Is Dungeons & Dragons dying? Sales for 4E and all RPG are down. Retailers are worried. Distrubutors are worried. Even manufacturers are worried. Video games are attacking RPGs on every front and even more people are worried. With all this worrying going around, I have to wonder, what would it take to "kill" Dungeons & Dragons? Or better yet, is Dungeons & Dragons "killable" and if it is what would replace it? What would it take for Dungeons & Dragons to "survive and thrive"?
These are the same questions that the comic book industry is battling with every day also with their content being given away for free to torrents websites. The Webcomics.com guys have seen the future and are adapting well to it. A few RPG companies have seen this future and are doing things to adapt also. Have you seen your future in RPGs and what are you doing to save it? Talk to you later...
There are bloods out there using xeroxed copies of the original brown booklets and ragged copies of The Complete Warlock to create homebrews. Editions come and go, the game is forever...
ReplyDeleteD&D as a big, corporate enterprise might be killable. But the brand name itself will always have power. For many people not involved in the hobby, "Dungeons & Dragons" is what you call role-playing games, the same way people often call all tissues "Kleenex". That means that even if WOTC/Hasbro decide to stop publishing the game, they can still sell the name to someone else. I think the rise of Pathfinder and the Old School Renaissance show that D&D can survive as a niche product from a small publisher, even if it cannot survive as a corporate property.
ReplyDeleteFor me, WotC already stopped publishing D&D. Others have taken up the banner however. So long as a game has fans, it will continue. I own hundreds of gaming books and boxed sets. Most are 'dead' games. But I can play them forever.
ReplyDeleteExample: http://talislanta.com/ has released a ton of stuff as free PDFs. Play Talislanta forever.