The 'World of Warcraft Killed Tabletop!' meme.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Sep 18, 2010 7:39 pm

First of all, we're just going to focus on WoW. It's even more ridiculous to claim that MMORPGs in the abstract are killing D&D, because the second biggest non-Korean/Chinese MMORPG, Final Fantasy XI, has slightly less than a million subscribers. Even 4E D&D can do better than that.

The Nintendo Entertainment System sold 62 million units.

The Playstation 1 has sold 100 million units.

The Playstation 2 has sold 140 million units.

WoW has about 15 million subscribers. The Nintendo DS, which has its own heyday during this time, has sold about 132 million units.

If you believe Frank's numbers, D&D had about 6 million players at its height (which was sometime between 2002 and 2006) and 1.5 million right now. Meaning that if the fucking Playstation 2 didn't stop 3rd Edition D&D from having its best sales ever, why the fuck would you think that World of Warcraft is the reason why the sales of it are so bad?

It just doesn't make sense to claim that MMORPGs have permanently killed off tabletop. MMORPGs, like any other hobby, demand a finite number of time out of your day. But here's the important part: the 8-hour a day fanboy who doesn't even have time for school is a stereotype. MMORPG players have time for other hobbies; it's no different from sports fans or video game nerds. Yeah, you have some addicts who have time for nothing else, but the majority of them do have time in their day for hanging out with friends, watching TV, exercising, whatever. So if something as time-demanding as modern video games didn't kill off tabletop, why the hell is something as pissant as World of Warcraft doing the trick?

The only way remotely in which this argument makes sense is if you're claiming that WoW is a replacement for tabletop, at least in its strong suits. Again, even if that were true, the obvious counter-argument is don't make tabletop RPGs to resemble MMORPGs.

People are getting all of their panties in a bunch like World of Warcraft is this monolith hellbent on sucking the interest out of tabletop gaming. Well, yeah, but that's because the games out right now suck ass. Seriously, the second biggest TTRPG out there right now is fucking Pathfinder. This reminds me of the arguments being bandied about during the 'low' point of Professional Wrestling (the early 90s), that no one watches Wrestling anymore and it's a dead hobby. They were even claiming that after the previous height of the WF era, as if the audience had completely moved on after a few years of Hulk Hogan-fueled megastardom.

Professional Wrestling wasn't dead, it's just that the product sucked ass then; after Eric Bischoff came back with his rebooted WCW/NWO and started the Monday Night Wars, Professional Wrestling became fucking ginormous. It's not as good nowadays as it was during the late 90's/early 2000s, but that's another story. The overall point I'm trying to make is that if you had a sales-gonanza of a product <5-7 years back and the product has had a successful track record 30 years prior, it just miiiiight be premature to go around claiming that you got dealt a bad hand.

Maybe your product sucks ass and YOU NEED TO FIX IT.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 2:09 am

Well, at least you finally get that MMORPGs aren't stealing from tabletop. And by implication the reverse won't be effective.

But you still don't get why the time for RPGs to be mainstream has come, and gone.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 4:23 am

Zinegata wrote:And by implication the reverse won't be effective.

As long as you're laboring under the extremely questionable assumption that people only have the time to dedicate to one interest, especially given the huge amounts of overlap that TTRPGs have with MMORPGs.

Zinegata wrote: But you still don't get why the time for RPGs to be mainstream has come, and gone.

The reason escapes me, in the same way that the reason why we need to privatize Social Security escapes me.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 4:41 am

A. There is no real overlap in MMOs and TTRPGs beside theme. (and being good at math lets you powergame with both, because math is the basis of all powergaming).

Also, I never denied some people can play multiple games. I even coined them "Omni gamers". But most people prefer to stick with one particular type of game.

So again, stop miscontruing my points like you do repeatedly.

B. People have found alternatives to RPGs and they are not coming back (and no, MMOs are not the alternative), because they provide what they used to get out of RPGs without dealing with the BS elements of RPGs (or at least elements which they think are BS).

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 6:48 am

I don't think WOW/MMOs are killing off tabletop, I think that tabletop designers (at least in the D&D product line) are looking at MMOs and saying "well shit that's popular on a computer, so let's rip it off and plug it into the game."

My argument is that tabletop games imitating the mechanics of an MMO is helping to ruin TTRPGs. I also argue that this will not change any time soon, and that designers are going to have to learn how to translate succcessful MMO concepts over to tabletop instead of just kind of carting it over.

