Why was 2000 the year RPGs died?

Its time for healing.

Come on OP, show us where the D&D touched you and we'll talk it out.

D&D is the last thing a grognard would complain about, you boobs

Did someone said 'boobs'?

The most notable thing that happened to rpgs in 2000 was the release of 3rd edition along with the Open Game License. The early 2000s were a hellish nightmarescape of third party d20 games.

It's a type of bird

Those birds are called boobies, you boob.

Mongoose Traveller was published in 2007 though

>an oboe

Did you say...booobies?

>be me
>be in year 2k
>be playing AD&D with my friends
>hear about a new version that just came out
>"Eh, we already know how to play 2E"
>too busy having fun to bother with d20
>never pick it up

>the year RPGs saw a revival and the gaming population exploded in size

>died

It's funny, because your hatred 3rd edition has grown to the level where your irrationality manages to actually invert facts.

Ayy

Mu.

The most notable thing to happen to RPGs in the 2000s was the sudden popularity of d&d video games, which flooded the hobby with CRPG fans, who tend to be lonely autists willing to swallow anything if it had somewhat passable writing attached to it. 3e's CCG-based design merely sealed the deal.

^ pretty much this. This, and the OGL.

Wow, you grognards are still bitter, sixteen years later?

It's hard to find a sadder existence than yours.

This- being a nerd has never been better, i live in nottingham and we have 6 comic shops, warhammer world and warlord games and so many pub nights for MtG and tabletop games/board games. Its a golden age

>*world games, narrativist fagfeasts and transsexualism as far as the eye can see!

Touched a sore spot I see.

>the ol' 'YOU'RE UPSET, NOT ME' response

Why so resistant to change? Even your replies are outdated.

Yours probably qualifies.

>thousands working on OSR clones
>online proliferation of old school modules and ported material for every edition of most every game
>BUT, because someone, somewhere, is having fun I don't like, it ruins my enjoyment of things that have nothing to do with them

Stay classy, my murderhoboing friend.

At least I'm not still lamenting a change of system two editions later. Moving on does wonders for not being a sad little grognard.

Honestly, it's hard to imagine something more pathetic.

Change to what? Kiddies unable to comprehend that you could perform actions not explicitly spelled out on your character sheet, new DMs running literal hack and slash campaigns that fall apart if you don't stay on the rails, autistic morons who treated roleplaying like a math competition being vindicated by 3e? There were always bad players and bad games but after ID and BG the community literally turned to shit. The blooming of other rpg brands that happened around that time was fueled in part by the hordes of people bailing d&d. You can see the ironic inversion of the same event in the publication of 4e ushering the rise of Tardfinder.

The LotR movies made high fantasy mainstream.

Yeah, you definitively qualify.

...

>this mad

>DMs running literal hack and slash campaigns that fall apart if you don't stay on the rails
How's that indicative of 2000's gaming?

>new DMs running literal hack and slash campaigns that fall apart if you don't stay on the rails, autistic morons who treated roleplaying like a math competition being vindicated by 3e?

Man, that started back in 2e, and the whole "RPG tourney" scene actually was nearly dead around the time 3 came to be. In fact, most of the RPG community was on its last limbs around that time, and were it not for 3e, it might have remained the incredibly niche hobby it was instead of blooming into the massive community which contained players of every type you could imagine.

Hate all you want, but roleplaying games owe a debt to 3rd edition that make your continued saltiness embarrassing to witness, because you genuinely believe the lies you've been telling yourself in your damp and lonely basement.

Because you touched yourself.

Why?

Because it was the year you were born.

>the ol' 'YOU'RE UPSET, NOT ME' response

I prefer calling it lolumad

you just reminded me that 2000 was 16 years ago.
goddamnit.

You're the kind of dumbass who's upset that narrativist and story games are super popular, while forgetting that old school and traditional RPGs are just as popular and the pool of people playing both kinds of games is larger than ever.

More kinds of games aren't a problem.

That's seriously the best exam of a good modern rpg you can think of?

Is this some grognardier version of the 4e MMO thing?

I'd disagree with you, but man, it has gotten a lot of replies.

Pathfinder is still a thing.

I've noticed an almost steady decline in the variety of games people find acceptable for the last ten or so years.

People used to be OK with something odd, like an underdark based game or something rooted in history, but it seems more and more people just insult anything that's not a by the book dungeon crawl or someone's flavorless homebrew setting that's yet another iteration of (not)Europe.

Nah, that would be calling 3e the Diablo 2 edition.

Which turned out to be a valid description, what with the noob trap minefields, martials sucking ass on higher difficulty levels and bad math across the board. So, actually it was the opposite, I guess.

Nah, D&D is exactly the sort of thing a grognard would complain about.

