D&D and RPG changes, please tell me what you've noticed!

[2D8HP]

I've posted a few threads where I ask for playgrounders wisdom and recommendations, but now I'm asking for your perceptions.
How and in what general directions have the RPG's (particularly D&D) you've played changed, and how what's available in the stores has changed.
I'm posting on the "Older/Other" sub-forum instead of the "General" Role-playing sub-forum because I particularly want to learn from those who have played games other than 21st Century D&D and Pathfinder (I'm talking about you T&T, C&S, M&M, AD&D, V&V, etc. player)
I started to wonder some more about this after I posted this:

Is that what your players want?

My view is admittedly skewed, given that I am not at all jaded by old-fashioned Dungeons & Dragons, and that after I heavily playing RPG's in the late 1970's until the early to mid 1990's, I then Rip-Van-Winkeled until recently,

but to me it looks like the general trend over the years has been away from interesting settings, and towards increasingly boring ones, but with increasingly super-powerful special snowflake PC''s.

Except maybe for Castle Falkenstein, I just haven't seen any settings as, wild, wooley, and just plain weird as the early Dungeons & Dragons games we played that incorporated:
Arduin,

All the Worlds Monsters, and

Empire of the Petal Throne,

Rich settings in which our PC''s began as mostly indistinct regular mortals that usually became a monster's lunch.

When I left the hobby in the 1990's, with the partial exception of Shadowrun, all the tables I could find ran games with modern day (or nearly so) settings, but the PC''s weren't mere mortals from the start.

Champions?
Comicbook Superheroes in a modern-day setting.

Vampire?
Supernatural hidden monsters in a modern-day setting.

Cyberpunk?
Bionic psychopaths in a setting of the "Dark Future" with criminal gangs, computer hackers, and Mega-Corporations. Just how was that setting fictional?

I wouldn't be surprised if someone published "Psionic Postal Worker: The RPG" sometime during the '90's.

Thankfully in the 21st century people will play D&D again, but there actually seem to be less setting books than there used to be in the 20th century, but now they're books full of super-powerful PC classes instead!

The situation is probably more complex than what I perceive, but it looks to me that players are now less interested in exploring worlds where "Here be Dragons", than they are in having PC's be the Dragons.

If you disagree with my rant great! I don't learn much from my mirror.
While I latter played some:
Villains & Vigilantes,
Traveller,
Champions,
Car Wars (technically not an RPG at first),
Runequest,
Stormbringer!,
Call of Cthullu,
Top Secret,
Ringworld,
Paranoia,
Rolemaster/MERP,
-no RPG's for a year or three, and then
Shadowrun,
Vampire,
Cyberpunk,
-no RPG's for decades then,
5e D&D.

But my RPG history began with DM'ing:
, and then playing:

Notice that the cover says "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames", not role-playing!
I believe the first use of the term "role-playing game" was in a Tunnels & Trolls supplement that was "compatible with other Fantasy role-playing games", but early D&D didn't seem any more or less combat focused than the later RPG's I've played, (in fact considering how fragile PC''s were avoiding combat was often the goal!) so I wouldn't say it was anymore of a "Wargame". I would however say it was more an exploration game, and was less character focused.
I miss that.
I'm less interested in writing back-stories and feelings, or fine tuning PC powers than I am in exploring a fantastic world.
As far as I can tell the RPG trends over the years have been (not all at the same time):

1) More focus on the PC''s less on the settings.

2) For a while towards more "realism" which became superceded by:

3) More powerful PC''s.

4) Less random PC generation and more "point-buy".

5) More mundane settings.

6) Less generic and more unique PC''s.

Some of the changes I've liked ("my PC survived? Awesome!), others I've not liked ("The setting is modern day but your PC has superpowers and INNER TORMENT!), but rolling up and playing a drooling begger (as in 1981's Stormbringer!) who's eaten by a dragon doesn't appeal to me anymore then playing Bruce Wayne/James Bond/Steve Austin/Robocop/Lestat (the games of 1991) does
(I have no 2001 or 2011 RPG experience to compare with, so I can't speak on then).

What's have the changes looked like to you?

[kyoryu]

Let's see... depending on when your "baseline" is:

1) Rise of the One True Party (a set group of players, each with exactly one PC) instead of open table play (a pool of players who may or may not show up, each whom might have more than one PC).

2) The assumption of *some* kind of "story" in all games. This might be a predetermined story/adventure path, or it might be a case where a dramatic situation is set up at the beginning of the game, and a large part of the goal is to figure out how that evolves. This is in contrast to early play where "explore and get loot" was the primary goal.

3) Higher emphasis on PC backstory before the game starts, as opposed to character development through play.

4) Presumption of a very low effective mortality rate.

5) A much, much wider range of mechanics being used in various games. As you've noted, there's a ton of more "realistic" games out there. And those still exist, but now there's other games with more directly story-influencing mechanics, among others.

6) An almost complete dismissal of random character generation, though this probably ties in with #3.

7) A higher emphasis on character "builds" in almost all games.

8) An emphasis on character uniqueness through their character sheet, rather than character developed through play.

9) (in many cases) a greater emphasis on overcoming obstacles via mechanical widgets on the character rather than descriptions of what the character is doing.

[Gamgee]

Numenera. Look into it for sure.

[Thrudd]

I think, in general, games have increasingly moved toward cooperative story telling with a strong emphasis on simulating cinematic narrative structures. So the GM and players are expecting to act out a story that feels like a movie or a book, with various tropes and pacing similar to what would be found in those media.
Some games are more blatant about stating this purpose than others, but a great many simply presume this to be what all RPGs are/should be aiming at.

