I mean, honestly, the idea that people need to suffer through reading hundreds of pages that they don't want to read before they can have Real Ultimate Fun needs to go. While a lot of work could be done with streamlining and newbie-friendlying the rules, not enough work is done in actually making RPG Books compelling enough reading to stand on their own. There's no reason why those things shouldn't be packed to the brim with beautiful artwork and neat little comics.And the part where RPGs fail the most is the time needed to be invested in them. And I´m not talking just about prep time, although that is certainly a factor. I´m talking about the fact that you have to buy a huge book, read through thousands and thousands of words that explain rules that are about as interesting as something not at all interesting, or read through countless pages of badly-written fiction, which, guess what? Isn´t that interesting at all.
The Character Builder is actually an enormous boon towards getting people to play. In one of my 4E games I hooked more than half of the players by showing them the Character Builder and letting them fool around with it, first. And the software and the 4E rules-set are a piece of shit; imagine what you could do if that thing actually had a character visualizer and some real honest-to-god customization.
I mean, obviously, even with all of the bells and whistles and maximum fine-tuning from our end there will still be people going 'too complicated; will not play!' but really that's not a big deal. The goal isn't to become the next World of Warcraft, the goal is to get back those millions of lapsed players. But in the meantime a lot more work could be done in actually getting players to read books.
The current setup of 'oh, gee, not as many people don't want to read our bland B&W doorstoppers where we whinge on endlessly about the economy of Brynn as they used to! Guess the hobby's going to die.' is laziness not on their end but on our end.