Source: I am a grognard and I complain about D&D from time to time.

3.x and its derivatives are a boring cancer on the world, 4e was a goofy miniatures game, and 5e is possibly the most lifeless fantasy game I've experienced firsthand.

not him, but what about this?

Like it or not, WotC very nearly killed RPGs, but not in 2000. Their golden goose, a little card game called Magic the Gathering (perhaps you've heard of it?) was so popular that it warped the behavior of the distributors, causing them to ignore *everyone else* in the industry for about a year, starting in 1994. If you were in the RPG or boardgame business you were getting no traction with the distributors, and if you were a store you were spending your entire budget on MtG.

Stores still survived, but the greed caused a domino effect among distributors, killing most of them.

So what, you ask, saved the game producers? This thing you are using *right now* did. This World Wide Web thingy.

Some didn't make it out of the 90s alive, of course. TSR is the elephant in the room, but GDW also collapsed, and several other companies with long histories in the RPG business attempted to copy the success of MtG. While only a few were good, they all served to distract the companies even more.

Then WotC did two things to SAVE RPGs, after nearly killing them. One was lauded at the time, while the other was reviled. It is ironic that the opinions regarding these two moves would now be reversed.

First, the bought TSR and revived D&D, adding a legal framework, the OGL, for what the entire industry had generally been doing anyway. Lauded at the time, we now see this as a collection of good and bad decisions.

The other thing WotC did, reviled as the nastiest competition killer they could have come up with, was to Patent the tapping mechanism at the heart of MtG. The many CCGs created to ride the wave all but vanished overnight. A few worded their way around the patent and kept going, but the other companies who had a history in RPGs went back to them, riding the wave of the OGL as well as ignoring it, and RPGs were practically Born Again.

while you are correct, finding people who aren't total D-bags is still a big issue.

Because the cocktail that was internet ubiquity and the OGL collided on such a shitty system built under such shitty MTG-inspired design choices that it changed "the community's" collective understanding of what constitutes an RPG into something much, much, shittier.

Wow, you are amazing how retarded you are.
Basically, you're running entirely on stupid. You hate two games, and instead of basing your opinions on facts, you are basing your "facts" on your opinions.

Your story is cute, but very far off the mark. Your "MTG choked the RPG market" myth is even sillier than the "D&D choked the RPG market" myth, which is already a joke, and comes from an incredibly naive understanding of how stores and their merchandise works.

Also, as far as patenting "tapping", they only patented the name and symbol. Turning cards sideways to signify they were being used could not be copyrighted and never was. Games made before and after used "tapping" freely, but just with their own names for it and their own symbols.

Really, all you've got is a silly story that reads like what someone who's bitter about Wizards being successful with two franchise cobbled together out of myths and rumors he's half-remembered.

because it got filled with narrative indie games that are more concerned about telling stories than figuring out your Anal Circumference statistic and how to best min max it.

OH WAIT THAT MADE PEOPLE LIKE THEM MORE

I do love that game. And I should clarify that I think we are in the best time for tabletop gaming in its history. My jaw just hit the floor when he defended our position with that game out of the hundreds of better ones.

RPGs seem better than ever honestly. If anything, this is the Golden Age.

Insult all you like, but I watched it happen.

WotC didn't try to kill the rest of the industry, they just handed it the gun. ONE North American distributor survived, and they got bought by a comics distributor. That wasn't healthy for gaming either. Comics distro operates on the idea that anything older than six months isn't worth re-ordering; it took years to break Diamond of that habit when they acquired Alliance. All the distro competition you see now arose after the bloodletting.

>as far as patenting "tapping", they only patented the name and symbol. Turning cards sideways to signify they were being used could not be copyrighted and never was. Games made before and after used "tapping" freely, but just with their own names for it and their own symbols.
Yes, the companies that realized that kept going. it's why L5R and Shadowfist persisted. The rest gave up, though. CCGs didn't start to expand again until the patent expired.

I know, the idea that games designers might not have a clue about IP law is novel to you in these days of ready internet advice, but the Web was very young and very different in the 90s.

>an incredibly naive understanding of how stores and their merchandise works.
Now, maybe. Direct sales to stores didn't exist at the time. The GW and WotC Direct programs were a reaction to how shitty distro got in the late 90s. I know publishers from that period who were hearing fans lament at conventions that they hadn't produced anything new recently *while standing at a table of new product*. Product the distributors didn't care about because it wasn't a CCG.

The distributors are not now and never have been altruists. They like money. That *was* their downfall in 95. Why take in a shipment of books, break it up into stock numbers, then pull store orders over a couple days when you can receive a pallet of MtG from one truck, slide it onto another truck headed for a lucky store, and pocket the markup in about five minutes. or better yet, sell it to some desperate store for retail, getting two markup steps.

