And the one piece of the equation that
creativecowboy seems to be missing is that there is a TERRIBLE frustration among MMO devotees because of that.
<snip>
If there was ever a time to find new TTRPG fans within the MMO community, now is it. WoW's gotten stale, Star Wars is at the awkward preteen phase, Rift is a wobbly-at-best franchise, and these are the BIG NAME AAA titles. There are a lot of frustrated gamers out there who would latch on to the TTRPG hobby and never let go, if they were gien the ghost of a chance at it.
It is true. I do not see much of this from my exposure in the expat community. The guys with whom I am familiar who play MMOs still play MMOs, and were playing MMO at my TTRPG table. They complain that they have to interact with my world. So I deduce the one complaint they share about MMOs is their inability to kill off quest giving NPCs. One especially puts on airs of how every thing is cliché (apply wrist to forehead, tilt back head, sigh).
I do have a husband and wife video game couple who are into TTRPG. In fact, their family is in the computer game business. I can relate what
forresst says maybe with her. Her initial complaint (respectfully to me in private) was that without a battle mat it was hard to conceptualize everything…
[Also, the fact she has a weeks old baby and a very polite 4-year old to care for during the game might have had something to do with her conceptualizing difficulty but she did not mention that so YMMV with subtext.]
I bring her up because she’s an anomaly to me. A riddle. We have two games in our group. One is with the battle mat and heavy on mechanics run to the railroad of published adventure modules. The other is mine: no minis, heavy on description and mood, language and imagination, and pouring like sand out of my head in response to the players, etc.
While we play in both games, mine and the other type, I constantly feel like she is going to drop out of mine. On numerous occasions when the newbs ask about the other group, the couple has emphasized the groups are very different. But she is actually getting better at mine. The husband cut his teeth on TTRPG so this is old hat to him. She has suffered some traps and problems to her character caused by a difficulty to conceptualize but she has offered some constructive “have you thought about that?” comments to the others that were very savant and important in fact. Sort of like the girl in the sofa who flashes into existence in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels if you catch my drift.
So, how exactly does making a paper MMO help /her/ experience TTRPG? She appears less present in the other game than in mine because she gets told to roll whereas I ask her “what do you do?” and sometimes she tells me before I ask. Reformulating TTRPG to an MMO is not a model that will make many MMO converts to TTRPG. I suspect, as I have seen, it might actually do the reverse (turn people off RPGs) since the MMO is the formula re-presented to role-players from the industry flagship as the equivalent of the new normal.
Or as many have said: why play a pencil and paper MMO when Dragons Age 3 is going to be multi-player next year with better graphics and faster combat resolution?
In my business career background, I have to concede that speaking to someone else in their language and getting past the noise barriers is necessary to impart new concepts and meaning. To deliver a message and actually communicate, rather than utter more noise, one has to be understood and specific on message (which WotC has not been). You can get that much from a Google search. Reformulating TTRPG can certainly, in that one respect, be seen as this model of message shaping. But the message communicated is this: try this pencil and paper MMO with the difference that your computer is alive. The message is: it’s MMO but better.
And it is neither. It is not “better.” It is not even the same. It has, as its roots, a very different philosophy. That is something very serious to consider. There is no common front here, unless WotC wants to make an PnP MMO (which it tried to do). If MMO players are frustrated or bored with MMOs they will be bored and frustrated differently with TTRPGs. It really is like selling Gone with the Wind to an MTV audience. In fact, I am even uncertain that metaphor is too close a parallel to make a suitable analogy of the distance between MMO and TTRPG to be honest. Write music vs. listen to music…?
Now I enjoy karaoke so I can do that without much problem but I sure as hell am no songwriter. I wonder how many MMOs have thought the same thing? But is ghost scripting a song the long-term answer to a bored or frustrated songwriter?
In my business career I have found Gandhi’s words very profound on more than one occasion concerning communications and community building in particular, and of direct relevance to this matter specifically. Now, I would pull out the quote I have in mind and astonish you but my mind is not such that I can recall the list of quotations I kept on my corporate website, which retired along with me. But, if you allow my paraphrase, he said that shared experience has the greatest influence on both communication apprehension and community building. (Noam Chomsky has said similar come to think of it). There are other similar Gandhi quotes, an ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching, and, you must be the change you wish to see in the world; but neither has the same oomph as the one I have in my unconscious at the moment.
So, a question: if experience is the best teacher, why is the TTRPG flagship becoming more MMO? Should it not turn the other way...? Who is doing the learning here? And what is being learnt?
In TTRPG we know about douchey DMs and players and the rule not to play with assholes; so standardization is a video game trait not part of the mosaic of TTRPG. No matter how many rules get hardcoded into rulebooks it comes down to people. Is that an expectation MMO-TTRPG passes along to the new player?
I am saying that the affect of the communication WotC used to entice the MMO market is so pervasively thin that the RPG industry Flagship, D&D, was to lose the whole TTRPG philosophy behind it in re-formulation. (It appears to have lost its Mission Statement) It is like converting The Indians to Christianity by renaming their holidays. It’s not a pilgrimage to TTRPG the MMOs are taking, but the TTRPG that was on the journey to conversion. Surely we see that much in retro-clone-spect.
For someone to decide to play TTRPGs, they have to want to play it. Full stop. To reach these folks or educate them, whether they are housewives or frustrated MMO players, mainstream advertising as simple as the old “products of your imagination” spot is required. Get the message out what TTRPG offers. (The Robot Chicken DnD ads on Youtube do go directly for the MMO market.) But these messages are far from mainstream and they are direct. Message acceptance simply does not happen in direct appeals but in tandem to the two-way communication of the PR experience (hence my old Gandhi quote collection).
Were I explaining this to WotC I would open with: let’s say you’re right and suddenly you get MMOers talking on their headsets about D&D but they all live somewhere else and none of them knows a DM (obviously or they wouldn’t be talking about it over a headset). Whose going to DM them – people fed up of an MMO D&D? What is the welcome these new guys get: edition wars? Does a local DM siphon them off to a Retro Clone for a traditional D&D experience? Do the MMOers become automated DMs themselves (only to be cut off with a 5e retro clone)? Is the cost of D&D TTRPG a reasonable proposition, because I suspect MMOers will keep a hand in MMOs because that’s where they have gaming friends? (Again, WotC gets hit with the PDF retro clone, or AD&D 1e grognards like myself, if the cost is too high for newbs accustomed to buying the latest expansion pack.) What sort of response to the same pressures WotC identifies as an opportunity within the MMO market might come from the market itself (maybe more robust games like Dragon Age 0, Deus Ex, LA Noire, Drakensang ROT, D&D Online, etc.)?
And the best answer WotC has is to make a TTRPG as MMO as possible? That’s madness.
The best thing for TTRPG to attract frustrated MMO players (or anyone) is to offer something grand and differentiated. Not to weaken itself or lower the barriers to access by re-formulating itself like Coke going after Pepsi. It deteriorates the brand and this brand is a standard within the industry.
You don’t taste Coke when you’re drinking Pepsi. And I think the marketing mistake the current iteration is attempting to fix at WotC signifies a Coke-like misstep.