The Endangered Species.

When I started RPing, I was brought in by a friend in my first year of college. We played a Pathfinder campaign that, sadly, ended early because the rest of the group just stopped playing (the beginning of the curse?) in favor of other Friday night activities (poker night, actually). Before this, I had only heard of D&D and the concept of D20 systems, but after my first roll, I knew I was hooked. I had heard it was a stereotypical thing to do, playing D&D with a bunch of other nerds in college, so when I learned how fascinating and intriguing and just plain fun the game was, I was sure that it was wide spread. Unfortunately, it would appear my estimation was off by about 20 years.

Before recently, I did not know how bad a stigma the game carried. I did not know how few players there were, and how difficult those who did could be to track down. I did not know about 4e, or how unpopular the better systems had become. I did not know that the game was dying.

RPing is slowly dying. There are less and less players and fewer and fewer people have ever even heard of table top role plying. Groups are difficult to put together and the common populaces short attention span make it hard to teach. Couple that with the fact that most people would rather pick up a controller than dice, and you have yourself an endangered species of hobbies.

Gamers are going down a bad way nowadays. Yes, video games are amazing, I love being able to push a disk into a box and save the world in a weekend. I love that you don't have to try and visualize every detail in your head, or that you cant become inundated with choices, as the programming pretty much RPs for you. However, every advantage to a video game is a double edged sword when one is discussing TTRPG.

For instance; take graphics. When you are playing a video game, you can become awe-struck at how beautiful or epic depictions of creatures and landscapes can be. You can be totally and utterly drawn in by a level of detail that is usually only reserved for "Dude, you had to have been there." They are great. They are wonderful. They are killing our imaginative eyes.

It is now so easy to see something on a screen, that I believe we are slowly losing the ability to come up with "original content". Even video game designers seem to be cannibalizing the same graphic elements from other/previous games over and over. Even for GMs, rather than utilizing a heightened sense of vocabulary, frequently degrade to the phrase, "Have you ever seen [insert scene from movie/game]? Yeah, it's kind of like that, only squishier."

As a DM, I am subject to this as well. I've used slightly twisted versions of other things I've seen to simply make things easier, but every time I do I feel as though I am somehow robbing some of the purity of the visual. No one can read minds and see exactly what the GM is describing, but that's what adds a little fun to the visuals: trying to get it right. Gaming (at least RPing) shouldn't be so much about accuracy or efficiency, as a good game has just enough concreteness as to keep characters from floating about like a picture on a bad website. Gaming is about creativity and using the powers of imagination to make things come alive. Plagiarism is a bit below you.

Another battle between the telly-box games and primitive, surface based games is one that is difficult to overcome in the modern nerd: social interaction. That's right, guys and gals, you actually need friends to play TTRPGs. Now, please forgive me, but the remainder of this section will sound like an old man talking your ear off at 1am in a crappy diner where your just trying to have a coffee and work off that pie craving. Kids these days don't play together. And yes, I am including a good percentage of my own generation when I say "kids". Gamers went from a group of people who were inept at socializing with anyone but other gamer nerds (80s. Yes, that makes me shiver a bit) to a group of people that consider social interaction only worthwhile while trying to kill each other from across the Internet. This ultimately makes gamers scattered by nature, with one's "gamer friends" actually coming from across the yawning chasm of the world rather than from ye olde hobby shoppe. It's mostly, I believe, because they are learning young to play better by themselves than with others (but that is a rant for another time and possibly a completely different blog...)

There you go, the dying gasps of the original "gaming" all summed up into one convenient package so that you don't have to look around to point fingers anymore. So please, if you know anything about RPing, whether you are new to the experience or if you "played back in college a lot", get out there and play. Your DM will thank you.