I frequently see discussions in which people argue about whether MMOs, and specifically World of Warcraft, are causing a decline in the number of roleplayers. This argument, I think, is too narrow in focus. To understand what’s going on now I think it’s necessary to take a step back and review a bit of history.

In the late 70s and early 80s roleplaying games were not only the dominant category in the industry, they were the games of choice of nerds everywhere. If you read fantasy and scifi novels, if you were in the computer club at school, if you were any sort of outcast with a bit of imagination, you probably played D&D; at some point. Roleplaying games overcame wargames to such a degree that many wargame companies tried to do RPGs to make some money off the new hotness.

Since the mid-80s tabletop RPGs have suffered a number of blows from other types of games:
* Computer games got better and better and each generation became more immersive.
* Games Workshop perfected its business model for miniatures and grew explosively.
* Collectible games became the new revenue generator of the game industry, doing to RPGs what they had done to wargames.
* Console and handheld games became more and more sophisticated.
* MMOs took the computer game market by storm.

Now the very sort of people who were most likely to have gotten into roleplaying in the early 80s have much shinier games to choose from. RPGs are getting some new fans but the lion’s share gets sucked into playing console games, computers games, and MMOs and never gives tabletop RPGs a look.

It’s about this point in the argument that people will start yelling about how computer games can never replace the true roleplaying experience. That’s probably true, but here’s the thing: the number of roleplayers who really do something more sophisticated than what you find in WoW or KOTOR is tiny. For all the vaunted imagination of the roleplayer, most of them are conservative in their tastes and really just want to buy the same thing over and over again.

To be clear though I am by no means sounding the death knell of tabletop RPGs. People who think that MMOs and their like are going to outright kill RPGs are deluded. As a hobby roleplaying as we know it is here to stay. The larger questions are how viable will RPGs be as a business in the future and what might be done to capture more of tomorrow’s young gamers?

I got a copy of Cold War Commander last week. This is the post-1946 version of Blitzkrieg Commander, a minis game I’ve been enjoying lately. The basic rules are the same, but there’s a lot of new material to cover things like helicopters, ground to air missiles, and the like. Rick and I are talking about giving it a try, which means settling on a conflict and collecting armies. The trouble is there too much to choose from. CWC covers everything after WWII and in fact goes far beyond the end of the Cold War proper. I don’t have much interest in wargaming conflicts later than 1980, as they just feel too recent and it’s hard for me to divorce my politics enough to game them. For many years I shied away from Vietnam War games for the same reason, but now I feel like enough time has passed I could enjoy them. Even limiting ourselves to pre-1980 though that’s still 34 years of history, compared to the 9 covered in Blitzkrieg Commander.

It looks like I’ll end up doing commies of some variety, as Rick is keen on things like Hueys and the Vietnam’s brown water navy. I’ve been investigating what minis are available in the various scales and in this too there is too much to choose from. The game can be played with anything from 2mm to 28mm figures, so it’s a matter of finding what lines cover what periods the best. Our three main options are shaping up to be the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the theoretical clash of NATO and Warsaw Pact ground forces in Europe in the 60s or 70s. Here’s what I’ve looked at so far.

Microarmor: This is 1/285 scale, which is very small indeed. GHQ makes nice tanks and vehicles and they cover all the periods. The downside is that this scale isn’t great for infantry because they are so tiny. It’s hard to tell from three feet away if the figs are supposed to be carrying RPGs, for example.

N Scale: These are 10-12mm figs. On the upside, they are pretty affordable and model railroad scenery is the same scale and thus provides ready terrain for the tabletop. I have not been able to find much in this scale for the Korean War though.

15mm: This is the scale we’ve been playing Blitzkrieg Commander. This can be advantageous if we go with the Korean War, as a lot of the equipment for the two conflicts is the same so we could get some double duty out of the figs. There’s also a new company from New Zealand called Flashpoint doing a nice range of Vietnam War minis if we go that route.

20mm: This is a scale I’ve never collected before but it has one big advantage in that 20mm figs match well with 1/72 scale plastic model kits. That means that hundreds of kits from model companies become useable and it’s likely that just about any vehicle we could want exists in someone’s catalog. I’ve also discovered a nice range of Korean War Chinese from the Platoon20 line.

I will continue to dig and ponder, though realistically this is going to have to wait until March at the earliest anyway. We’re heading off to NY ComicCon this week and many projects are demanding my attention. Perhaps by April or May though hordes of Chinese will be ready to assault the Chosin Reservoir.