Role Playing Games are now primarily seen as "story telling", with the players in the role of main actors in the story, often with some degree of control over how their characters are portrayed and what happens to them in the plot. The GM is the writer of the story and the director of each scene guiding the players toward the tone that is wanted and hoping to make the story exciting or surprising for the players, who are also the audience of this movie.

However, there has been a resurgence of people revisiting and revising old D&D to recapture the type of game you favor. Apart from just playing an old edition of D&D, some of the Old School Renaissance games (not all of them) understand and capture what D&D used to be like.
The best that do this, while also adding some new things to the mix, are "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", "Dungeon Crawl Classics", "Lamentations of the Flame Princess".

[DrMartin]

the hobby itself is not so mysterious anymore, and a larger audience does have consequences on the game mechanics as well: it used to be that the DM is the only one that knows all the rules (in the first edition of the DMG it was even stated that a player should not even *read* the book), and as such the mystery and exploration was something that involved not only the PCs, but the players as well (the PCs were exploring the world, the players were exploring the game). In this context odd and to the modern eye "unfair" mechanics were sort of expected, or par for the course. Things like rolling your stat in order and sticking to them, or having to roll high to achieve something and low to achieve something else, and some rolls are made with a d20 and others with a d6, etc etc etc.

I think that modern games assume a different level of transparency. the DM screen is not as high as it used to be. (in dnd 5th edition case, that is literally the case). The higher level of scrutiny means game mechanics are more polished, more elegant, and more "fair", and internet means that the rules and setting are usually publicly, if not freely, available to all the players involved.

[Anonymouswizard]

Okay, I'm mainly 2000s+ with some early D&D and World of Darkness (oh, and T&T), but what I've seen is:

1) Greater control of character build: this ties into the lack of random generation, but in general modern games put every aspect of the character sheet under player control.

2) Specialisation of games: you rarely get games that claim to be able to do anything nowdays, they are normally honest about their genre or style.

3) Generalisation of games: combined with the above, a few games excel at a specific style of game, the classic example being Fate (although GURPS also fits).

4) Player driven narrative: a big change is all the mechanics that let the players control the story, rather than making it purely the GM's responsibility.

5) A drift away from realism for it's own sake: genre emulation is the new big thing, you still occasionally get realistic games but that generally seems to be because they're emulating something realistic.

6) Streamlined rules: now I love my big crunchy rulesets, but I must admit this is the best change. Gone are the complex interactions of various subsystems, replaced by stuff like Fate's 'Four Actions' or Legend of the Wulin's 'everything is a Chi condition'. It makes rules much easier to understand.

[Yora]

1) Rise of the One True Party (a set group of players, each with exactly one PC) instead of open table play (a pool of players who may or may not show up, each whom might have more than one PC).

2) The assumption of *some* kind of "story" in all games. This might be a predetermined story/adventure path, or it might be a case where a dramatic situation is set up at the beginning of the game, and a large part of the goal is to figure out how that evolves. This is in contrast to early play where "explore and get loot" was the primary goal.

3) Higher emphasis on PC backstory before the game starts, as opposed to character development through play.

4) Presumption of a very low effective mortality rate.

I think these are all elements of the shift from the referee model to the storyteller model that happened in the mid 80s. Even without having been born yet at the time it's still quite clearly to reconstruct when looking at the books. In wargaming you have two groups of players with one neutral person keeping track of things, looking out for nobody cheating, and making decisions when the rules don't provide a clear answer. When GMs started to control the enemies they weren't really neutral referees anymore but there was still the concept that there's a battlefield and the players run around in it and use tactics to capture treasures hidden somewhere in the environment.
Dragonlance in 1984 was I believe the first major attempt to make money with the idea of the players acting out a script for a fantasy story and it turned out to be hugely successful. By 1986 you get things like this from AD&D books:

“The story you design for your players is just as important as the world setting you create. In fact, the story line may be the most important element in your campaign. In fact,* the DM’s function may be viewed as that of a bard or storyteller who creates the stuff of heroic fantasy . . .”

And by 1991 you already got World of Darkness which calls the GM the Storyteller. I get where the idea comes from to inject more story into RPGs but looking back I am quite surprised that it turned out like this. This is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I don't really see how players of the older games would have jumped on to that. What wouldn't surprise me is if this new approach was taken up entirely by new players and GMs who didn't know tactical exploration games before. And I think the worst offense D&D always did was to never explain how the games are meant to be played. Well, except the 1983 Basic Set. That's the one notable exception. Otherwise it's always just the rules with no explanation what they are for. I didn't understand how the older games were meant to be fun until two or three years ago when people on the internet explained it to me.

5) A much, much wider range of mechanics being used in various games. As you've noted, there's a ton of more "realistic" games out there. And those still exist, but now there's other games with more directly story-influencing mechanics, among others.

6) An almost complete dismissal of random character generation, though this probably ties in with #3.

7) A higher emphasis on character "builds" in almost all games.

8) An emphasis on character uniqueness through their character sheet, rather than character developed through play.

9) (in many cases) a greater emphasis on overcoming obstacles via mechanical widgets on the character rather than descriptions of what the character is doing.

