Is roleplaying a dying hobby? I mean real roleplaying, not fourteen-year-olds doing Super-Wholock pairings

It's already dead

Yes, it is.
Because of effin weirdos like you! You are the cancer, please end your hobby and get out to the real world. Catch some Pokemon!

Is story-telling a dying pastime? Is reading books dead?

Some people want the freedom of pure imagination.

>Dungeons and Dragons has been a household name since the 80's.
And that's the main reason why I hate D&D: it's the only household name and therefore many gamers only come in touch with the playstyle it is geared towards.

It is bad for our hobby, overall. It makes our hobby 1-dimensional for too many uninitiated: kill and take the loot, then level up. I wish at least CoC and VtM were household names too.

>wah, dumb shit isn't popular

Maybe you should stop liking dumb shit and whining about how unpopular it is all the time? At least you can play D&D without having to deal with pretentious fags who think that just because they play bad games that are less popular that they're some sort of roleplaying elite, when they're just the dregs no one wants to play with.

No?
Not sure what you mean by the last part but there are still plenty of groups around. There are still plenty of companies turning out games.

In the past few years I'v ran and played in plenty of games (mostly one shots due to work and school) and I'v talk to more people with games currently on the go. And fuck I live in Red Deer, not much of place for "nerd culture."

You may not like the way people play their games with role-playing and dice but they are playing them.
Every group will have a kill-happy-number-master or an annoying, meme spouting goof at some point but I'm pretty certain it's always been that way.
If anything I think it's getting better in terms of the kill happy players. My grognard dad would tell me stories of whole groups of sullen dice-rollers, in it for the loot and exp and nothing more, who shy away from story or characterisation. He's a bit surprised I haven't encountered that play style more in my years of gaming.

Real Roleplaying: Most Tabletop RPGs

Not Real Roleplaying: Jabbing F1 in WoW, Metagaming, min-maxing, etc

Veeky Forums sure feels like a weird place for complaining about retarded fandom headcanons of British tv shows, OP.

I bring new people in all the time, some stay, some go, some start their own groups. People have been on and on about this stuff dying as long as I can remember, but I discovered this stuff on my own after watching a Dexter's Lab episode and doing some digging online.

I'm sure that others will do the same, and if they don't they may find it through other people. I don't think the hobby is dying, it's actually in a sorta stasis.

>min-maxing

Numbers and understanding them: Not part of roleplaying gmaes!

You should really put more effort into your bait. This is way too obvious.

Exploitation of numbers in an uncharacteristic way. Nothing wrong with making good balanced characters made to reflect your concept.

I don't understand why min-maxing automatically means you can't roleplay. Generally, I would like it when a level of competency is a part of my character's personality. Kinda hard to do that if I don't use math.

Why is playing an incompetent tag-along character a source of pride now?

In my case, the new recruits, come from me teaching kids 9-13 how to play dungeons and dragons 5e for a living (one of my jobs is that I work at a YMCA daycare program part time)

Over the span of two years, I've caused parents to spend a total of $800-$900 on fifth edition books at my FLGS. Some kid even got his parents to buy him $400 in various miniatures for Christmas last year. Best part is, is he often brings them with him

From the secret cloning facilities.

Not a clue. Something I rather like to do is to min-max the crap out of an inherently sub-optimal concept. I get a balanced character that's a lot of fun to play and generally a unique experience. Like a melee focused shadowrun character.

Competence does not require min-maxing, generally speaking. Being hyper-specialized does. Min-maxed characters are basically in-game autists that are good at one and one thing only. But they're the best at this thing.

>dungeons and dragons
Kill yourself.

>if you don't manipulate the system you're incompetent

Pfft. Go play Diablo.

This is the best age of tabletop roleplaying ever. More games and participants than ever before.

Quantity =/= quality

Universities, sixth forms, clubs

Hey, if you've got a better game to teach a bunch of often times, rowdy 9-13 year olds, that is just as simple as 5e, than I'm all ears!

GURPS Lite

A person can cheese the system all they want as long as they give the character identity.

The problems people have with min-maxers stem from the players themselves, not the practice.

There are more quality games than we've ever had before, maybe not more compared to the toal number of games, but more on asbolite terms. We might actually have a higher proportion of quality games than ever before, too. All of these game may not appeal to you, but that's pkay. I'd say that focusing on a specific target audience or style of play is more conductive to quality than trying to appeal to everyone, and such an approach will obviously mean that most pf the games made won't appeal to everyone.

I think in a well designed system competence shouldn't require min-maxing. What qualities will result in character of a certain type should be made plain to the players. One character might be more specialised than another but ideally that should come with tangible sacrifices.