I was watching an interview with James Cromwell this morning. He’s the great character actor who nailed the Dudley Smith role in LA Confidential. He’s also a fire-breathing lefty of the old school, which I appreciate. Peter Bart of Variety asked him if he read the critics and Cromwell said no. When asked why, he quipped, “Did ever a dog praise its fleas?” I am amused.

When you sit down to design any game, one of the first questions you want to answer is, “Who is the target audience?” This is doubly true when you are starting work on a new edition. Most new editions choose one of these two options:

1) The game is for newbies.

2) The game is for the entrenched fanbase.

So basically, are you trying to attract new players or are you trying to please your existing fans? Now obviously you have some room to move here, but this fundamental choice is going to affect everything about the game. When I was designing the second edition of WFRP, making the game attractive and easily accessible to new players was my most important design goal. That’s why I considered it crucial to make character creation fast and simply, keep the entire game less than 300 pages, avoid overly complicated rules, and limit the setting info to the Empire. I’ve been reading Ars Magica, Fifth Edition lately (because Nicole is starting a game) and it takes the opposite approach. The design choices seem to be made for longtime fans first and foremost. This is good in some ways, because you have plenty of choice, but not so good in others, because character creation has so many options that it takes a lot longer than it used to. Generally speaking, many things that used to be simpler now have more comprehensive and thus more complicated systems.

Now I am not saying that if you choose to try to attract new players, you are writing off your existing fanbase. There’s plenty you can and should do to keep the old players as you move into a new edition, but I do think focusing too much on pleasing the hardcore players can be a mistake. When you launch a new edition, it’s an event and a chance to bring in a whole new group of players in on the ground floor. I think you want to show off what’s best about your game and to make it approachable to those who aren’t steeped in its lore. If you can hook people with your new edition, you can always add in the other material in supplements. If the new edition fails to engage them in the first place, your plans for follow-ups are academic.

I’ve played through all the scenarios of the BattleLore game but the last one and I think I’m ready to say a few things about the game. Overall, it is a fun and I’ve enjoyed the games I’ve played. Ultimately though, I think I prefer Memoir 44 (and not just because it’s a World War II game). Although the two games share the same basic system, Richard Borg’s Commands and Colors, BattleLore is quite a bit different due to the addition of the lore rules. These provide a system to handle magic and heroic abilities and they are manipulated by a war council made up of classic fantasy archetypes (wizard, warrior, priest, and rogue). As we got into the war council scenarios, I was reminded of the less stellar eras of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, when wizards and magic dominated the battlefield. When powerful game-changing effects can be played at nearly any moment, it’s hard to develop battle-winning tactics until the very end of the game. What I mean by that is while you can plan a turn or two ahead, you never know when some lore card is going to radically change the tactical situation. For example, in one of our games, I was able to use a lore card to swap two units. I took a heavy cavalry unit from behind my lines and swapped it with a goblin unit of Rick’s. All of a sudden I had a heavy cavalry unit rampaging in his rear while his weak goblin unit was surrounded by my battle line.

One of the things I love about Borg’s basic system is the way the command deck controls the pace of the battle while also representing the difficulties of communication and the fog of war. The more powerful lore cards can really undermine some of the design’s fundamentals though. There’s one card, for example, that lets you not only move every unit you have on the field, but also grants all of them +1D in combat. Now there is some control over the lore deck in that you must spend lore tokens to activate these abilities. I found that in play thought this isn’t much of a restriction once the game heats up. So many dice get rolled that lore tokens are generated at a fast clip. It is true that many of the lore abilities are similar to special cards in other Commands and Colors games, but there is a key difference. In Memoir 44 or Battle Cry, you can only play one card per turn. In BattleLore you can play a command card and a lore card together and then potentially play other lore cards in that same turn. That means a lot more can happen in one turn and consequently the battle can swing from loss to victory (and vice versa) very quickly.

I realize this doesn’t sound too positive, but as I said I do enjoy BattleLore. It has some nice improvements to Commands and Colors system, like the support and strike back rules, and the production values are fantastic. The addition of the lore deck though adds a bit too much swing into the game. I like Memoir 44 better because it rewards strategic play more and it is less susceptible to gimmicky wins. That said I will be curious to see how Days of Wonder supports the game and how expansion material affects the gameplay.

