I have been having discussions on a number of different forums and a number of different emails. I have talked to my friends, like Critus, and I have done a bit of research myself. Let's just get this out of the way. Things look good, and they look bad. More people are roleplaying than ever before. Unfortunately they are playing World of Warcraft and other CRPGs. By the way, CRPG means Computer Role Playing Game, like World of Warcraft, D&D Online, etcetera. That means a lot of people are getting exposed to the idea of roleplaying and it could possibly drag people in to the table-top hobby, but it probably won't. The utility of CRPGs is too great.

The market looks like this. We have a lot of people, and I think it is possibly a majority of the sales in the paper game industry are from "tourists". The tourist wants to visit, and they love to buy and read games; but they don't play. They can't play in a normal game because of work, family, and timing issues. This is important, they want to play and can not. We also have a lot of people who were raised on Ultima and that kind of thing, and to them this is the pinnacle of game development. I have also found a disturbing number of these players look down on paper roleplayers; much like Trekkie fanfic writers look down on Furries.

Roleplaying on the computer is not roleplaying on the table, and with the exception of something like running a game on iChat I don't see them being similar any time soon. Of course I have been gloriously wrong before, but let's all humor the old man and act like I know what I am talking about. I think that CRPGs are inferior to the table-top experience in many ways.

So why are they so damned popular?

The utility of CRPGs is frankly orders of magnitude higher for a hell of a lot broader demographic than we have ever seen roleplaying before. They can play any time, and they can play with the same people or different people. They can play together and alone. They can tweak, min/max, and gearhead their way through the game gloriously. Something like 90% of roleplayers never touch anything except D&D and many of those are only interested in dungeon-crawling. So for them, CRPGs are exactly like their old D&D game in college, without the stale chips or the B.O. Do you remember as a kid how you dreamed that some day there would be a place to go and game any time you wanted to. You know, that sort of kid fantasy about being an adult that has nothing to do with being an adult. Guess what, there it is; right in front of you.

The barrier to entry is a bitch. Go out and buy a butch computer, go buy the software, and then pay a monthly fee. A decent gaming computer system can easily run $3,000. These games commonly charge about $50 up front, and then they have maintenance fees that can run up to $20 a month. Spread over about three years that is a monthly cost of $110. I know you can do other things with your PC, and I also know that you can blow weeks off your work year just by checking Livejournal a few times a day. Neither is germane because while you can do other things with a butch computer, you cannot, in any way, shape, or form, play these games with less of a machine. Unless of course, you happen to enjoy playing the slow retarded brother of the Strong-jawed Hero; most people do not, but you can run Microsoft Office on a three year-old machine with no video card, and it works. If you asked anyone to spend that kind of money to play D&D, they would probably stop. Some people do not send that much money in gas every month, though that number is getting smaller.

So CRPGs are much more expensive, but they are much more convenient for busy adults, and they offer almost analogous play to the majority of current and former roleplayers. Does that mean that table-top RPGs are going the way of the Dodo?

No, no; but it does mean that we are going to be living in a very new world. Soon there will be less than ten companies publishing as we know it today. There will be a large boutique publishing industry working solely in PDFs: companies like Atomic Sock Monkey, Adamant Entertainment, and possibly Aethereal Forge, but we probably will not see them coming. Aethereal Forge has just published Ninja Burger: The RPG, Second Edition. Not only is this game entertaining and well written, it is almost half as funny as the Ninja Burger Honorable Employee Handbook, and in this reviewer's opinion that is no mean feat. Ninja Burger and the PDQ system both exemplify the innovation that is coming on to the hobby from the ground up. PDQ works well for the game and hats off to Aeon for being strong enough to see that using these mechanics makes his game better. Full disclosure: Aeon, that is Mike Fiegel, was the Columns editor at RPGnet for several years. Until a few months ago, he was our editor. We both also worked on Cyberpunk (at different times) and Godsend Agenda; though his role was much greater in Godsend Agenda. Games like this will thrive in the new marketplace because they fill a niche too small for traditional publishing, and too large for the so-called "vanity press".

At least there will be a boutique publishing industry unless there is another major change in the industry. It is too soon to judge the final analysis, or the final players. It is sure that Green Ronin will be there, and Wizards of the Coast; apart from that the current "major players" are probably history. One of the current PDF-only companies will maybe even struggle up the food chain, but that is a long shot. In the interim few years, we need to make our games the best we have ever had.

Lest you think that this column was recently blowing smoke about Fourth Edition D&D; I have it on excellent authority that no one at Green Ronin, or any of the other major players in the DDL world have been notified of a new OGL, because there will not be one. If Wizards wanted any support from their D&D licensure, except for probably Monte Cook, is over. The current management at Wizards is shooting heroin between bong hits, because the OGL has been hugely positive for them. They just refuse to see it. They will watch a lot of their fans, the ones with the huge investments in the game, just go away and play True20, Spycraft, and Mutants & Masterminds.