Is it a good or a bad thing that roleplaying games are becoming more mainstream?

Oh shit I used to game regularly with lower-right in college, one of the best GMs I've ever been fortunate enough to play with.

If the mainstream starts liking RPGs, it means their tastes are changing, not that the games are.

Good thing. More potential players. Individual gaming groups are isolated enough that even if the "mainstream" becomes a cesspool, as long as you can find five or six people you like, you're all right. More players means more indie RPGs.

The only downside would be if the "mainstream" decides there's a Right way to play RPGs, and all other games are wrong, but Pathfinder mostly stays in its containment thread, so I think we'll live.

I'd say it's a bad thing for the majority of players as it can drive game creators to change their games to appeal to more mainstream audiences that do not appreciate the same things as more traditional players do

WHFB End Times

WoW classic vs Lich King vs current state

I hate being surrounded by nothing but fat neckbeards with no hygiene whatsoever, so I say good. Whatever brings more normal people to my table.

this. I really want more people involved, but experiences has shown that it only leads to ruin the franchise

This sort of fearmongering only applies if you focus entirely on the highest profile games, and doing so is overly limiting IMO. It's like with vidya, I've had way more fun in recent years with indie titles. As RPGs get mainstream, sure the big ones might be crap, but they've always been crap. But more people interested means more indie designers, and while most of those will be crap enough people will be trying it for some good games to be created, by sheer chance if nothing else.

Video games are seeing an all time high, cinema's been alive and kicking for the past century, and books have been going strong since the 1600's despite the abundance of alternatives and constant cries that they are doomed by them. Seems fine.

At the risk of sounding somewhat elitist it all depends on whether the newcomers adapt to existing norms and regulations of play or if companies instead release new products which while being more easily accessible to newcomers aren't satisfying to veteran players of TTRPG's.

Just because we get some focus tested shit movies crapped out, doesn't mean we don't also get the good shit, that we wouldn't have gotten would movies not be as big an industry as they are.

Heck, after the LEGO movie, I don't even mind brand movies. Excellence can come from any source.

Heck, we are already kinda past the "everything is the same" with 2000s and the OGL anyway, it can't possibly get worse.

>cinema's been alive and kicking for the past century

Actually, movie theaters are closing rapidly, since besides obvious blockbusters, nobody wants to go out and pay 10 bucks for hollywood trash when Netflix and similar services are a thing.

It's a bad thing that you keep making threads with pictures of ""problematic"" people just so faggots can whine about MUH TUMBLR and MUH X-CARDS.

Pretty sure OP doesn't actually have any friends to play RPGs with.

If you don't like the stuff that is being made, then make your own. The good thing with TTRPG is that you don't have to learn to code or buy expensive cameras or take costly classes. Just get to work and test.

>Video games are seeing an all time high
In what way

Cinema as a medium, not as a place.

Commercial. I know everyone's butthurt that the industry's moved to mostly making microtransaction based phone games and the occasional CoD clone but the only objective measurement you have is the bottom line. Everything else is people just not liking whatever the flavor of the month is. And bottom line, things are going better.

More productions than ever and an ever-flourishing indie market that makes it pretty much impossible not to find a game you like even if you don't like the mainstream tendencies.

The games industry is only shit if you look at AAA stuff. Which, admittedly, is really fucking shitty, especially with them actively ruining interesting looking games like Shadow of War with bullshit microtransactions.

Still, there's a lot of good indies out there. You just need to find them.

you'd have to be some real pretentious hipster douchebag to think that is anything but great.
If you don't enjoy a more mainstream appealing game, then play it how you want it. nobody is making you do anything.
big newsflash, that is the point of pen and paper RPGs.

>If the mainstream starts liking RPGs, it means their tastes are changing, not that the games are.
Then why was Skyrim so absolutely beautiful in graphics, but terrible in design?

The mainstream likes whatever is pretty and popular, nothimg more. This was true in the past, it's true in the present, and it will be true in the future.

It's good for the hobby as a whole if things become mainstream, but bad for an idnividual game if that individual game becomes mainstream.

skyrim existing doesn't take away games you like.
if your audience isn't big enough to warrant being pandered to, then the mainstream not being part of that audience wont make a difference at all.
In that case your choice is: Skyrim or nothing?

>skyrim existing doesn't take away games you like
Never claimed it did. My argument was solely against 's argument that more people spending money on the hobby is always a good thing without considering that the companies producing the hobby will inevitably start to pander to the mainstream, favoring style over substance, in the nature of Skyrim as opposed to Daggerfall, which came out before the genre got popular.