I don't hate WotC, or I didn't back then. MtG was my crack of choice and I was an old D&Der so their revival of it was a blessing after TSR went tits up.

It seemed like the stores in my area that went out of business after MtG became the thing died because they couldn't compete with the customer service of the MtG only stores that started popping up. Three went down here, and all of them just wanted to sell starters and boosters straight out of the box.

Meanwhile, the MtG players that opened stores would buy/sell/trade in singles or whole collections, sold all the little strange CCGs the other stores never heard of, had five tables to play at rather the one the other places had, always someone there to play against, sold sodas and snacks... And of course they didn't treat MtG players like filthy animals once they had their money in hand, like the grognards at the other stores did. Of four stores I used to go to the only one that survived the 90s was mostly a comics store, so losing some of their gamers for a few years didn't hurt them as bad.

Not saying there weren't other factors in play, as I don't know how the industry worked, but just saying the ones I saw die out had it coming.

Certainly the stores that couldn't or wouldn't adapt suffered, but that had been the case before. We had stores come and go, but if anything the earlier advent of 40k had prepared the retail market for in-store play as an idea. One of my locals had no room for in-store play, but instead struck up relationships with nearby pizza joints, and filled them with MtG players.

Our local historicals store was bemused by the wave of Magic, but was adaptable enough to sell it with a straight face. I remember standing in line for an hour there for a shot at Legends boxes. You had to buy Legends by the box and hope you got both halves of the Uncommons.

My immediate friends and I recovered from the height of the madness shortly thereafter, aided by the change in the community wrought by the launch of the pro league. "Fun" Magic died and serious business took its place. Then in-store organized play *really* took off.

probably because the apocalypse happened

oh wait it didn't you're retarded

Gee, i envy you, i love page 45.

Birmingham just has one game shop, that can hardly be called friendly, a forbidden planet and a comic shop thats owned by forbidden planet.

>probably because punctuation happened
>oh wait it didn't you're retarded

>GDW also collapsed
GDW collapsed because TSR legally raped them over Dangerous Journeys.

>this is the Golden Age
Why would you think that?

When else have you ever been so righteously reminded on every single character sheet that your character can be transgressive, androgynous or concealing?

Are we being raised by /v/?

What's wrong with it?

I think this is a symptom of people reinforcing each others opinions somewhere, somewhere where facts can't reach them.

What general are you guys are part of? Are you just the three GURPS guys who go around looking for threads where they can complain about WotC?

To start, if something sells well, that's good for the store. It's not a zero sum game kids, and the profits from MTG would help allow the store to keep operating to sell everything else. You should be thanking MTG for helping stores survive.

Second, the "tapping patent stopped other CCG's" is so silly, that it sounds like the shouts of someone from the top of mount stupid. Congrats, you know about that obscure little factoid, but maybe you should learn more about it instead of just using it to fuel your little vendetta.

But the American civil war was about state rights. Slavery only became an issue when the northern leadership found out they could fuck up the south bad if they made slavery an issue.

That's kind of the only possible measure.

I visited Wayland's Forge, it wasn't that unfriendly.

You are near the top of the mountain right now

This guy honestly believes that if the South had given up its slaves on its own anti-federalist terms, the North would have made the civil war about tailgating or cousin-fucking.

I notice this too.
People are getting incredibly echo-chambery with their tastes, and they have piles of triggers and red flags dictating their actions these days.

Can't have anything interesting, risky, or out of the ordinary, everything has to be committee designed to not offend any of the easily offendable grognards out there.

And the list of things that offend them is so long, too. Anime. Sandboxes. Railroading. Narrativism. Gamism. Anything but their special favorite game type, really.

SATURDAY, APRIL 27, 1861.
By the President of the United States:
A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas, The laws of the United States have been for some time past and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the Marshals by law :

Now, therefore, I, ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution and the laws, have thought fit to call forth, and hereby do call forth, the Militia of the several States of the Union, to the aggregate number of 75,000, in order to suppress said combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed. The details for this object will be immediately communicated to the State authorities through the War Department.

I appeal to all loyal citizens to favor, facilitate,

and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union and the perpetuity of popular government, and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.

(cont.)

I deem it proper to say that the first service assigned to the force hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union, and, in every event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, any destruction of, or interference with property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country; and I hereby command the persons composing the combinations aforesaid to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes within twenty days from this date.

Deeming that the present condition of public affairs presents an extraordinary occasion, I do, hereby, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution, convene both Houses of Congress. The Senators and Representatives are therefore summoned to assemble at their respective chambers at twelve o'clock, noon, on Thursday, the fourth day of July next, then and there to consider and determine such measures as, in their wisdom, the public safety and interest may seem to demand.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this fifteenth day of April, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one, and of the independence of the United States the eighty-fifth.