Min-maxing is the result of loop-holes in the system. That there are options that are significantly more or less useful without balancing factors. These holes also devalue the concepts of levels or ability costs since under mini-maxing their written value means little or nothing. Being 9th level doesn't mean much when the effect could be being a slayer of armies or a guy who's kinda good in a fight. Focus is pulled away from how the rules represent the world of the game and placed instead on how the abstract nature of the rules can be manipulated.

This creates a sort of char-gen minigame that draws attention away from actual play. It also arbitrarily limits competent character types based on the min-maxing meta.

Unfortunately no game is perfect and most allow some level of min-maxing, with the worst actually requiring it.
But the argument it self isn't about making a good character or bad one, it's about whether a kind of play oriented around a game's flaws should be encouraged.

>tl;dr
min-maxing is the result of bad game design

FFG Star Wars? FATE? Call of Cthulhu, if you want to spook them? Nothing wrong with D&D, I just hate that it's the only household name in Role-playing.

We also have more crap than ever before.

>asbolite
What the fuck, I must either be drunk or having some serious problems with my cerebral blood flow.

>We also have more crap than ever before.
Yeah, and also more good stuff.

Uncle, friend wanted to do one and it was the biggest shitshow I've been in other than the time i let a player take 5 dots in age in owod once. I thought i could do better so i became the forever dm.

I'm 18, me and my friends always knew that dnd was a thing and we wanted to play it, so i bought the starter set of 5e and then the players handbook and we found it fun so we kept doing it.

VtM and Shadowrun are pretty much household names at this point too.

Really, I am not sure how many would not reference D&D when explaining what RPGs are.

See Nobody says: Oh, we always wanted to do Shadowrun, so I went out and bought the corebook. It's only D&D and that is annoying because D&D stands only for the biggest niche in role-playing.

>Oh, we always wanted to do Shadowrun, so I went out and bought the corebook. It's only D&D and that is annoying because D&D stands only for the biggest niche in role-playing.
That's literally how my group and I started roleplaying.

First off, role-playing is alive and well. Second of all, Superwholock is barely a phenomenon anymore: it collapsed in 2014 and never really recovered.

>real roleplaying
You mean, that thing you're going to keep redefining to conveniently exclude any evidence that the hobby is doing better than ever so you and the other salty, crusty grogs can circlejerk about how you're the only "true" RPG players left to feel good about yourselves?
Oh look, a perfect example of what I'm talking about popped up while I was writing that. Notice how, even though it's never been easier to find people to play more obscure systems with, the fact that people still play D&D means that somehow doesn't count? If D&D suddenly dropped off the face of the earth, they'd be bitching about SR or WoD or whatever took its place. Sure, they'll invent excuses for why D&D in particular is cancer that's ruining the hobby, but they're just excuses.

Lets be honest here, D&D isn't even that bad as a game, if you are looking for something like a long-term boardgame.

I think the main issue here is that Min-Maxing has become what Munchkin used to mean. Min-Maxing used to be just getting the most out of your character idea's build, and playing normally, while munchkinning was when you built something simply to be the most broken thing you could possibly make so you could 'win' the game.

It's good that D&D is popular. I am glad a lot of games centered around going to dangerous places and trying to steal shit without being killed exist. I know a lot of different RPGs, and actually love storygames, and I still almost always choose to use D&D (OSR hexcrawling) to bring people into the hobby.

I think that newcomers usually fare better in shadowrun, because it's way more open and less vidya-like, but that's just my observations. I like d&d a lot myself.

>less vidya-like
I think almost any RPG besides a full-on story-oriented game can be played "vidya-like" if you want, and very NOT vidya-like if you don't want to. Older games with fewer rules meant much more experimentation and innovation in what players tried to do, I think. And I find that if you put some interesting NPCs with their own motives around, players can create their own stories and develop motivations that are indirectly related to "get loot, level up" at best.

I once had a character who was injured while rescuing an aging farmer's adult daughter from some kidnappers, was taken care of by the daughter at her father's house, fell in love with her, but was told by the farmer that no "dirty, wild adventurer" would be with his daughter, even if he did save her. We could have gone an entirely different direction and never known she existed, or refused to save her, since the farmer couldn't pay us much.

So he went off to try to earn enough treasure that she would be able to live comfortably for the rest of her days, in hopes that would change her father's mind. More than once, the memory of the woman waiting for him, the poor lonely farmer's daughter who wanted to see the city, kept him going when he would have surely died otherwise.

(1/2)

And then we returned, triumphant, dressed as fine as nobility... to find that her father was dead and she, kidnapped once more, this time by a lord from a neighboring kingdom who wanted to wed her.

