Showing posts with label Five Moons. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Five Moons. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The Casual Pen-and-Paper Gamer

This is the new battleground. The casual pen-and-paper gamer.

They are by definition exclusively new players too, drawn in from the world of video games, MMOs, cell phone games, Youtube, tablets, and other places. Forget the hardcore - they are already playing and bought-in, the profits and future customers of the roleplaying depend on new players.

Every industry chases 'the new player' and you even see legacy MMOs in decline trying to reinvent themselves to attract a new player base. This is where World of Warcraft is right now, a declining (but mature) hobby struggling to reinvent itself for that large group of casual players out there with little time to invest and who frankly aren't sold on the idea of logging to a faction grind in every day.

World of Warcraft's problem is essentially Zynga's with Farmville and Mafia Wars - how do you make a game interesting to play when it is essentially a game of "who gets bigger numbers?" Granted in each those 'numbers' turn out to be little pieces of gear, new critters for the farm, or a bigger number to bonk other players over the head with - but they are numbers hidden by 3d graphics, achievements, pets, or other virtual representations. Sometimes they are just numbers, like stamina or the endless faction reputation values in WoW.

Numbers are not cool.

Social, right? Our game is a social experience! World of Warcraft was like that for a while, you played because that's where everybody else was, but social is never a reason to play something when no one is playing, it's fire without fuel. Social can amplify a game's popularity, but you can't sell people on social in a barren desert. Unless you are Las Vegas, but that's only been done once.

So the casual player, that incredibly large mass of players out there with nothing else better to do than wait to play your game. Right? You have to answer the question, why should they? D&D 5, Pathfinder Beginner Box, or Five Moons, why play? What makes this as 'pick up and play' as the next Angry Birds? What makes this game so cool I will sit and watch people play it endlessly on Youtube? Look at your game. Is it really that casual? Is it really that fun? What screams at people and engages them? What makes this game so fun that you have to play it, or even watch people play it?

If your answer is "we have better numbers" you are not thinking it right.

There is a question, how many casuals pen-and-paper gamers are out there? While I love Pathfinder or even D&D 5 I know plenty of people that play casual games who's eyes would water just looking at the books and dismiss them as 'not for them'. Of course the hard-core players love these games, and we system wars ourselves to incredible lengths over them - that's just who we are. But those casuals. Who are they? What are they doing now? How do you entice them?

How do you get them to say, "This is cool! I wanna be doing this!"

Or most importantly, "I want to be seen doing this."

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Kickstarter News: Five Moons RPG

Here's an interesting piece of news, Sean K Reynolds, of recently retired Pathfinder and Paizo fame, is starting a Kickstarter campaign for his Five Moons RPG idea. He wants to simplify fantasy gaming down to the Pathfinder Beginner Box level of complexity, and make fantasy gaming a more social experience. He is also breaking with the OGL and d20 SRD for this one, and will develop his own license.

It's interesting he wants to do a fresh take on pen-and-paper gaming, and he's trying to iron out the complex systems in Pathfinder and create something simple and cool. Over on the Five Moons Blog you can find more of his ideas on the game, balance, magic systems, and his other ideas.

Of note as well is designers are moving away from d20 SRD and the OGL in particular. We are far enough away from 3.5 and compatibility (and Pathfinder has it covered pretty well) that this doesn't seem to be as hot as it was in the past, so that is also an interesting development.

It seems the industry is letting Pathfinder rule the roost with complex and deep rules, while there is a clear fight on for the casual pen-and-paper gamer. D&D 5 has put its foot down in one corner, and it looks like Five Moons is the challenger with a pretty impressive designer and pedigree behind the project.

But how big is the casual pen-and-paper market? Is there such a thing? Are casual pen-and-paper gamers more of the iPhone/Android mobile gaming or online MMO crowds with much interest in pen-and-paper games? It can be argued the pen-and-paper market nowadays has grown considerably hard-core, with a clear need for new players and especially dungeon masters. Will simple hardcover games alone be enough, or is an online or electronic component necessary to draw interest from the casual players?

There are a lot of questions here, and not many good answers until we gauge the success of D&D 5 at pulling in new players. Converting older players from one game to another is not enough, these games need to cause a buzz outside of the traditional RPG community and draw in the next generation of tabletop fantasy gamers. New players are the clear measure of success for any game.

I suppose the battle has been joined, and this shall be an interesting time for fantasy tabletop gaming.