I happen to view this as bad. If you don't, well, I guess you're the guy spending his money, so who am I to tell you boo? They've got yours, but they're losing mine.

I also forgot to add that I was also arguing against 's argument that "If the mainstream starts liking RPGs, it means their tastes are changing, not that the games are" by pointing out Skyrim, a clear case of the games changing to meet the tastes of the mainstream as opposed to the mainstream's tastes changing.

>the LEGO movie
>good
Heh.
>Heck, we are already kinda past the "everything is the same" with 2000s and the OGL anyway, it can't possibly get worse.
Sure. Now instead of OGL, you have DM's guild, where you create content and Wizards of the Coast sells it for money, which you do not see a single penny of. Because they made the system that enabled your creativity, and you should suck their dick and buy more of their fifty dollar adventure books and ten dollar slips of cardboard.

D&D 5e
The newer Magic sets (anything after Innistrad has been normalfuck pandering)
Video games sell well but in terms of quality they are trash. Movie theaters are dying, worst box office weekend in 25 years was like a week ago. Books are being replaced by shitty kindles and retarded meme books that convey nothing of value.

Try again.

Daggerfall would not come out today even if the mainstream never so much as looked in the general direction of RPGs.
Instead of Skyrim you'd have nothing.
>But there is game xyz which i like
And yeah, that still exists now, no?
"Their" audience being smaller doesn't make "Yours" bigger, and vice versa, if that makes sense.

>Video games sell well but in terms of quality they are trash. Movie theaters are dying, worst box office weekend in 25 years was like a week ago. Books are being replaced by shitty kindles and retarded meme books that convey nothing of value.

So, your personal taste, a logical fallacy and more of your personal taste. I'm not trying again before you try at all. :^)

The false premise here is that Daggerfall is good.
I mean, it's a pretty clever argument, since you're not going with the standard argument of Morrowind being the best, but it still means that you're claiming that what was basically a roguelike with shitty 3d graphics and uninteresting mechanics that crashed every twenty minutes and had no plot is somehow the 'purest' form of the genre.

>The false premise here is that Daggerfall is good

>There is no objective answer to this question.

>You're right about that

Magfest?

Movie theaters are actually dying though and this has been a general trend for years. Don't ask for sauce, this is fucking common knowledge now and if you don't know it it's your own fault.

>since more people will be spending money on the hobby
You meant to say, "since more people will be spending money on D&D and its derivatives," since the small publishers and indie developers sure as shit aren't going to see much boost thanks to Big Bazinga Theory or shit like Critical Roll.

Yes.
It introduces a lot of garbage players to the mix, but let's admit it, the playerbase was already full of garbage. The only difference now is that there's more junk to sort through to find good players. Systems might be getting more "casual" but I don't really care. I vastly prefer tearing systems apart to modify them or just making my own. If I don't like something that a new edition does I'll change it or use a different one. If other players only want to play garbage I'll find new players, there's plenty of them out there if you live in a city.

Warhammer and WoW were never good.

>because certain designers appeal to the mainstream all designers will
ok

>fat dude sitting directly across from girl
>side shaved angry girl
>girl who looks very uncomfortable
>balding little man
>guy with gene mist poof hair

I'm sick of normies like that ruining my games for weirdos and outsiders.

99% certain that's MEPACon. The wallpaper and the tables are dead on.

indeed
though morrowind is best

>Then why was Skyrim so absolutely beautiful in graphics, but terrible in design?
Videogamers have been swallowing shitty games for the sake of graphical improvement long before Skyrim though.

>Then why was Skyrim so absolutely beautiful in graphics, but terrible in design?
Because console kiddies can't handle proper UIs and everything the base game could do needed to be able to fit into half a gig of ram because of said consoles.

Most of Veeky Forums is literally okay with being colonized. Every hobby ever has had issues with normalization and, sure, all survived but the state of those hobbies certainly took hits to quality.

Civilian firearms are very similar to Veeky Forums's interests in the way it's produced and consumed; individually and small groups, used weekly to monthly, expensive, designed with little market testing, etc. The gun hobby, because of its new mass market appeal, has shaped gun stores and culture for the next 20 years.
>Every range almost exclusively sells AR15 and Glock parts and accessories.
>Training courses are filled with modern fuddlore.
>Awful tshirts everywhere.
>Gun designs stagnated and are built around compatibility and user idiocy.
>Even unique designs are normie appeal type affairs that evoke a specific aesthetic in both the exterior and mechanics of the gun.

