Beyond the Default Failure Mode

(Adapted from my post at ENWorld)

The main Nice Things post inspired threads, anger and a blog carnival about growing the hobby — and more threads and posts and such.

There’s a certain routine you need to sigh through in these discussions. Before you get anywhere useful you need to:

1. Take the idea of a hobby in decline to its most exaggerated, strawmanish extent so that we can claim that it will never die, even though there is a set of outcomes greater than 0 gamers and 0 games that is still awful.
2. Something-something THERE’S NO INDUSTRY HOBBIE SUMPREM!!!111!!
3. Make promotional statements for some clique in the hobby under a thin pretense of addressing the issue.

Let’s get past this. First, tabletop RPGs as we know them will never go completely extinct, but may reach a minimum, long-tail level that makes it extremely difficult for hobbyists to find each other or maintain a creative culture.

Second, the tabletop RPG hobby is permeated with commercialism and consumerist values at all levels. Hobbyists have internalized the language and values of social marketing to a stronger degree than many other communities. This is *because* the merchants are small scale. Elements like IP licensing, which were previously ignored in favour of fair use, can be seen in the smallest fan endeavours.

Third, if any particular clique was capable of reversing trends in the hobby it would have happened by now. The “indie” community has had a decade to establish a breakout hit, and has largely found its successes in games that emulate much of the commercial and play systems of “mainstream” games. The part of the OSR that cares (not caring is a valid choice, mind) is selling a solution that would have worked even earlier, since that style of D&D is decades old.

To sum up: We are not an immortal grassroots counterculture already possessed of the will to reignite our hobby, but bereft of the sense to pay attention to some brilliant scheme that’s already been devised by your favourite gamer.

We are a branch of a greater roleplaying hobby that extends into computer games and self-started online social networks, that can use tools and lessons from them to experiment, and hovers above an important threshold, below which many enthusiasts may lose what they value. We have complex relationships with an industry so that it’s difficult to say where the noncommercial ends and the commercial begins.

We should stop seeking comfort in familiar patter and before we dismiss new ideas out of hand, we should seriously examine how they might support or threaten the things we love about tabletop RPGs. But I think the biggest threat comes from ourselves. Beyond particular behaviours, I’ve noticed one awful thing: The default assumption about RPG play is that without expert advice, a special theory or even a particular product, it’s a failure mode. To put it more simply: Lots of people now talk like the basic way of playing RPGs is badly, and not amatuer theatre bad (which is fun), but find out your sitting next to a Nazi on the bus bad (which isn’t!).

We should start assuming that gaming leads to good times. People like that. We should start thinking of setbacks with more cheerfulness, and of play as something robust enough to survive differences of opinions or various social and technical blunders.

People like good times, even when it comes from screwing up.