Here's a lesson to those developing the Next Big RPG thinking kids will buy it. Kids don't need RPG books or dice. They covet shiny console and handheld games (a habit I share), have some play with computer games (another struggling breed), and become addicted to leveling up in MMOs. But for roleplaying, the tabletop RPG habit just isn't their poison.

The only children I know who roleplay are the children of roleplayers. RPG books sell mostly to existing RPGers, a greying lot of 25+ers. Drawing in 12-year olds to create lifetime customers is just not happening. Despite all the decrying of D&D 4th Edition being 'not an RPG' and just being an MMO with miniatures and a table, that direction has a stronger draw to 10-12 year olds than a stack of books.

For those kids into roleplaying, it's online and book-free. My niece in middle school hangs out on roleplaying servers. Basically chatrooms, sometimes with MUD elements, where they have in-character names, roles, guilds and clans, hierarchies, politics. She spends hours on them, fantastically creative and literate-- but online, not tabletop, and rule-free. One is Harry Potter themed, one is LotR, and the third is generic fantasy.

It's what she and her middle school friends do, a mix of girls and boys (maybe 60/40, 70/30?). It's entirely dice-free. She does it so much her mom took away the computer in her room. It's like interactive fanfic.

The difficulties in reaching this potential audience for tabletop RPGing are learning curve, game type, and most important-- availability.

These online roleplays are purely social, so the learning curve is 'figure out the social network of your friends', something she and her friends already have down. There's no rules encumbering the interaction, only social constructs.

Yeah, that makes it hell for people like me that like rules, but this is what they want to do, not what I want to do.

As a bonus, they can romp around in their favorite IP. Since the IP isn't required, I'm trying to aim her to online games like those at Skotos, etc. But doing conventional tabletop just doesn't fit into her social schedule.

For availability, online lets them game with each other while stuck at home. Kids don't hang out at each other's houses nearly as much as 'in the day'. Today, young children don't wander over to visit each other much. Instead, they have scheduled 1-on-1 play-dates. The kids still have free time and sit around at home, bored, as kids throughout the centuries have done.

The act of physically getting together often requires ridiculous logistics. Add in overscheduling of activities and coordination of 2 pairs of working parents plus sibling sport schedules and other distractions means there simply aren't the huge hunks of free time when a bunch of kids can game. And if they are home, they'll play console games. Meeting online is on-call and latency-free.

Meanwhile, my nephew likes Runescape and board games. He's the prime demographic in that household to get into tabletop. Both kids have the same amount of free time, I don't think it's a gender issue so much as a spectrum of social integration versus play alone. But with him, there's no one to walk him through the first RPG session, so there's little incentive to pick up a tabletop RPG-- particularly given the electronic alternatives that are readily open for him and his peers.

I think the underlying point is tabletop RPGs have to transform to something different to sell to kids today. Specifically, they need to have easy access, quick immersion, and inherent network building. D&D added an explicit social interaction to wargaming to create a new market. Someone needs to add an explicit networking interaction to tabletop RPGing to create the next new market. That's what M:TG did, but not for RPGing. So there's still room for someone to play on this.

Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net