Normies ruin everything, but now we have gun right groups growing, so yeah. Veeky Forums gains NOTHING from mass appeal.

I like this answer.

Interesting. I'm a gun enthusiast and play board games and ttRPGs and I feel the last decade has been better than it ever has before. More variety for people getting into it, and plenty of people producing tried and true designs for the older guys.

Its....ok. I think some aspects of it are good, like more people playing can never hurt. However, I think some of the shit that people use as paragons of the hobby are terrible, and normies dont know not to follow their lead. Id go so far as to say unambiguously that Critical Role is the worst thing to come of mainstream nerd-dom.

It's """variety"""

>Do you want your blowback semi auto Stoner rifle to be 300 or .223 sir?

At the end of the day though, we still have the same guns and you don't need to participate in 3 gun and go to ranges so you can ignore a lot of the new culture. I forgot to say that in my original post.

Good thing. There is no argument otherwise

I'm fine with normies as long as they eventually dive deeper into the hobby than 5E, the problem I have is that normies seem to stay at the surface level and don't really develop an understanding of the hobby

Yeah, I'm of this mindset too. Introducing people to D&D is easier now than it ever was, coming from a 16 year vet. At least for my generation we're in that place where we've graduated and got good jobs, but haven't yet got kids so we have lots of time and money and are looking for social things to do.

It's true that I don't want to play with every person who's interested, but as a social hobby (and especially as a DM) you get to choose who you associate with and how you run your games.

I'm really of two minds about Critical Role. I worry that the high production quality of it is misleading for newbies. I've been teaching some new players myself and they didn't realize that those players are literally professional voice actors and hosts. Unsurprisingly the game you have at your friend's kitchen table will be different than the one run by professionals in a studio.

At the same time, I love the exposure and how easy it makes for me to find new players and introduce them to D&D.

Overall, the posters in this thread seem concerned with the notion that game designers will target a "mainstream" audience at the expense of current hobbyists. The thread contains many comparisons to other media. I think it's probably best to consider these in terms of the cost of production in each market, because if the cost of production is low, you can make a profit by targeting a non-mainstream audience. Movies have a high cost of production, as do AAA video games or television shows, so it makes some degree of sense to complain about "casualization" in those cases. Books and music technically have a very low cost of production, but their respective industries are operating on thin margins and are consequently very risk-averse. Roleplaying games seem like the least causalizable case possible: they don't go obsolete, the creators can't control how they're played, they're relatively cheap to make, and the fans are pretty heavily invested in the hobby. So I don't see why you have anything to worry about: you can always make money selling GURPS to GURPS fans.

I think it's good overall.

Looking at how many indie devs are taking off right now, I'd say you're dead wrong. Everyone and their mother is making a game and selling it through kickstarter/Patreon. It's like the SRD days, except people aren't forcing d20 to do properties it was never designed for; now it's a number of different narrative systems (Fate, PbtA, etc) trying to recreate emotional spaces.

Roleplaying games are fun, and I hope more people start to play them.

My initial impression was to disagree with you, as I have seen several games I enjoy decrease in quality as a result of their desire to pander to the large normie audience getting into their game and have left their more die hard fans in a position where they need to ignore the developments made for that purpose, examples that come to mind are Elder Scrolls, which made Skyrim a much more simple RPG than its predecessors. Or MTG, which has increasingly pandered towards its casual audience during the last 5 or so years.

With TTRPG's however, the content is only a template, and, while it might be improved if it were balanced; playing 1000 hours of pathfinder doesn't get old in the same way that playing 1000 hours of morrowind does. You can just let the next player GM with their new story, and you can even invent homebrew rules. Furthermore, because of the ease of publishing a rules system, and the large amount of free rules systems, if one doesn't feel incentivized by money in the first place to make their game, the fact that there is a potential for a more lucrative product by making it more simple for the 'normies' sake, won't in every case change their mind.

All this is to say, I think that often times it is bad when normies get into a hobby and ask the hobby to meet them half way (ie when normies bring the hobby to a lowest common denominator), however, in the case of TTRPG's, while this might still occur in some instances, the effect is greatly mitigated by the fact that the 'content' of an rpg is typically the rules which can be filled with whatever other content a group wants, and it is the latter type of content which a group will often get sick of if they are playing a system they enjoy, not the system it's self.