I am not sure where this really began, but at least as far as D&D is concerned, 3rd edition is where you get the second shift from storytelling games to complex tactical encounter games. And then the d20 system got the Open Game Licence and everyone was jumping onto that train, whether the concept of the setting lined up with this or not. I think the biggest game changer was actually the introduction of prerequisite abilities that themselves have prerequisites. And with that you very quickly get to the point that players plan out all 20 character levels before the game even begins. If you want to play the kind of character you wish you can play, you have to build up to that and you have to plan in advance.

I believe that the story games showed up around that time in the early 2000s specifically as a reaction to d20 games, but I know almost nothing about them.

2) Specialisation of games: you rarely get games that claim to be able to do anything nowdays, they are normally honest about their genre or style.

I think this is really the most recent development in RPGs as a whole. I don't quite know why but nobody is really doing these huge RPG lines of the 90s and 2000s anymore. Even D&D has abandoned that business model. Pathfinder is still around, but they look like the last dinosaur that keeps quietly soldiering on. Current games tend to be smaller and tightly focused, aiming for a small core of fans instead of wide mass appeal. (Modipheus seems to be buying up any license they can get their hands on these days.)

[Tiktakkat]

I started with the basic set as well. Actually, the one BEFORE the one in your image, where the introductory module was not included.
I moved from there to AD&D rather than going back to the original set.

What has changed?

The players.
And as a result, the products have changed to reflect a different customer base.

When I started, there were no "role-players".
There were just wargamers, looking for something different - that "medieval fantasy" shtick.
As such, the way the rules were written made absolute sense - movement in inches, levels with rank titles, lots of room for judge arbitration, and so on.
Further, most all wargamers were exceptionally well read. The legendary "Appendix N" was less a reading list and more an index of your bookshelf. (Well, for the adults anyway. I was 12 when I started, so it was more a guide to filling my bookshelf.)

And there was the first change, when the game was marketed to early teens.
They might have been wargamers but they were rarely that well read - yet. The thing is, they tended toward newer books, like The Chronicles of Thomas Convenant or the Dragonriders of Pern. They also tended toward Elric rather than the other Eternal Champion books.
That shift in reading eventually led to Dragonlance.

Then there was the second change, when new players were brought in by existing role-players rather than wargamers.
Now the archaic elements of the rules weren't as understandable. Likewise the fast and loose structure caused more issues. That latter was compounded by the first surge of the RPGA with the Living City campaign.
These new players also tended to be even less well read than the previous players. Oh they would read endless Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels, and a few would delve into Elric (still), but very few would venture beyond that. That cut off a very significant pool of themes and concepts.

The needs of those groups - more rules, more options, more "alternative" settings, drove the next big change. As the product line proliferated, the cost to play the game soared. From a $15 basic set to 3 books costing $39 total (IIRC) to half a dozen books costing $150 to the Book of the Month Club (with bonuses) at $30/month or more, the casual kids were being pushed out in favor of those either subsidized by parents or with enough surplus cash and time to remain in the hobby. That eventually meant the completely casual players of the Living Greyhawk era, who may have been utterly oblivious that fantasy existed before D&D (or beyond Tolkien for the "exceptional" ones), and for whom a 4-hour RPGA round was barely doable one night per week, if the wife (or whoever) could be suitably placated. (I had a favorable reputation for being able to speed run LG rounds in 2-3 hours so people could do 2 a night or just get home early.)

And then World of Warcraft.
No, I'm not going to start on the "4e is just WoW" argument.
I am however going to point out that CRPG/MMO players have very different expectations of what a game should consist of.
And I am going to point out that corporate bosses who see the profits Blizzard makes on WoW compared to the profits WotC makes on D&D are going to wonder what they are doing wrong and how they can "fix" it.
So now there is yet another shift in what the game is structured to do, and yet another shift away from the books that inspired it.

So what I have noticed is that completely different people are the core of the fanbase today compared to those who played when I started, and the company that owns the games has changed the rules to try and appeal to the ever-shifting fanbase, with greater or lesser success depending on the actual product they produce.

[Knaight]

I don't think that "moved" is a particularly good way of looking at RPGs; I'd argue that they've "spread". We've got the OSR that still covers the bulk of the old school stuff (not to mention the whole West Marches thing), the modern settings of the 90's are still around, the hyper complex simulation games of the 80's have modern descendants, so on and so forth. The territory that's covered by RPGs just keeps growing, and there's more and more esoteric stuff starting to get coverage. For instance, there's the whole rise of the GMless game, with Microscope and Fiasco being my two go to examples. As for setting specific games there's an increasing variety in setting and genre - but the old ones are still there. Fantasy is still going strong, sci-fi and space opera still proliferate, cyberpunk has gone nowhere. Right besides the old standbys we see wuxia and diesel punk, romance and tragedy, and even fantasy geological history.

When it comes down to what the majority of players are doing, it's D&D and has always been D&D. Everything else is fringe, and while some stuff is much less fringe (e.g. White Wolf's entire output) D&D still leads the industry. The fringe is much more accessible now though, between internet ordering of physical products and the emergence of digital distribution in the early 2000's*. The bar for publication and distribution plummeted, and the variety of games exploded as a result.

*There are isolated cases before that, but that's when it got big.

[Telok]

I'll have a tighter focus for my response, the players.

