I agree with the overall sentiment, but this is something on my mind since I very recently got into this conversation elsewhere on here.
I see and understand your points about core/target audiences and that screaming about Mothership and Mausritter makes me an outlier fringe subculture. And subcultures dont make the public eye.
My argument is this: go to any person on the street and ask them if they prefer Star Trek or Star Wars? Batman or Superman? Marvel or DC? In video games you can say Halo vs Fortnight vs CoD vs OW vs ad nauseum. Hell. And these are just every day people on the street you can ask this. You might have to find people into PC gaming before you can start asking things like AMD vs Nvidia, or people into golf about Taylor made vs Callaway. The core audience of a hobby can almost always tell you the major players.
Except for TTRPGs.
I mean, what even is the DC to D&D's Marvel? Traveller? Shadow run? Castle and Crusades? Mutants and Masterminds? Pathfinder (aka D&D 3.75)?
Like I said, this is on my brain because I recently got into a conversation on here with some people that were talking about AD&D and extolling playing 100% RAW with zero exceptions ever. Which was this wildly puritanical view where they just insulted anyone who said differently. But over the course of the conversation some things just....
1) say they had been playing for over a decade
2) playing AD&D but didnt know what I meant when I said OSR
3) had never heard of Mothership, Free League, or "dice pool mechanic"
4) continued to insult me for my willingness to read other rulesets for inspiration on how things can be done
So while I *do* agree that subcultures are subcultures in a system snd that outliers are outliers, those are kind of missing the larger point about the state of the hobby. To use comic books as the analogy: anything that is not original Avengers is labeled fringe. Knowing that Justice League even exists would be considered a deep take. And people would be sooooo confused when you mentioned Spider-Man.
I'm in a lot of hobbies but this is only one thats monolithic like that. Not even tabletop wargaming going against Warhammer is this bad. I've never had a conversation either in person or online with a Warhammer *tabletop* player that didn't at least know about BattleTech, Corvus Belli or War Machine. Whether or not they played them... ehhhhh.... wargaming is a semi expensive hobby. Even where I live now is mildly hard to find a Warhammer game because its all OPR and BattleTech for this area. Same goes for YuGiOh, Pokémon and MtG.
What makes it even more frustrating is TTRPGs are without a doubt one of the cheapest modern hobbies. I mean, if you're willing to hoist a black flag and use a dice app, its entirely free. Hell, in the case of the original Pathfinder SRD it was all entirely online for free. So the financial investment to even try a new system is minimal. But the core audience of the hobby at large refuses to.
tl;dr, it's not that subcultures are a problem or need to be elevated. The issue is that literally anything at all that is not WoTC D&D specifically is considered fringe and an outlier.
And worse now than in the past! In the ‘80’s competition just advertised in Dragon!
Agreed, in my experience only Games Workshop comes close to the current dominance of D&D/WotC.
Which makes it more important, IMO, for the various TTRPG subcultures to be positive + expansive instead of isolationist & divisive.
Look at the group you mention - if they were positive inserted of negative you could grow the impact.
Macris & ACKS might be the best example. By being positive, focusing in good content his subculture wants he’s growing. In time THAT is what could become more mainstream, not to too common ‘stop liking what I don’t like’ dynamic.
I agree with just about everything but the OSR becoming smaller. I would argue it's at it's largest ever, though I think it also depends on what you mean by 'the osr.'
If you mean retroclones or the exact style of play found in older editions you might be right. But I'd argue the OSR isn't dying so much as it is evolving. It's spirit lives on in derivative games like Dolmenwood, Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, and Shadowdark. These games have (relatively) high player counts and the developers are doing (relatively) well for themselves.
They aren't D&D numbers, but the money going into OSR titles either through Kickstarter or Drivethru apprears to my eye to be getting bigger, not smaller.
I agree wholeheartedly. And I honestly feel like there is much more collaboration on the fringe level indie scene in ttrpgs than I see in other spaces. I sometimes joke that my *real* hobby is actually collecting rulebooks. Mostly to remind myself that I'm indeed on the fringe level and that I shouldn't expect them to know the systems I know.
But I routinely see so much collaboration among creators here on the bottom. There's a group of like five or six creators that I almost wish would the publishing equivalent of "just kiss already." I feel as if none of them have made so much as a single one page rules without giving some sort of credit to one of the others 3+ years.
As much as I thoroughly hate to say this, we can thank WoTC for that. The silver lining to D&D and its monolithic state: the OGL. Because the monolith itself personally asked to be hacked and changed and reskinned and mutated and all of that, so why would I bother to play *your* game if you're gonna be that way whenever I have 10x more support and no attitude if I stick to d&d?
Plus, how many current game designers are game designers purely because they started tweaking d&d rules for fun, or came acrossed a different rpg and realized all the different possibilities?
Honestly, the interaction I mentioned was the first real negative interaction I've had that was actually about the hobby itself, which is why the memory of it is bugging me.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but this is something on my mind since I very recently got into this conversation elsewhere on here.
I see and understand your points about core/target audiences and that screaming about Mothership and Mausritter makes me an outlier fringe subculture. And subcultures dont make the public eye.
