Everyone Needs to Play This!

Yeah, that above line. That's what you want to hear. It's like the days when World of Warcraft was hot because that's what everyone at work played, and you had to too so you could be a part of the water-cooler discussions.

Pathfinder? D&D 5?

We're not there yet or the boat never got here.

Pen-and-paper games are terribly niche. It feels easier to sell a boxed board game in Barnes & Noble such as Arkham Horror or Risk than it does to sell a "concept" like "pen and paper roleplaying" to people. This is not for the faithful, this more applies to new players, you know, the next generation of players.

What would it take for fantasy roleplaying to go mainstream again?

You are platform building, like an operating system. Computer companies know how to get market share, and it typically goes like this:

1. Release an OS that is easy to pirate or get for free
2. Support lots of pirated and free software
3. When you control the market, lock things down because the party's over

It's a cynical view, but there's a truth to this. If your game or OS is everywhere, you will control the users, even if you are not making any money doing it. That's more important when you launch, because you can worry about locking in that user base later and monetizing them after they have built up a substantial investment in software or gaming books that it would be too painful to go anywhere else.

It was this way with D&D 3 and the OGL and d20 SRD. Paizo kept supporting those games, and took many of the locked in users with them. If D&D 4 was the "upgraded Windows 7 version" of D&D 3's "Windows XP," things would have been different. But D&D 4 went Windows 8 instead, and you got a split in the market where some people liked the concept, and some long-time users didn't.

So Windows 10 and D&D 5 feel like the "what did we do last night?" hangover games and OS's returning to the familiar way of doing things. They feel like iterative "return to the normal" experiences that you have to use rather than a breakout experience that causes a market hysteria and rush of new users and players. If you want to keep using a PC, yeah, you will probably need to use Windows 10 some day. If you want to be a part of the hobby store crowd, yeah, you will have to pick up D&D 5 and learn how to play. Pathfinder is always there for the D&D 3 crowd as well, existing like a Android or Chrome OS for those fans.

I'm reminded of Apple's new OSX Yosemite upgrade and how nothing really changed much but some backend stuff, the UI, and some icons. It still feels like the same solid design, and they didn't go all iPad on us desktop users and force a new way of doing things on us. There was no major change in the way things were done, there is no "hangover version" of the OS, and things still work the way they did. Apple is conservative, because it know not to mess with the way users know and love how to do things, unless a major-major change is needed and they have no good options (Final Cut, etc).

In a way, roleplaying is already mainstream, it's just online games and communities have taken the torch from pen and paper games and people "roleplay" in a million different ways in a million different programs everyday. D&D has to become relevant to those roleplaying fans again, a platform for people to express themselves in fantasy settings and worlds. They are split off roleplaying in World of Warcraft to Second Life, often roleplaying in games that don't even have basic support for meaningful player interaction or dungeon mastering.

Those are your users.

I feel we are three of four generations of D&D style games away from this point because we just don't have the vision and willpower to make this a reality. D&D does not need a new set of paper rules to get to the mainstream conversation again, it needs a vision of what the product can be.