As the decades have passed and the media market has grown, spread, and fragmented more people have come to the hobby from different backgrounds and with different assumptions. Early on there was a core of about twenty authors and a small selection of fantasy movies that made up most of the background that early D&D was built on. The people who played were generally heavy readers and had been exposed to half or more of the available fantasy content. So most groups had a sort of common background of fiction to draw on. Perhaps most importantly it was that same fiction that informed the authors of the first games. You can even see this in Traveller, a common sci-fi fiction culture and players who had read/seen much of it and were not afraid of math, calculations, or look-up tables.

Today the media market is huge and the concepts of fantasy and sci-fi are mainstream. It's also massively fragmented, under the fantasy heading you have those old originals plus Game of Thrones, World of Warcraft, Forgotten Realms novels, Disney movies, the Magic card game, Harry Dresden novels, Harry Potter stuff, the whole vamp/were/erotica subgenera. And any particular player who isn't a gorgonard (by the way, look up the history of that word, it's great) may well be coming into the hobby with only one or two references, while older players may well not have the time or interest to peruse even a fifth of the media.

For the last ten years I've seen increasing amounts of bashing on D&D's Vancian casting system and I think that 90% of the people talking about it have never read anything by Vance. Before they complain about it many have never even heard of Vance despite playing D&D for years.

Whay I can see the rpg market doing is fragmenting into three general styles. The old style stuff like the classic D&Ds, OSR, and other original games. Genera rpgs like the Dresden one, Firefly, Star Wars, etc. where they follow and emulate a particular piece of fiction. And General systems with high flexability and a series of settings and/or options books. The first is a small hobbyist market fueled by labors of love, the second tends towards fad chasing but I think it's beginning to realize that it needs to focus on concise and affordable rulebook sets, the last is pretty well off with stuff like Fudge, Hero, and Gurps but it's pretty niche too. Sadly I don't think the current couple of D&Ds are in any of those groups and that's going to cause it problems.

[2D8HP]

For the last ten years I've seen increasing amounts of bashing on D&D's Vancian casting system and I think that 90% of the people talking about it have never read anything by Vance. Before they complain about it many have never even heard of Vance despite playing D&D for years

I do remember some long ago bashing of the D&D magic system, usually by those who favored Runequest instead, but for me, while the Runequest rules seemed more intuitive than AD&D, the game just wasn't as fun. Also "Dying Earth" rocked!

What I can see the rpg market doing is fragmenting ......
-snip-
stuff like Fudge, Hero, and Gurps but it's pretty niche too. Sadly I don't think the current couple of D&Ds are in any of those groups and that's going to cause it problems.

I bought a whole lot of GURPS worldbooks during the 1980's and 90's, but I remember almost nothing about the rules other than character creation took a very long time, and that the system reminded me of Champions/HERO.
5e D&D actually seems to me to be a bit of old D&D (classes and levels), Runequest (critical hits, skills and backgrounds), and Champions (superpowers and point buy attributes).

I really wish I could better remember more of those long ago adventures, especially the oD&D games of my first DM, spiders and skeletons were more often the antagonists rather than orcs and goblins, and it gloriously fun, but other than that my memory is dim, yet I still remember long useless rules minutia of "70's D&D. With the partial exception of the easy Call of Cthullu, with latter games, the opposite is true, I can remember the adventures, but 5 minutes after I close the rulebook, I can't really recall any of the rules.
I also wish I could forget more of the late 1980's/early 90's games! I didn't like Vampire much, and no setting has bored me as much as Cyberpunk!

[Morty]

For the last ten years I've seen increasing amounts of bashing on D&D's Vancian casting system and I think that 90% of the people talking about it have never read anything by Vance. Before they complain about it many have never even heard of Vance despite playing D&D for years.

Which is fine, because D&D's magic only superficially resembles anything Vance wrote. If it was really like in Dying Earth, it might actually be tolerable. Or not, because it would be even more poorly suited to the pace most D&D games follow.

[Mordar]

Hi -

There's a ton to think about here (for me, anyway). I think 1982 was my start...mostly AD&D but some Red/Blue boxes too. Played pretty solid from 82-88, summers of 88-91, then solid again from 91-03 or so, and then some frequent 3.x and 4 plinking for the next 10ish years.

Other people can probably give much better answers about design shifts and evolution. Player expectations are a space where I'd probably get all grumpy and start telling people to either "Get off my lawn!" or "Mow my lawn, kid!"...but I'll probably still go there at some point.

One of the questions you asked was about what you could see at the game store, and I think that one is pretty interesting to me.

My AD&D books all came from the Sears catalog. Seriously. Most of the rest of my early stuff was from Waldenbooks (virtually all) or BDalton (maybe a couple things?). Despite being near a major metropolitan area (Minneapolis) there weren't many game stores on my side of the world. Mostly it was catch as you can from the bookstores. So what did I see? Stuff that fit well in a 4' wide shelving unit that was maybe 6' tall.

Aside from the AD&D hardbacks, most everything else was boxed sets. I think that is a big departure from even 10 years later. I must have had 20 boxed sets of RPGs minimum from that era (and shortly after when the cool baseball card and comic book store started selling a lot of RPGs). Probably 10+ TSR boxed sets, a horde of Chaosium boxes and PaceSetter. Toss in a couple of others (Paranoia, Twilight2000, Traveler) and it was boxarama. Both complex and simple games came in boxes (RoleMaster for me was a boxed set). By the 2000s it seems there were VERY few boxed set games...everyone wanted to produce 6 individual books, so I think maybe this is a big change. The exception to the boxed set was the modules. Millions and millions of modules in series or standing alone, mostly TSR but many from RoleAids as well. I loved these...even though I only played/ran maybe a double handful I must own about 75 of these wonderful booklets. Affordable for a young teen, fun to read on their own, and occasionally good to run. I think these peaked in the 90s then vanished until 3.x and the OGL (was that it?) spawned about 80 bijillion companies that cranked out module. Mostly gone again...right?