My argument is this: go to any person on the street and ask them if they prefer Star Trek or Star Wars? Batman or Superman? Marvel or DC? In video games you can say Halo vs Fortnight vs CoD vs OW vs ad nauseum. Hell. And these are just every day people on the street you can ask this. You might have to find people into PC gaming before you can start asking things like AMD vs Nvidia, or people into golf about Taylor made vs Callaway. The core audience of a hobby can almost always tell you the major players.
Except for TTRPGs.
I mean, what even is the DC to D&D's Marvel? Traveller? Shadow run? Castle and Crusades? Mutants and Masterminds? Pathfinder (aka D&D 3.75)?
Like I said, this is on my brain because I recently got into a conversation on here with some people that were talking about AD&D and extolling playing 100% RAW with zero exceptions ever. Which was this wildly puritanical view where they just insulted anyone who said differently. But over the course of the conversation some things just....
1) say they had been playing for over a decade
2) playing AD&D but didnt know what I meant when I said OSR
3) had never heard of Mothership, Free League, or "dice pool mechanic"
4) continued to insult me for my willingness to read other rulesets for inspiration on how things can be done
So while I *do* agree that subcultures are subcultures in a system snd that outliers are outliers, those are kind of missing the larger point about the state of the hobby. To use comic books as the analogy: anything that is not original Avengers is labeled fringe. Knowing that Justice League even exists would be considered a deep take. And people would be sooooo confused when you mentioned Spider-Man.
I'm in a lot of hobbies but this is only one thats monolithic like that. Not even tabletop wargaming going against Warhammer is this bad. I've never had a conversation either in person or online with a Warhammer *tabletop* player that didn't at least know about BattleTech, Corvus Belli or War Machine. Whether or not they played them... ehhhhh.... wargaming is a semi expensive hobby. Even where I live now is mildly hard to find a Warhammer game because its all OPR and BattleTech for this area. Same goes for YuGiOh, Pokémon and MtG.
What makes it even more frustrating is TTRPGs are without a doubt one of the cheapest modern hobbies. I mean, if you're willing to hoist a black flag and use a dice app, its entirely free. Hell, in the case of the original Pathfinder SRD it was all entirely online for free. So the financial investment to even try a new system is minimal. But the core audience of the hobby at large refuses to.
tl;dr, it's not that subcultures are a problem or need to be elevated. The issue is that literally anything at all that is not WoTC D&D specifically is considered fringe and an outlier.
And worse now than in the past! In the ‘80’s competition just advertised in Dragon!
Agreed, in my experience only Games Workshop comes close to the current dominance of D&D/WotC.
Which makes it more important, IMO, for the various TTRPG subcultures to be positive + expansive instead of isolationist & divisive.
Look at the group you mention - if they were positive inserted of negative you could grow the impact.
Macris & ACKS might be the best example. By being positive, focusing in good content his subculture wants he’s growing. In time THAT is what could become more mainstream, not to too common ‘stop liking what I don’t like’ dynamic.
I agree with just about everything but the OSR becoming smaller. I would argue it's at it's largest ever, though I think it also depends on what you mean by 'the osr.'
If you mean retroclones or the exact style of play found in older editions you might be right. But I'd argue the OSR isn't dying so much as it is evolving. It's spirit lives on in derivative games like Dolmenwood, Mork Borg, Worlds Without Number, and Shadowdark. These games have (relatively) high player counts and the developers are doing (relatively) well for themselves.
They aren't D&D numbers, but the money going into OSR titles either through Kickstarter or Drivethru apprears to my eye to be getting bigger, not smaller.
My point said another way, agreed
I agree wholeheartedly. And I honestly feel like there is much more collaboration on the fringe level indie scene in ttrpgs than I see in other spaces. I sometimes joke that my *real* hobby is actually collecting rulebooks. Mostly to remind myself that I'm indeed on the fringe level and that I shouldn't expect them to know the systems I know.
But I routinely see so much collaboration among creators here on the bottom. There's a group of like five or six creators that I almost wish would the publishing equivalent of "just kiss already." I feel as if none of them have made so much as a single one page rules without giving some sort of credit to one of the others 3+ years.
As much as I thoroughly hate to say this, we can thank WoTC for that. The silver lining to D&D and its monolithic state: the OGL. Because the monolith itself personally asked to be hacked and changed and reskinned and mutated and all of that, so why would I bother to play *your* game if you're gonna be that way whenever I have 10x more support and no attitude if I stick to d&d?
Plus, how many current game designers are game designers purely because they started tweaking d&d rules for fun, or came acrossed a different rpg and realized all the different possibilities?
Honestly, the interaction I mentioned was the first real negative interaction I've had that was actually about the hobby itself, which is why the memory of it is bugging me.
As I’ve been saying for decades:
Every long-term D&D DM is effectively making their own game
Nah, in the future I plan on gatekeeping the things I like. I saw what happened to DnD and MTG.
…that’s pretty much what I said. Just more condensed.
I guess I misread it. I'm glad we're on the same page.