Hard to believe it’s Monday already. The weekend flew by, though I did get some fun in. Friday night Nik and I saw Children of Men, which was a really good film in the tradition of the best science fiction. You know, the kind that is about something more than shiny spaceships and special effects. Saturday night we met up with Erik and Danica for dinner at the Ipanema Grill, a Brazilian rodizzio near Pike’s Place Market. If you think an endless line of guys carving off meat onto your plate until you cry uncle sounds like heaven, rodizzio dining is for you.

The rest of the weekend I spent working on GR stuff. It was time to catch up on e-mails, sort out contracts, make a few offers, write text for a catalog, plan out a Freeport adventure, and work with a cartographer on a map. The latter is for the Pirate’s Guide to Freeport and it’s a map of the Continent, revealed and detailed for the first time. I had sketched up the basics, scanned my rough, and sent it to Andy Law, who’s doing the cartography. He shot back a first draft of what is shaping up to be a truly awesome map. He numbered areas he felt could do with names and I spent Sunday morning naming rivers, bays, seas, oceans, hills, forests, straights, mountains, and so on. It was a lot more detail than I had planned to provide, but I think it’s really going to take the map over the top. In fact, the Pirate’s Guide to Freeport is shaping up to be a really deluxe book in all respects. This makes me happy.

Here are some more thoughts on the game industry in 2007. Today’s topic: RPGs.

Roleplaying in 2007 is a category of extremes. On the one hand, it’s possible to see the current RPG market as a golden age for the fans. There new games coming out all the time and it’s never been easier to find even the most obscure titles with the advent of PDF sales and POD technology. You can order one of the fifty printed copies of a game that uses the torture of field mice as its resolution mechanic and central metaphor and you can do it in your underwear at 3 am. By anyone’s estimation, there are far more RPG games and support products coming out than one group could ever use. RPG fans are spoiled for choice as never before.

On the other hand, RPG publishing as a business is in a perilous state. The gap between the big publishers and the small publishers is widening, just as the gap between the rich and the poor is widening in America. There used to be a middle ground for successful RPG companies, a place between the one man shop and TSR where a company could have full time staffers, put out regular releases in print, and make a decent wage. That space is becoming more and more difficult to occupy. The reasons for this are legion, from failing hobby stores to just-in-time ordering to the shrinking number of roleplayers to the heated competition for every entertainment dollar. So you have a small number of larger companies like WotC, GW, and White Wolf and an ever-expanding roster of PDF/POD companies, with the shrinking middle ground occupied by the likes of Green Ronin, SJG, Goodman, Atlas, and MWP. With the market for third party d20 material continuing its death spiral, there is no longer a quick and easy way for new companies to establish themselves. With RPGs making up the smallest percentage of retailers’ sales, making the jump from part time hobby to full time business is getting harder and harder.

Historically speaking, roleplaying has never strayed too far from its roots. The origin of tabletop gaming is hobbyist and everyone who works in the industry started out as just another gamer. It is a nerdy version of the American Dream, where anyone with the gumption can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and get into the RPG industry. The danger of current trends is that the RPG industry could complete its polarization into two camps: small hobbyist companies that sell PDFs and POD books largely direct and big professional companies that do traditional game publishing through the three-tier system and the book trade. This would not be a welcome development, as the RPG industry needs a “middle class”.

Mid-level RPG companies have performed some important functions in the game industry. First, they have provided readily available games for players to graduate to after D&D; or the WoD games. While there are certainly many fans who find those games and never leave them, there have always been those who become dissatisfied and look for something else. It has been the mid-tier companies that catch those gamers and ensure they don’t just leave roleplaying altogether. Second, they provide a training ground for designers, editors, illustrators, and entrepreneurs. You can learn a lot working for such a company and parley that into a job in a bigger company, the computer game industry, comics, etc. Third, they are the place most likely to bring about the “next big thing” in roleplaying. The large companies are too risk averse to take big chances and the small companies lack the means and often the expertise to pull it off. The mid-level companies are hungry, but they do have resources and know-how that can turn an idea into a real success.

I know there are people who are very excited about the growth of the small press thanks to advances to technology that allow games to be delivered directly to the consumer in ways that just didn’t exist 20 years ago. Certainly new ideas and implementations are always welcome, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. While it is true that a game that sold 100 copies last year and 200 copies this year has doubled its sales, in my mind this is not a cause for celebration for the RPG industry at large. Nor is the continued stagnation of D&D; and WotC’s failure to bring in the stream of new players that RPGs need if they are to ever again become a category that shows real growth.

More thoughts later.