By the mid/late 80s there was a bit broader spectrum in both the mall bookstores and Shinders (the above mentioned baseball card & comic book store). White Dwarf (when it was still an RPG magazine and not a GW catalog) hit the shelves along with a lot of standalone books - the era of the splatbook (I don't know if that is a proper term...these were accessory books that were often pretty important and advanced the games as a whole) was born. RoleMaster was my favorite, but there were tons of others. This is when I remember seeing more and more of the "whole campaign" books...I guess they'd be commonly thought of as "Adventure Paths" now?...Call of Cthulhu was the king here. This was also a good era for third-party products, even if they had serial numbers filed off. RoleAids again comes to mind...but even before those there were others (Grimtooth's Traps, The Compleat Adventurer, etc). Its just that there were more options for more games and will a generally much higher level of production quality.

I went off to school in 1988 and only played in the summers...and then I found the big game store in my new town. It was split about 50/50 between RPGs and minis games, but it was big enough to accommodate both. This was about the time of the genre explosion, I think - TSR, FASA and WW were duking it out for supremacy, but there was plenty of market for all of them...and that meant lots of their core games but lots of splinter games as well...and splinter companies. Conservatively there must have been 40 or 50 full-fledged games available on the RPG side, many with tons of sourcebooks. The RPG hipsters had their dark and broody, the kids had their fantasy hackers, the in-the-middles had Shadowrun and Cyberpunk along with tons of Supers, Horror, Spy and "older" fantasy games. Tons for everyone...even the BattleTech nerds. During visits back home I would see similar things at Shinders and the now-open game stores, so I think it was more an element of the time than my geography.

Then this little card game in baseball card packaging hit...and it fueled a glorious burnout in the RPG world. Suddenly Magic was on everyone's radar and tons of people spent tons of money on tons of cards. And the game stores flourished. See, Walmart and Target and the dedicated baseball card places didn't catch on...it took them years...but the game stores...at least 3 additional stores opened, propped up totally on MtG (and then other CCG) sales. This provided cashflow for the stores allowing them to speculate on fringe RPGs, or to rent bigger spaces and keep more and more core RPG product on the shelves. Other companies launched CCGs and used some of that money to bankroll their RPGs...and for a while it was good. There was a huge range of games available to a wider population than ever...all because of the CCG boom.

And then it ended. A bad run of expansions...too much speculation in non-MtG...and the rivers of money dried up. Many of the game stores vanished under their debt load. Sure, the good ones held on...but a lot of them cut back. MtG still sold, so it stayed an inventory priority, but other games...like RPGs...could be more expendable. The array on the shelved dwindled and tightened. There were still plenty of quality products...and some really picked up in this era, thanks in part to cross-promotion with other genre of games (Legend of the Five Rings, Deadlands come to mind) and several stalwarts hung in there or expanded (World of Darkness, ShadowRun)...but I think this marked the end of the small guy publisher having shelf space in the game store. Even some of the bigs (FASA) ended up in the tank, only to have their IPs pillaged (or rescued) by CCG/clicky money.

Dedicated game stores now seemed to have a lot of "euro" board games and card stuff...the RPG portion of the store was once the lion's share now faded to second and then even a distant third. Based on my recent trips to game stores, this seems to still be the case...CCGs/Clickys, minis games, board games and RPGs all fall at different points in specific stores, but generally seem to be equitable.

RPGs now seem to feature FAR fewer modules/adventures or boxed sets...that seems to represent the expectation that groups will design their own adventures and have no need for the "training wheels/crutches/tools of bad gaming" (or whatever else the hip kids call them nowadays) of premade adventures. The variety of genres of RPG still seems decent, though it is certainly trimmed from my day...can still find fantasy, near future, dark modern, near past horror and space settings for heroes, superheroes and regular joes. But the depth of choice seems to have been reduced far beyond the width. Sure, the internet provides...but what you see in the stores is still a bellwether. Gone are the western games, the gangster games of the 1920s, the cold war spy games, the 37 non-D&D fantasy games...and while some of those are probably good riddance to bad trash, there were a lot of gems lost, and a lot of opportunities for fun/learning/exploration went with them. (See, I knew I'd get to "Get off my lawn" at some point!).

So, short version? Nowadays I think we see far fewer games across fewer settings/genres but with much higher production quality. Many games feature more streamlined rules benefiting from advances in design learned on the shoulders of the giants. Player expectations seem to have shifted and games have shifted to follow that perception (see smarter people comments above mine), and the cost of production (or the success in the market) seems to have limited non-centrist genres or systems to the fringe of self-publication, PDF or tiny boutique runs.

Old man ranting: My day was the golden age of games. It was the time of new horizons in every direction...people were willing to play dozens of systems for games in an array of genre/settings...and I had seemingly unlimited time and wonderful friends with which to play. Even as lower middle class youth we could afford those dozens of games, and we could get them at the mall...so if you decided later Boot Hill wasn't for you it had only cost you $12...not $35+. Today is the platinum age. Everything has more polish, more shine and probably more quality. But no one waxes philosophic about the glories of the platinum age.

Now, bring back Against the Giants, give me modules with carrion crawlers, black puddings and gnolls sharing space with a manticore, yuan-ti and a xorn...and don't gripe to me about ecology and realism!