Bit of a tangent, but got the gist of the changes to MTG by any chance? Fell out of the loop around Zendikar or so.

Old School Gaming

>Played games with only weird dudes as a kid
>Treated like lepers by popular kids
>Parents treated the game as a 'weird phase', averted their eyes and struggled to politely endure any mention of the game
>Couldn't bring it up at family gatherings because a couple of Aunts and Uncles were convinced Dungeons and Dragons made you worship the devil
>"If DnD gave me sweet devil powers do you think I would be this unpopular?"
>9/10 tabletop games were poorly written, barely cohesive things written on graph paper

Now

>Actual girls who have fun with the games and get into it as much as me, married one
>Can talk about it openly, 'the episode where the characters play DnD' is a pretty common tv episode played for laughs but also showing how fun tabletop is, people are mostly curious when they find out I play
>Actual money and writing goes into games, they get playtested, get funded
>Staggering amount of good games today

I'm always amazed when people are all 'Weh, I wish gaming wasn't so mainstream Weh! I wish all movies were still filmed on celophane in black and white!'

It's a variant of the sour grapes problem. Many of the weirder nerds in the hobby are terrified of the thought of being confronted by normies playing because their whole lives they've been (consciously or not) telling themselves that being outsiders was the "price" they paid for getting so good at it. It absolves them of true responsibility for being weirdoes because it postulates that if they'd only, say, picked up basketballs instead, they'd be swimming in pussy like Chad, but they made the "choice" to dedicate themselves to memorizing the entirety Werewolf: the Apocalypse game line instead.

If players suddenly entered the hobby who also had social lives and looked normal, it'd be a constant living proof that it's possible to be in the hobby and be normal, which would mean that the weirdoes could no longer blame it for their misery.

LITERALLY only upsides. If you don't like what is coming out, you can just continue to play systems that you have always played. However with more mainstream exposure, people can now actually sustain financial backing for new stuff.

I feel like I should be screeching about normies or something but I don't really care either way.

A problem everybody ignores is that "mainstream success" isn't translating into sales while more and more people who haven't brought a single item ever continue to take up more and more resources at your LGS.

So the upsides are only really there for podcasts and youtube channels, for everybody else It's time to make redundancies, again, for the 4th year running.

Can we stop with the meme that mainstream society is healthy or normal?

I consider "normal" people to be straight-talking, able to take a joke, forgive mistakes and try to fit in within a social group rather than divide it.

The move to attract new players has instead brought thin-skinned humorless types who see any perceived offence as unforgivable and actively try to disrupt and divide established social groups.

So let's stop normalizing that behaviour.

You would think more people on Veeky Forums would remember what happened to White Wolf when they hit the mainstream.

It's bad initially but once the filthy casuals leave it will end up creating more fans and replenishing the depleted ranks of the last boom in the early 1980s.

When AAA was the only option people lapped that garbage up because it was the only shit out there.

Video games are objectively better now than they ever were, and the only difference is an aging audience that has seen a lot of things, just like when an aging audience calls all movies shit because they start picking apart the things they have seen before. Just like your dad still insists everything in the 80s was better when they were not.

>The move to attract new players has instead brought thin-skinned humorless types who see any perceived offence as unforgivable and actively try to disrupt and divide established social groups.
So, Veeky Forums?

at least they're all white amirite?

Normies are good for you, they can help you become a normie too. You can find a tabletop girlfriend, lifting buffy that plays magic with you friday dungeon crawl nights can turn into pub crawls.

It has pros and cons like literally every other niche, genre, and hobby.

This is a point nobody here hit on before and i'd like to add my 2 Cents:
TTRPGs have such a wide range of money you can spend on it, but all things considered are very good value for the time you spend with them.
You can get started without any monetary investment, be it by using free games or pirating, but even if you buy your games you have an initial investment of maybe 50-100$ to entertain 4+ people many hours a week for a pretty long time.
Even if you where only to play a short campaign and never touched these books again you are at only at dimes per person per hour of entertainment.
(But of course the potential for spending way, way more is there as well: Additional Books, Modules, Miniatures, Dice, etc... You could get started with the change in your pocket but could burn your whole paycheck, too)

Actually I'd say It's the exact opposite, there's almost nothing to spend money on for the average person; who are often fervently against anything that resembles a video game, they exclusively want to play in the mind's eye, no miniatures, tokens, maps, etc

You've got it backwards, roleplaying games are relatively expensive to make compared to video games who often make back their investment on the first day of release, splats often never make their investment back. The only reason why rpg's are commercially viable is because the entire industry consists of

>I have seen several games I enjoy decrease in quality as a result of their desire to pander to the large normie audience

That's the fault of companies revealing that they don't care about their product. Increased popularity has nothing to do with it, only greed.