So I went on a quest to find an ancient relic, just to gain the prestige necessary to gather enough people to my cause, to make them believe my promises of glory (well, and because the magic-user wanted it because apparently it was magical or something).

And then I outfitted them with the treasure I had amassed, bribed someone to let us into the lord's castle at night, and murdered the fuck out of him, rescuing a poor woman for whom I and the party of which I was a member were the only remaining friendly faces in the world).

My character married her, retiring at level 9. And that's a story, driven entirely by player choices and motivations.

I don't know how much more open a game can get.

(2/2)

I'm not a huge fan of using Shadowrun for new players for two reasons. The first is I just don't like the system and don't enjoy running it. The second is for newcomers to RPGs it's also their first exposure to cyberpunk, and I actively hate Shadowrun's take on the genre.

You're a fringe case, you realize that?

No, but I also have never seen a "Tell me why I should learn a new system beyond SR/VtM/CoC thread" and I am hanging around here for a few years on and off. Com'on, guys. You know the market share of D&D and its direct descendents.

I disagree. It reenforces a particular notion about role-playing games in normies who come into contact. Normies impressions of RPGs are largely based on D&D. And that reflects bad on the entire hobby.

>And that reflects bad on the entire hobby.
What is it about D&D that you feel reflects badly on the hobby as a whole?

> I actively hate Shadowrun's take on the genre.

What do you dislike about it? For me, I just don't like the mixing of fantasy and cyberpunk. And also my first experience with it was tainted by the GM running an investigative campaign more in line with what you'd find in CoC instead of corporate espionage/operator shenanigans we'd been told. Me and a friend made characters with that in mind. I was a rigger, he was a hacker. The idea was he'd weaken the computer systems, and I'd do the physical sabotage and provide assault backup and the getaway vehicle. Basically our characters were useless for the "evil cult is planning to summon lovecraftian horrors"

>waaah wahh my glass is half empty waaah

It propagates a specific idea of role-playing games with the focus being on monster-killing, looting and character builds. All good and fine, but it's very one-dimensional. Pen & Paper RPGs are more than Diablo/WoW.

A friend of mine and I conscripted a bunch of university friends into a 5e game. From there, I'm convincing them to try systems that aren't simply written to be bland and inoffensive.

...nor written entirely in a lame, boring non-Papyrus font.

High school students. Middle school students. Bored adults. Same place new Magic players come from, really. (There was at least one regular D&D group at my high school not four years ago. A bunch of video gamers formed it spontaneously, because tabletop is fun and liking one thing doesn't stop you liking other things.)

You know, despite the mass invasion and normiefication of 'nerd culture', actual old-school nerds didn't stop coming into existence.

Oh. I get people into it with old school D&D. See
Also, RPGs started with D&D, and if you think D&D started out being about "character builds" and "monster-killing," you're mistaken. The latter was something you did if you had to, but likely to be very dangerous, so you usually didn't want to fight. And characters were pretty samey by design, because differentiation was meant to be handled primarily via roleplay.

>actual old-school nerds didn't stop coming into existence.

Sounds about right, there will always be people who are social outcasts for one reason or another, and will come together to engaged in "nerd" hobbies beyond what is considered chic.

Also, if those people get their shit together and make friends who weren't necessarily social outcasts to the same extent when they were younger, and/or aren't now, the game can spread outside of traditional "nerd" circles without the people who play only doing so to be trendy.

>Where does the fresh meat come from
In my experience? Friends and university groups
>My brother got in around 18 after some college friends got him into it.
>My brother got me interested, but I really started playing in college when my then-fwb introduced me to her group.
>The forever-DM for my current group has played AD&D with oldfriends.
>The rest of my current group are the DM's friends, or else volunteered to game with him during college. I believe they connected via the D&D club's facebook group, which functions as a sort of 'game-finder' thing.

I've also heard of people in the armed forces playing tabletop RPGs. Apparently some marines are huge nerds, and I often hear them connect their interest to old marines ads that heavily featured fantasy type stuff.

youtube.com/watch?v=mplEt-7HNR8
youtube.com/watch?v=pir1Hug-CEc

I forgot to mention a few other sources

Sometimes, tabletop RPG gamers manage to reproduce, and proceed to convince their mates and/or offspring to play with them. This is one way for even young children to come into the hobby. In that sense roleplaying like many other activities that parents get their kids into.

I personally thought D&D was the tightest shit imaginable after seeing that Dexter's Lab episode, and other popular TV shows involving roleplaying have awoken interest in countless others.

There are also the occasional people who learn that D&D was an ancestor of modern video-gaming and come in to learn more about it.