Before you get all pissed off and start ripping me a new asshole, let me say this:
I’m a Dungeons and Dragons geek, and I’m damned proud of it. I love my D&D peeps, and wouldn’t trade them for all the gold in World of Warcraft.
Having said that, I’ve noticed some things. See, I run a mildly popular writing blog, and I’ve had the chance to meet all sorts of folks in the blogosphere by way of that blog. And do you know what I’ve discovered? We D&D geeks are way behind on this Internet thing. The sad facts are:
Dungeons and Dragons is an underrepresented niche in the blogosphere.
Our Rockstar bloggers like Yax at Dungeonmastering.com boast 1200 or so RSS subscribers. That’s no small number, to be sure. But in the freelance writing area? The big blogs start at around 20,000 subscribers. Tech knowledge or no tech knowledge, that’s a pretty startling difference. If Dungeons and Dragons geeks are online, they’re not hanging out at D&D blogs.
But that’s not the only problem for Dungeons and Dragons Blogs.
Dungeons and Dragons players prefer interactivity to information gathering.
Forums do amazingly well in Dungeons and Dragons world of the Internet. While forums have, in many cases, become passé’ in other niches, our forums are going gangbusters. The EnWorld forums and the WotC forums together constitute more readers than any two freelance writing forums that I’m aware of.
Now, blogs are interactive, to be sure. But Dungeons and Dragons players don’t seem, as of yet, to really have grasped just how much more effective blogs are than forums. Blogs are intimate communities of, generally, about 30-50 active participants. Forums, in many cases, have thousands. Blogs focus on a single topic at a time, and carry that conversation from one blog to the next. Forums tend to keep everything in one neat little isolated forum thread, so if you skip one thread you miss volumes.
That’s not all of it, though.
Dungeons and Dragons players prefer pen-and-paper to computers.
This isn’t a hard and fast rule. One of my best friends is a huge Everquest guy, in addition to playing Dungeons and Dragons. But the nature of the game has been such that you don’t need a lot of technical knowledge to play.
This is, in some ways, why 4E is needed so badly. Specifically, the digital initiative is needed badly. If the hobby is going to continue to grow, it has to appeal to a generation of kids that have grown up with computers in the house. No, Dungeons and Dragons doesn’t have to be WOW-ified, but it does have to utilize some technology. This is why I’m so geeked about the DM Tools and the virtual tabletop: if they work as promised, they’ll bring Dungeons and Dragons into the 21st century. Truth be told, we should have been here a decade ago.
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So, what do you think? Are we stuck in a bygone era? If so, does it mean our game will soon become a thing of the past, replaced en toto by MMORPGs?
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I disagree on the digital initiative. Does Monopoly need it’s counterpart on the computer to survive? No. I don’t think the medium is a real barrier. It’s the ease of rules, and it sounds like 4E is taking steps toward that direction.
Truth be told the one thing that modern D&D players haven’t realized yet is that we don’t need WoTC or any other game company out there.
The interenet is a big vast sea full of incredible people and amazing minds. Write the stories, tell the tales, the rest is just dice and paper. I’m more than positive that the collective minds could come up with so much more than what 3.5 was or Pathfinder / 4.0 will be.
Just a humble opinion.
Apis
@ Kam – you make a good point, I think. Still, Monopoly never really had a good electronic competitor, and it had 60+ years to become a cultural before the Information Revolution.
@ Apis – Extremely astute observation, bro. Honestly, I think that’s the one part that D&D has done well with, at least from 3E forward. The OGL (based on open souce computing, ironically enough) opened D&D to the marketplace, and the cream rose to the top.
The DMs last blog post..Why Dungeons and Dragons Geeks are Behind the Times
Oh…you are so right. I used to keep up a blog/journal for our campaign. Our players would post on our forum about my blog posts but didn’t understand the whole commenting thing.
I am often frustrated by the idea that WOTC is the end all be all of gaming. Having been to various gamedays and GenCon, I am learning to spread my wings and play True 20, Mutants and Masterminds, Dread, and other awesome systems.
Yes, I am an infrequent ENWorlder…mostly because a few of my friends are judges for the Ennies and because Morrus is a super cool dude. I have asked some of my friends why they don’t get into blogs and they can’t really explain it. My husband understands the web and technology but refuses to jump on the blog bandwagon. It’s frustrating…
While gaming is a personal thing, social, interactive and in most cases something you do with people you like, the internet is not. I think the forums are more popular than blogs because the gamers want to jump from topic to topic on a whim and are not as interested in the musings of a single person.
Also, who wants to travel to many blogs to find that character build, plot hook or discussion on the latest product that you remember from two weeks ago when you can go to the forum that everyone uses and search for it?
We gripe about all the feats or spells or classes being spread out over so many books, we tend to like our info centralized and searchable. (Or at least come with an index)
I am looking forward to the online tools mentioned. I hope they become something better than the Etools abomination from years gone by. I am not sure about the online gaming aspect but the tools for characters, monsters and campaign tracking are what I am hoping turn out well.
I think the roleplaying blogs are a bit rare because roleplayers are a bit rare.