- M

[CharonsHelper]

Even as lower middle class youth we could afford those dozens of games, and we could get them at the mall...so if you decided later Boot Hill wasn't for you it had only cost you $12...not $35+.

I think that that's mostly inflation. $12 in 1982 is $29.93 in today's money, and books have generally gone up a bit more than inflation due to paper going up in price way more than inflation the last decade, and as you said, the quality has generally gone up, and that includes printing quality. I can't remember the last RPG book I saw in a store which was printed in black & white, while I know that it used to not be uncommon.

[RazorChain]

Well I started in '87 with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and then drifted into D&D and then AD&D 2nd ed.


What happended??? Times change and the roleplaying matured, the hobby was young, I mean the oldest guy I've roleplayed with is 15 years older than me. My parents never understood why me and my friends would spend a whole weekend in somebody's basement playing....why wasn't I getting drunk and partying like the rest of the lot.

I have experimented with lots of systems through the years but now I just contently run the systems I know and barely keep tab of all the new things coming out.

But as RPGs evolved from wargames to more storytelling now the next influence is CRPG. I see people throwing around computer slang like "mini-boss", "Boss battle", "Character Builds" etc. Nowdays when I get generation Y around my gaming table I have to wean them off their computer roleplaying expectations.

I already feel somewhat like a dinosaur with my newest group where the most experienced of them has a year of gaming under their belt. When we formed the group, løcal people through a facebook rpg group, I suggested I could be a player. Nobody wanted to be the GM/DM for a guy who had already been playing for 3 decades, so I got stuck behind the GM screen.


The bottom line is that the medium will evolve and soon we will feel like old relics telling tales of the good old times, that time when we crawled through that megadungeon and lost 6 characters....or was it 7 in one session. The good old times nobody told us how the game was supposed to be played as the internet didn't exist

[kyoryu]

My AD&D books all came from the Sears catalog. Seriously. Most of the rest of my early stuff was from Waldenbooks (virtually all) or BDalton (maybe a couple things?). Despite being near a major metropolitan area (Minneapolis) there weren't many game stores on my side of the world.

Ha! I actually got some of my AD&D books during a trip to the Twin Cities when I was 10 or so. I think some of them came from a Sears there in the connected downtown area.

[Mordar]

I think that that's mostly inflation. $12 in 1982 is $29.93 in today's money, and books have generally gone up a bit more than inflation due to paper going up in price way more than inflation the last decade, and as you said, the quality has generally gone up, and that includes printing quality. I can't remember the last RPG book I saw in a store which was printed in black & white, while I know that it used to not be uncommon.

I think I should have been more clear...$12 (or maybe $15) was for a "whole game" in a boxed set, not a single book for the game. You're pretty much dead on though regarding say AD&D...I seem remember the books were $12 and $15 (for the DMG) as base price...that's right around the $25 to $30 price point now.

Certainly correct on the black-and-white...heck, some of them look like they were barely better than newsprint!

- M

[CharonsHelper]

But as RPGs evolved from wargames to more storytelling now the next influence is CRPG. I see people throwing around computer slang like "mini-boss", "Boss battle", "Character Builds" etc. Nowdays when I get generation Y around my gaming table I have to wean them off their computer roleplaying expectations.

That's a millennial to you! (Generation Y was just the placeholder - just as Gen X was initially 'boomer repeat'.) Though, as one of the oldest of the millennials, (born from 1982-2004 officially) most of the generalities don't apply to me.

Really though - most of the complaints are variations of the same things people have always complained about the youth for. (Socrates claimed that reading would rot your brain.)

[RazorChain]

That's a millennial to you! (Generation Y was just the placeholder - just as Gen X was initially 'boomer repeat'.) Though, as one of the oldest of the millennials, (born from 1982-2004 officially) most of the generalities don't apply to me.

Really though - most of the complaints are variations of the same things people have always complained about the youth for. (Socrates claimed that reading would rot your brain.)

Oh don't get me wrong.....my friends were much worse when I was teaching them how to play. The youth today is so well behaved in comparison.....they understand that when they punch the innkeeper in the face or start murdering people that the rest of the town turns hostile.

[Anonymouswizard]

Oh don't get me wrong.....my friends were much worse when I was teaching them how to play. The youth today is so well behaved in comparison.....they understand that when they punch the innkeeper in the face or start murdering people that the rest of the town turns hostile.

Yeah, but just avoid the police for ten minutes and your notoriety will go down.

I will say that Video Games have brought something to the medium, the idea of a challenge structure. Now it's not something you desperately need, I've played in a very fun game where the final boss was taken down before he could act (the same person also ran a game where the final encounter was a chase through the London Underground, and one with a more traditional 'flunky boss'), but for more story focused games the idea that there should occasionally be more difficult fights here and there with an extra hard fight for the 'final boss' is a valid way to play.

Now, it shouldn't be the only concern. But it does help when planning if you can look at the players and say 'he needs a strong bodyguard' or 'he'll make an awesome final boss'.

I have personally experienced a lot of 'new media is bad' stuff recently, generally aimed at fantasy and video games (...I'm sorry for knowing what genres I like). I'll agree that people being too many expectations from video games when playing tabletop RPGs, but that's generally solved once they reach an open-ended point.

[2D8HP]

I will say that Video Games have brought something to the medium, the idea of a challenge structure....

