Let's go back in the day, when red-box Basic D&D was considered the simpler game for kids, and every teenager that wanted to be 'cool' played AD&D and had Rubik's Cube stickers stuck on their shirts. AD&D was more complex, it had more to it, it was arcane, it had so many rules, but it was cool because it was a lot more difficult to understand and required good players to invest in the game to do well.
Let's fast-forward to today, when D&D 5 is the simple game intended for casual players, and there is a group out there who like Pathfinder because it fills that AD&D role again. Pathfinder has Hero Lab, and you can literally spend an entire afternoon fiddling and playing with numbers designing the perfect character. Pathfinder keeps the Magic the Gathering vibe of card-like character design, and it has a strong D&D influenced focus on maps and tactical play. Pathfinder is today's AD&D as D&D 5's is to the old D&D Basic Set.
But are the cool kids playing it?
Nah, the cool kids are playing computer games. They are often playing them on Youtube and becoming social media stars.
It's not 1980. The Atari 2600 was an easy device to compete against in the theater of the mind, and pen-and-paper games could be anything and attract an audience. Today, a lot of people have moved on, and let's face it, electronic gaming is easy, it's on-demand fun. What don't computer games have?
One thing that pen-and-paper games do very well is this thing I have a scientific name for called, "tricking the bastard." When the DM is sitting there all smug with deathtrap in hand, it is so satisfying to be the play who figures it out and "tricks the bastard." Because let's face it, the dungeon master is the bastard who could get the entire killed at a whim, and figuring things out when his finger is on the doom-switch is just so gratifying.
In computer games, this is called "exploiting the system." It is not as satisfying, but it is the same gratification and pleasure at finding a way to cheat the system, rocket ahead, and beat the computer game because no one has tested or thought of what you are doing yet. In a sense, the bastard here is the programmer and QA team, and you just beat them at their own game.
Roleplaying games have institutionalized "tricking the bastard" - especially old-school games. The closer you get to modern designs, the more wargaming and figure battle you get, because somebody somewhere on a whiteboard said, "these games need figures to buy!" With figures comes balanced play, rules revisions, and the like. You won't find many board games that allow one player to say, "All the other Monopoly pieces fell into a pit and are dead. Game over."
No, that is the power a DM needs to be the bastard, and why it is so fun tricking him into letting you win. The DM needs to be able to separate The Bastard out from himself, Sports Referee, Shakespeare Guy, and Uncle Moneybags, but that is another article on being a good DM.
Part of what makes pen-and-paper games so difficult to sell is partly this reason. There are two types of people that say no to pen-and-paper because of this, people who don't like someone having that much control over them, and people who don't buy the whole concept of a dungeon master in the first place. A computer is so much more impartial and fair, right? I I do something, some person is not going to take away what I did because they are messing with me - it has to be that way because the rules say so, right?
Computers are so much more fair. Right?
If you only knew the business and programmer stuff that went behind the games you play. I would rather trust a DM, at least there's someone you can understand the motivations of directly, To their face. And you don't have a marketer, someone from corporate, or some addiction specialist programming a system to make the game more desirable for you to stay logged into. Or a programmer rushed for a deadline and he doesn't really care what he puts in there. Or a system that keeps people apart intentionally (World of Warcraft and other MMOs).
It's social interaction, something our corporate-ized society pushes us away from because they want an electronic layer between us because the variables are easier to control. Why would you ever want a company controlling your free speech? Oh, yeah, that Facebook thing, I hear that's really popular.
Computers are a lot less fair than a living, breathing person you trust.
It's what us cool kids know.
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