Fucking, this.

Video games crash and burn extremely frequently, closing entire development teams that get bought out and folded into others. Same with most of the nuts and bolts work of movies.

RPGs don't make money because they have a small audience representing single digit millions of a billion dollar industry. Board games are much more expensive to produce but people are willing to pay a lot of money for a complete boxed thing with plastic crap, and wargames amp that willingness to buy up to 10,000.

Meanwhile the RPG market wants free or close to free, meaning the money is made in licensing to other mediums or through subscription products. It's why D&D beyond exists, roll20 exists, etc.

Everything goes to shit after it becomes mainstream, but p'n'p RPGs are ralativley easy to make on your own(compared to vidya or movies) and you can still enjoy them, even if you are the author.

Funny he used GURPs as a example because SJG are very close to discontinuing the entire product line after the failure of Discworld and Mars Attacks.

>Is it a good or a bad thing that roleplaying games are becoming more mainstream?
They're not.

They've just started drawing in emos, SJWs and other social rejects aside from basement-dwelling neckbeards.

The customer base is growing, but 'normies' still aren't a meaningful part of it.

It depends. Do you like the majority of people who walk this earth? Then you will like that it becomes more mainstream.
Do you despise the majority of people who walk this earth like I do. Then it's bad.

It's just math.

>They've just started drawing in emos, SJWs and other social rejects aside from basement-dwelling neckbeards.

I think World of Darkness already existed.

It's debatable which side is less likely to make its investment back, and that TRPG investment is a couple thousand dollars counting one's own time for a shitty splat up through perhaps a few million dollars for a new edition of a major system, while for vidya the absolute bottom is tens of thousands (remember, your job prospects as a programmer beat the shit out of your job prospects as a writer who isn't doing actual plots) to several hundred million for an FF or GTA.

How many splats bomb out without it stopping the flow is proof of this if anything, even individuals can afford a couple duds.

This.
People don't realize, the 5% bitter Nerds are the good and well adjusted people now.
World has gone insane.

I wish new movies would be more like the once in the 80s, sadly they are not. They are heartless moving pictures made out of poop.

While I share this sentiment for theater-of-the-mind play, on what basis do you assert that it's the most common?

That's always more people to play with.
Just boot the bad players and keep the best

I don't know, theres quite a few ways to spend your money, even w/o miniatures.
A second rule book is in my opinion almost a must-have, and in my experience theres always somebody who likes the game enough to buy a few splat books or other supplements.
And of course new systems are always a draw, too

A lot of the same problems are still around like OP and/or useless mythics, and too many planeswalkers. Development is being shitier than normal, Kaladesh had an extremely obvious combo slip through the cracks and warp the format, and they recently announced a day 1 errata for a card because it could go infinite by itself.

Lore is the same as it was in Zendikar, the main problem is still that most of their writers are crap.

Design is trying to be more "inclusive" which is honestly not as big a problem as Veeky Forums makes it out to be. Also designing sets 2 years in advance has come back to bite them in the ass as they are only just now changing course after it became clear people didn't like the Gatewatch being shoved into every set.

On the bright side there's a new Un set announced and we're going back to Dominara this year.

It isn't bad thing per se, but the bad thing is that it's through D&D mainly, and while becoming more widespread, it still mostly panders to certain social groups that are repulsive to other people, thus limiting potential growth towards new teritorries.

I wish some day RPGs will stop being associated with loosers dungeoncrawling with minis on grid map, and will become games of story and imagination for everyone, but it isn't going to happen.

>I wish some day RPGs will stop being associated with loosers dungeoncrawling with minis on grid map, and will become games of story and imagination for everyone, but it isn't going to happen.
Are you posting this from from 2010?

Look at what happens to series.

GoT season 1 was good, in season 2 they tried to appeal to a broader audience and it was a big drop in quality yet it was still decent. Season 3 to now (I assume, because I dropped that shit mid S3) became a plebfest of epic proportions, something in the big bang theory tier or the walking dead level of plebness.

This is what happens when something starts to become successful, companies try to broaden the market and by doing so they start pandering to the biggest casuals, AKA normies.

It's not popularity that ruins things it's over commercialisation. Thanks, capitalism

The LEGO Movie was great.