In my brief time playing table-top in the 21st Century, the youngsters video game references went completely over my head, and it's only in reading this Forum that I starting noticing how common they are (and my needing to Google the references over and over again, to try and understand the post, much to my frustration).
Maybe it's just how they treat me, but I'd actually say that the teenagers and young adults who I've recently played table top with are more socially adept than were "gamers, back in the day", but they need to watch more Monty Python (what kind of tops-turvy bizzaro world is this where gamers are polite and don't get "Holy Grail" references? It was funny)!
My son just doesn't care for tabletop,
and prefers Magic: The Gathering, and video games.
*sobs*
I have to restrain myself from telling him how much Minecraft "rips off" Dungeons & Dragons, and I did a double take when he yesterday mentioned a "Super Mario" RPG!

Off topic but what really seems strange, is that so many young adults here in Northern California who grew uo here, speak with what sounds to me like southern Californian (Jeff Spicoli and Moon Unit Zappa) accents and phrases, that would have gotten you wildly mocked in the 1980's!
*rant, rave, mumble, grumble, kid's today I tell ya!!*

[Yora]

I have personally experienced a lot of 'new media is bad' stuff recently, generally aimed at fantasy and video games (...I'm sorry for knowing what genres I like). I'll agree that people being too many expectations from video games when playing tabletop RPGs, but that's generally solved once they reach an open-ended point.

And there lies the actual problem. The major commercial publishers don't do open-ended. Instead of showing why an RPG with a GM can be so much more than what a technologically limited videogame can do, WotC and Paizo keep making scripted adventures that have a prepared story with negible player input.
People keep buying these things and are actually enjoying them, but I suspect this is mostly because they've never seen how much more than that RPGs can do. It's less that people choose to play like that but more that they don't know that there even is a choice.

But that's nothing new really. This hasn't been going on since the last 15 years but the last 30 years, well before videogames had meaningful plots and characters. Could even be that videogames are the way they are because of what designers had already internalized from RPGs in the late 80s and early 90s.

[RazorChain]

And there lies the actual problem. The major commercial publishers don't do open-ended. Instead of showing why an RPG with a GM can be so much more than what a technologically limited videogame can do, WotC and Paizo keep making scripted adventures that have a prepared story with negible player input.
People keep buying these things and are actually enjoying them, but I suspect this is mostly because they've never seen how much more than that RPGs can do. It's less that people choose to play like that but more that they don't know that there even is a choice.

But that's nothing new really. This hasn't been going on since the last 15 years but the last 30 years, well before videogames had meaningful plots and characters. Could even be that videogames are the way they are because of what designers had already internalized from RPGs in the late 80s and early 90s.

This is a bit funny though because the circle is completed. First it was how to encompass the table top rpg experience on a computer. Now computer games are so mainstream that I don't even get a geek vibe for discussing the latest games at my work...some things change :). But this means that computer games are a major influence on ttrpg. Hence when new players enter the hobby they are going to draw on their experience from computer games and going to expect the narrative structure as well....which is like fight, fight...miniboss...fight, fight, proper boss fight. For me D&D has worked best as a computer game...it fits like a hand in glove:
Dungeons with different monsters and no explanation why they are cohabiting....check.
Lots of combat....check.
Loot...lots of it and hundreds of thousands of gold coins.....check
Storyline (good or not) that mostly serves as an excuse to raid different dungeons.
Munchkinism....nobody yells at you when you come with a dual class Kensai/Mage after using an hour to roll up good enough stats and then you break the game.....check.

[Knaight]

This is a bit funny though because the circle is completed. First it was how to encompass the table top rpg experience on a computer. Now computer games are so mainstream that I don't even get a geek vibe for discussing the latest games at my work...some things change :). But this means that computer games are a major influence on ttrpg. Hence when new players enter the hobby they are going to draw on their experience from computer games and going to expect the narrative structure as well....which is like fight, fight...miniboss...fight, fight, proper boss fight. For me D&D has worked best as a computer game...it fits like a hand in glove:
Dungeons with different monsters and no explanation why they are cohabiting....check.
Lots of combat....check.
Loot...lots of it and hundreds of thousands of gold coins.....check
Storyline (good or not) that mostly serves as an excuse to raid different dungeons.
Munchkinism....nobody yells at you when you come with a dual class Kensai/Mage after using an hour to roll up good enough stats and then you break the game.....check.

This post is pretty much a perfect explanation of why I don't play D&D as a rule. It's optimized towards exactly the sort of things computer games do best, and computer games do it better. On the other hand plenty of other RPGs are optimized for things which we still do vastly better than computers do.

[Telwar]

I think that that's mostly inflation. $12 in 1982 is $29.93 in today's money, and books have generally gone up a bit more than inflation due to paper going up in price way more than inflation the last decade, and as you said, the quality has generally gone up, and that includes printing quality. I can't remember the last RPG book I saw in a store which was printed in black & white, while I know that it used to not be uncommon.

And you do *generally* get a lot more for what you spend. I remember Fields of Fire for SR2 was $15 in '93, but the SR3 and SR4 gun books had a LOT more to them, including many more rules systems you could put in for more killin'.

But the main thing is that publishers LOVE their hardbacks. I was trying to figure out why a backpack full of SR4 books could pull a muscle when a backpack full of SR2 books didn't...and it's because they're all hardcovers as much as possible. I gained a new appreciation for PDFs that weekend.


