Cyberpunk game. There's only one successful Western. There's only one successful Lovecraft game. There's only one successful total-genre mash up (Rifts).
He's right about the facts and in this case, even pretty good advice for the future, but his assumptions are wrong. Dan Repperger on Fear the Boot often talks about the logic of grocery store placement and how people apply it to RPGs or Comics and it doesn't work. Basically, there are no "new" customers for grocery stores. You can only place your grocery store strategically to take as much business as possible from your competitors. It is a zero sum game. And the above thinking by Ryan seems to fall right into that mold.
But there is more than enough room in the universe for two Vampire games or two Cyberpunk games. This is not a zero sum game where no new RPG players is possible. And despite the recession, there is more than enough money to pay for them. We are just not making good enough games anymore. We are creatively bankrupt. We are convinced there is nothing new under the sun, when what we lack is quality content that would make new things possible. We are riding on other people's coat-tails and they are getting thinner by the day.
It's time to stop riding coat-tails and make a new coat. On this, Ryan and I can agree.
And if you think that something can't be successful because it isn't being designed by some corporation (you know, because they have the money to do it), but because it is instead being designed by some dude working out of his house, or garage, or scrapping things together on the fly... where have you been living the past fifty years? Ever heard of Microsoft? Apple? MySpace? Facebook? Twitter? Club Penguin?
Or maybe you were just waiting for IBM to invent that shit. After all, they were already on 3rd base.
EDIT: This post contained some weird formating errors that blogger fucked up. I have now fixed it. I think. Sorry
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