Murtak · Post by **Murtak** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 8:02 am

Zinegata wrote:Also, I never denied some people can play multiple games. I even coined them "Omni gamers". But most people prefer to stick with one particular type of game.

For the record, I do not know anyone who only plays one type of game, not even if those types are "computer games" and "everything else".

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 10:31 am

Murtak wrote:
Zinegata wrote:Also, I never denied some people can play multiple games. I even coined them "Omni gamers". But most people prefer to stick with one particular type of game.
For the record, I do not know anyone who only plays one type of game, not even if those types are "computer games" and "everything else".

For the record, I don't know anyone who plays one type of game either - and yes the definition is supposed to refer to broad game types (i.e. computers vs tabletop vs others)

However, most people I know prefer one particular type of game. And they invest most of their game playing time on it. Only a few - the Omnigamers - actually bother to invest playing time in multiple types of gaming.

Lots of people try out other stuff. Most computer gamers I know have tried out Magic and other Tabletopgames. But they don't persist in playing those games.

Caedrus · Post by **Caedrus** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 12:16 pm

TheFlatline wrote:I don't think WOW/MMOs are killing off tabletop, I think that tabletop designers (at least in the D&D product line) are looking at MMOs and saying "well shit that's popular on a computer, so let's rip it off and plug it into the game."

And of course this doesn't work because many of the things that make MMOs successful work particularly in that medium. You can't expect that to carry over. You can't, for example, make random battles take 30 seconds in a pen and paper RPG. You need different goalposts because the mediums are different and designers who don't realize that will just make inferior versions of videogame mechanics.

And then of course the videogames are going to be better.

What tabetop designers need to do is emphasize the side of things that videogames aren't as good at as tabletop games are.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 5:55 pm

The six million players thing wasn't necessarily even the heyday. That was 2007, towards the end of the 3.5 cycle. D&D could very plausibly have been bigger still at one of the peak periods. Also, even today WotC is out there claiming 24 million "lapsed players" - whatever that means.

But really the bottom line is that WoW is very much more profitable than D&D, because they have a model where 100% of the player base pays ten bucks a month, every month, for as long as they play. That's going to make Blizzard's penis huge and allow them to have impact in the financial sector that D&D cannot match. Of course, that doesn't actually make D&D go away, or stop being profitable on its own terms.

Dungeons & Dragons could easily put together more than the 11 million players that World of Warcraft has. It still would not make as much money, but the cultural impact would be bigger. If you total up the number of people who have played D&D, it's several times the number of people who have played WoW. So even today there are more people who know what a Beholder is than can tell you the name of the Lich King.

If D&D dies, it will be because of mismanagement of the property itself, not competition from some video game or another.

-Username17

For Valor · Post by **For Valor** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 6:14 pm

... the Lich King has a name? Oh! Um... Ner'zul. or something.

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Sun Sep 19, 2010 7:49 pm

For Valor wrote:... the Lich King has a name? Oh! Um... Ner'zul. or something.

He's more kind of a Ner'zul-Arthas hybrid at this point.

For Valor · Post by **For Valor** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 6:08 am

I have NO idea what the second one is...

Quantumboost · Post by **Quantumboost** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 6:25 pm

For Valor wrote:I have NO idea what the second one is...

Some prettyboy former paladin prince from Lordaeron. Showed up in WC3. Kind of a dick.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 8:42 pm

I don't quite believe that the Internet will replace social interaction. That ship sailed with the invention of television, making people who hate each other sit happily for years on end without murdering each other. Or to make up excuses to avoid hanging out with friends in order to have their brains sucked out by its warm cathode ray tube embrace. You cannot get any more passive than that, people in the same room or no, and that shit used to take up 6 hours on average of an American's day.

Regardless, tabletop will have to get used to the idea of being able to play a game entirely over the Internet. It's just too convenient to ignore.

I mean, shit, they've been selling Monopoly and Scrabble videogames for more than 25 years even though neither holds a candle to the sales or gameplay of the actual boardgame. What's stopping 5E or even 4E for that matter? What's holding them up?

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Mon Sep 20, 2010 11:58 pm

Communication is holding them up. Tabletop is still very much a verbal passtime. Not many people can type at dictation speeds. Hell I'm a pretty quick typist and I can manage a slow dictation speed. Conversational speeds of typing simply aren't prevelent enough to replace verbal communications.

With broadband, VOIP is becoming more of an option, and I suspect you'll start seeing more TT over the internet, but before that happened, it might take 5 minutes for the DM to type out the description of a single room, and during that time your players are losing interest at a rapid pace.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Tue Sep 21, 2010 12:00 am

Exactly