Also, I feel like there's a better appreciation for math and statistics now than when I started. I have fairly horrifying memories of the bizarre steps early die-pool systems used, by having difficulty adjustments through both die pool size and target numbers you needed. In SR2 I made a troll samurai who had a target number of -1 with his bayoneted rifle (as in I could have 3 points of negative penalties and still only need a 2 to get a success on that die), and in the same game the other samurai had to blow every single bit of karma he had to get enough rerolls to get a 36 on at least one of his dice to survive a hit. Having both the pool size and target number fluctuate made things incredibly unpredictable. And while '90s White Wolf was just as bad, both have dispensed with the TN monkeying...mostly.

[Psikerlord]

And there lies the actual problem. The major commercial publishers don't do open-ended. Instead of showing why an RPG with a GM can be so much more than what a technologically limited videogame can do, WotC and Paizo keep making scripted adventures that have a prepared story with negible player input.
People keep buying these things and are actually enjoying them, but I suspect this is mostly because they've never seen how much more than that RPGs can do. It's less that people choose to play like that but more that they don't know that there even is a choice.

But that's nothing new really. This hasn't been going on since the last 15 years but the last 30 years, well before videogames had meaningful plots and characters. Could even be that videogames are the way they are because of what designers had already internalized from RPGs in the late 80s and early 90s.

Very much agree.The edge that tabletop RPGs have over awesome and fun computer RPGs is that the GM is infinitely flexible. APs are not the way to take advantage of this, however....

[Anonymouswizard]

And there lies the actual problem. The major commercial publishers don't do open-ended. Instead of showing why an RPG with a GM can be so much more than what a technologically limited videogame can do, WotC and Paizo keep making scripted adventures that have a prepared story with negible player input.
People keep buying these things and are actually enjoying them, but I suspect this is mostly because they've never seen how much more than that RPGs can do. It's less that people choose to play like that but more that they don't know that there even is a choice.

But that's nothing new really. This hasn't been going on since the last 15 years but the last 30 years, well before videogames had meaningful plots and characters. Could even be that videogames are the way they are because of what designers had already internalized from RPGs in the late 80s and early 90s.

I recently picked up two of the Fate equivalent of modules, specifically Romance in the Air and Venture City. The first is mainly adventure, it begins with an optional phase where the players take the role of major powers and shape the world for a bit, then it goes into the PCs' situation and how characters differ from standard Fate characters, provides some rules for vehicles (potentially useful, as the characters are passengers on an airship), then gives an overview of possible situations and locations, but expects the GM and the players to make the plot.

Venture City does have a more standard plotted adventure, but it's more of a superpowers supplement with an inbuilt setting, with the adventure as an example pegged alongside the location and NPC descriptions.

Yes, I do love the Fate Worlds of Adventure, I think the 52 page books are a great model of adventures, and a great example for how varied Fate can be.

[Cluedrew]

I feel a little bit odd saying this as I have been in the RPG scene for about 5 years. But I think one big change that happened is that I think people figured out what a role-playing game actually is.

When the original systems came out, people didn't quite have what a role-playing game was in there head. I believe that to this day D&D has almost as much wargame in it as role-playing. Since then people have managed to make games based on the characterisation of your characters, instead of that being something merely worked in or even just on the side. Not to say those games are necessarily better, but I think they are "purer" role-playing games.

[Jay R]

Disclaimer: Any attempt to categorize millions of individual experiences of millions of people will be incomplete and stereotypical. It will not account for many of the nuances, exceptions, and sliding scales. What I'm about to say is no different.

The biggest difference I've seen is that originally, there was very little differentiation of different characters in the same class. Therefore most players just put together the most obvious character from the given stats, and tried to optimize in gameplay.

Now, most players spend a lot of time in character creation trying to optimize the build, and then just play the most obvious moves from that optimized build.

Both are more-or-less the correct response to the rules that they play under.

I repeat: Any attempt to categorize millions of individual experiences of millions of people will be incomplete and stereotypical. It will not account for many of the nuances, exceptions, and sliding scales. What I've just written is no different.

[raygun goth]

Warning: I am a very literary person, and I want to play "Psionic Postal Worker: The RPG." With that in mind.

No, I haven't noticed a major shift in anything other than an attempt to be more inclusive, though I've only been playing since around the 90s.

My group "plays the dragons" a lot because we're almost all, except for like one guy, Native Americans of some stripe or another - I'm Miccosukkee/Seminole, one player is Hawaiian/Apache, another is Cree, one guy is Coeur D'Alene - we found the "go explore the unexplored" narrative and the limited scope of what D&D was attempting to do rather distasteful from the very start. "Let me see if I get this straight. We go down into "unexplored" territories, where as it turns out, people are already living, so they're not really unexplored at all, and we have to smash their gods and take their gold? This is really uncomfortable on a rather visceral level. Let's flip that narrative and play more politics and protect our lands from these invaders that think they're "exploring" the "wilderness.""

There are a lot of weird settings out nowadays. Cryptomancer, DEGENESIS, Numenera, Over the Edge, All Flesh Must Be Eaten: Singing Cowboys, Dragonmech, Eclipse Phase, Space: 1889. Castle Falkenstein is weaksauce compared to some of the stuff you can dig up nowadays.

My favorite settings are the Chronicles of Darkness settings - sure, it's got that "it's the real world, but..." thing happening, but at least 3/4 of the splats have access to another universe or universes (and even alternate timelines, in the case of Demon). You can easily run a game where PCs go to school, jobs, or work, and on the weekends, literally kick off to a fantasy world for funzies.