AD&D had wonderful settings and TSR did adventure modules right.

Shame it was a wonky ass mess in a lot of ways.

Fighters at a certain point always hit everything all the time forever.

Different races had absurdly low level caps compared to humans.

THAC0 was and still remains a retarded mechanic.

3e was an improvement in a lot of ways and worse in many ways too.

4e was balanced but also didn't really sit well with me. I didn't care for the system on a whole.

5e was probably the amalgamation of all the systems. It still has flaws, because all systems do, but it has the least amount of flaws and is pretty damn balanced while offering a lot of opportunities for good role play. It also helps that the Player's Handbook has the most player options right out of the gate compared to every other D&D edition to extend the life of the game and bloat is being kept in check pretty well too.

>5e was probably the amalgamation of all the systems. It still has flaws, because all systems do, but it has the least amount of flaws and is pretty damn balanced while offering a lot of opportunities for good role play. It also helps that the Player's Handbook has the most player options right out of the gate compared to every other D&D edition to extend the life of the game and bloat is being kept in check pretty well too.

But it came to late. The mess that 4e and Pathfinder left was a fragmantaion of the RPG community. Before you could walk into any store and find a 3e gaming group. Now not so much.

On the other side it we have a lot more to choose from. Different tastes are adressed.

The history of TT RPGs reminds me somehow Roman history. The Republic went into Empiremode (AD&D-->3e). The empire tried to reform itself but failed and went down. Eastrome still keeps the old ways (PF). While in the former western roman empire small and medium states rise and fall, fighting for land and resources (player).

TSR won, but then had to *buy* all remaining DJ stock from GDW. It drained their time, but was ultimately not as bad as it could have been since it was more a hate suit against Gygax than anything else.

What finally got GDW and TSR was, again, a reaction to distro going bad. They both tried the regular booksellers route and got badly burned by the differences.

Sick rebuttal. I especially like the utter irrelevance.

>Fighters at a certain point always hit everything all the time forever.
Pretty sure that was the point.

>I'm pissed off, or feeling smug, probably about some shitty edition of D&D, and now I make sweeping statements about the entire hobby based on it.

Please take a long walk off a short pier. Role-playing has never been better off, there are more games catering to every style of play than ever before.

When I started playing role-playing games, you played one of 3 games made by the same company, because that's all there was, domestically.

Now I can spend ten minutes and download 10 different rpgs, from dungeoncrawlers to super autistic weapon wanking or rules lights and high-concept indie rpgs.

How am I worse off than now? The only thing I personally think has gotten worse is the player base on average, because a lot more people just view it as a game than back when I got started, when it was more about the fiction, but that's my personal, subjective opinion, they're allowed to play games the way they want, and I'm perfectly capable of playing with like-minded people.

If you're trying to make a point, just fucking tell people what it is in the op so we can explain why you're wrong.

Why was [arbitrary year] the year [thing I enjoy] died?

Gotta love those systems where you roll to check your privilege.

The state of D&D is not the state of role-playing though.

Wizards is like the Games Workshop of role-playing. Them declining as their expansion grinds to a halt and getting some competition, or even having their shit pushed in by the barbarians is not a bad thing for role-players, just for D&D fans.

>When I started playing role-playing games, you played one of 3 games made by the same company, because that's all there was, domestically.
Where the hell did you start out? 1975 USA?

Try 80s Sweden. No thriving internet community, small player base. Before the explosion with Drakar och Demoner it was slim pickings.

Not that it really mattered because you used whatever rules the friend with the books had, and you played whatever you wanted with them.

Then of course, 1989 hit and the scene exploded with Drakar och Demoner, but it was still very much about one company putting out all the systems that were popular, and importing books was not common.

This is actually coming from a dude who never has played a RPG in that same year of all things and spent too much time playing more RPG-less related games instead

This man speaks truth.

>importing books was not common.
Apparently Traveller got imported by Hobbyhuset in Uppsala in '84, at least according to JTAS 21.

Yes, that's true, but since this was 84 most kids were still limited to what was actually sold in the stores they frequented.

I grew up in a town on Öland.

I got my role-playing games in a generic toy store on the mainland that I had to go 40 miles by bus or car to reach, as an example. Today I can just order a pdf within a couple of minutes from making the decision, no problem. Back then you made do, and meeting other people with similar interests some times meant learning about entire systems you didn't know existed, because the hobby was so compartmentalized. You didn't have the big unifying internet hivemind where everyone got exposed to all the options.

But does it have menacing spikes?

Why would you want anything but '84 Mutant?

See, that's the thing! I didn't even know about Mutant until I had been playing Kult and Drakar & Demoner for years.