Tommis last blog post..A small idea: Scope of effect
You are coming from some place completely outside my frame of reference. My game peeps are highly computer literate. We’ve run an online games using a private Yahoo group while we were in multiple states and one foreign country. (We totally blew Domino’s mind when we used our cell phone to call in a pizza order for a player in another state because they didn’t have a cell phone yet and didn’t want to get off their dial-up access to call. It was sometime in the mid-90s.)
I have to agree with Tommi’s assessment that roleplayers are a bit rare.
Sue Londons last blog post..Oh, How I Have Suffered…
I agree with Tommi. It is hard to compare the number of roleplayers to the number of people interested in freelance writing, technology, whatever…
Also, I don’t think internet is definitely needed to get D&D to 21st century. Why change something that, imo, works great?
I guess forums always have more readers than blogs.
Maikls last blog post..Fight Club – A duel and a slaughter
@ Sandie – I don’t have a problem with one company having a strong foothold on the market – that just means they’ve got a product that more folks want to buy. That loosely corresponds to quality.
@Nevyn – I don’t know. I tend to get tired of message boards. They are so much less personal, for the most part. And people can be real dicks. Not saying every board is that way, but it happens. In other games, like Magic: The Gathering, article-based websites that are the thoughts of a single or a few authors tend to come to the fore, rather than boards or blogs.
@ Tommi – I get what you’re saying, but here’s the thing: some estimates put upwards of a million D&D players on the planet. It’s a big enough niche to support all of those boards, yes?
@ Sue – That’s cool. My group is pretty computer literate, but they don’t bring that literacy to the gaming table.
@ Maikl – See my reply to Tommy. If it were a mere numbers game, then it would stand to reason that freelance writing message boards would be busy in the same way that RPG boards are – but they aren’t. I know of one blogger, for example, with 26,000+ blog subscribers – and 800 forum members. For whatever reason, and maybe it’s what Nevyn says above, RPGers don’t like blogs the way they like boards.
Thanks for your thoughts, all! Keep ‘em coming!
The DMs last blog post..Dungeons and Dragons Sunday Link Smashup for May 17, 2008
Forums are, simply, better at answering questions, especially specific questions to the effect of “Is this thing balanced?”, “My game is in this situation, should I do this or that?”.
Blogs are good at generating permanent material. It is easy to get people reacting to your forum posts, but untrivial to have the same happen to blog posts.
Forums are also better at play-by-post. Generic chatter about new games, which is a large portion of rpg.net, happens when someone reads about an unfamiliar game and asks questions about it. And forums are better for that.
I’d say that a lot of what roleplayers discuss simply works better in forums.
That said, there is a lot of material on forums that would be better served by blogs as a platform. For example, homebrewed whatever, including D&D monsters, don’t lose their value as quickly as they are forgotten in forums.
Tommis last blog post..A small idea: Scope of effect
The WoTC forums are all about selling their product. That is achieved by attracting the maximum number of people and offering what is most marketable at the moment.
So the “fad” of the moment is WoW than guess what their next major release going to look like?
The problem is that RPG in the beginning was not about following a trend, it was about innovating and starting a trend in itself.
That is what we need today, more innovation, more people with great ideas that are so sure of them that they are not afraid to take them to the next level.
Coles last blog post..Meeting the slaver
I would say that there are two distinct powers at work here – first of all, blogging and social medias have a stronger grasp on the female part of society. Looking at the number of bloggers, there are simply more female bloggers than male. When it comes to roleplaying, there are few female roleplayers, which means fewer people blog.
Second of all, roleplaying is a communal event, something a number of people do, together. This means that no single individual feels they have a true grasp on it for writing articles (which blog posts are), but a lot of people tend to ask questions at forums because of this insecurity. This is also the reason that more DM-oriented blogs do better – DMs are the singular people with the “best” grasp/control of the game and are thus more confident in writing articles.
Atleast that is how I view it.
Andreas Rönnqvists last blog post..Untapped Potential Again Available In Print
I’d have to agree with Tommi. Forums are better for what most DND gamers need. This doesn’t make them “behind the times” this makes them “different”. There is nothing wrong with that. We have different needs than most blogs provide. Forums handle those needs better. Neither is really perfect, but forums are much closer.
As for “DND prefer pen and paper”, how does that make us “behind”. DND is a social game far more than several other gaming types. It’s not really the “pen and paper” we prefer, it’s the social interaction. I’ve played DND over maptool (www.maptool.net) the game was just as good as the “pen and paper”, but the social interaction was weakened.
Also Andreas has a point. We have some females in our gaming group. (Yes I said SOME, not just one.) However, even they are more comfortable with message boards than forums. While several of the females I know who don’t game are much the opposite in their preference of web media.
I can only speak for myself, but I like it that D&D is not digital.
I do like computer games, I do like WoW, but the great thing about D&D is that it’s NOT a computer game.
I like it that I physically have to go somewhere, make real time for it, meet with physical people, roll physical dice and move around physical figurines.
Of course you could have online D&D sessions using a chat program, using online dice and only character sheets. And I am not saying that would be bad. It could be fun. It would have certain advantages, like you could play with persons who live far away without having to travel.
But it would not be the same as sitting around a physical table and looking each other into the eyes as you roll the dice.
That is something I would not want to change.