I brought in some CDs to work this week so I could rip some new music into my I-Tunes. It’s amazing how even a robust collection of music can get tired after a couple of months. One of the albums I brought was 13-Point Program to Destroy America by Nation of Ulysses. I tend to think of NoU as one of the newer DC punk bands I suppose they are when compared to bands like the Faith, Minor Threat, and Iron Cross. On ripping the CD though, I could help but notice the date of the songs: 1991. Yeah, 16 years ago and not in fact new by any definition.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I was seeing Nation of Ulysses play the Pyramid Club in NYC with Bikini Kill. This must have in 1990 or so. It was a really fun show, the first time I had heard either band. NoU’s mock revolutionary rhetoric was amusing and Bikini Kill’s punk rock feminism was refreshing. This was right at the beginning of the whole riot girl movement. Now both bands are long broken up and my brain is about 10 years out of date. Time to hit the reset button I guess.

So Pirates of the Burning Sea is going through beta testing now. Some of the players are getting frisky, so there’s a plan to have a big battle royale where the “mighty devs” of Flying Lab take on upstart playtesters in a fleet engagement. Although we are entirely likely to get our asses kicked, this should be fun. A thread started in the beta test forum and naturally smack talk ensued. Yesterday, the head of my department told us all to pile into the thread and start taunting the playtesters. I posted:

“You can tell that war is brewing when gums start flapping. Let’s see who measures up once the battle starts. When shot flies through the air thicker than rain, who will brave it? When your decks are slick with the blood of your comrades, who will fight on? When the acrid smoke of the gun deck chokes you, who will keep loading the cannons? When your ship has more holes in it than a prostitute’s smile, who will go down with the ship? When you’re wearing your best friend’s face on your shirt, who will sound the charge? Is it you, big talkers, or will you be running away instead of running out the guns?”

This was slightly undercut by my co-worker posting a challenge in the form of the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme song lyrics (which he assures me is some kind of internet meme; whatever) but nonetheless the desire result was achieved. I am amused that I am getting paid to smack talk our customers. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for hobby game companie…

When I talk to other game industry people, they often ask me what is going on at WotC. There was certainly a time when I could tell them, having worked there for four years and knowing many of the people still inside the beast. These days though I don’t have much to report. Many of the people I knew have moved on and those I remain friendly with like their jobs enough not to go spilling secrets. So please don’t read too much into what follows. I sat down to write a little something about where the game industry was at in 2007. With all the other stuff I have going on, I realized that it was going to take me a long time to finish and it was going to be a lot longer than I expected. So I figured I’d do it in chunks instead and where better to start than the local heavyweight? These are my personal opinions, not those of Green Ronin, and I based on little more than observation and a fair understanding of the marketplace.

I might as well start with the question vexing the denizens of all D&D; fan boards at the moment: the dreaded new edition. I expect to see an announcement from WotC this year about 4th edition D&D;, probably at GenCon. The types of products that they are doing show all the signs that a new edition is in the works: compendiums (first spells, soon magic items, and then rules), disposable adventures, experiments (Book of Nine Swords), and nostalgia products. This is all the sort of stuff that happened in the waning years of second edition. Plus 2008 will be five years since the release of 3.5, which makes it a natural time to hit the reset button. I have talked to some folks who think this might be announced as early as next month at the “D&D; Experience” (the re-branded Winter Fantasy) but I really doubt that’s the case. There’s too much announced product in the queue and any 4E announcement is sure to kill sales on subsequent 3.5 books.

This year I also think D&D; minis may begin their decline. I think the majority of the purchasers have been roleplayers to date. DDM as a game barely seems to be a blip. Now that the minis have been available for a few years, I suspect most roleplaying purchasers have robust collections that give them most of the figs they need. The number of folks who will buy a full case on release will drop and instead they will buy the specific models they need from a new set on the secondary market. Of course, if set runs get smaller the secondary market will also suffer.

What WotC really needs to do to keep sales up is take the minis from being optional RPG accessories to mandatory ones. I don’t know what their plans are, but I would not be surprised if 4th edition takes a form that ties minis even tighter to the RPG experience. This will certainly make many fans howl if it happens. However, I’m betting that that collectible minis are making WotC a lot more money than D&D; books at the moment, which means the tail may now be wagging the dog. Considering the attitude of many RPG R&D; people when WotC first got into miniatures, this is supremely ironic.

While all this is going on, Magic will keep plugging along like it always does, giving WotC the solid baseline it requires to move ahead. It’s amazing that the workhorse keeps pulling the cart, but it has endured while games all around have died horrible deaths.