The most recent issue of Comics & Games Retailer, the sole trade magazine for the industry, arrived in the mail yesterday.
This is the “State of the Gaming Industry” issue — and I figured I’d post some summary and comment here, since if I do it at any of the usual gaming fora, I’ll be shouted down by wishful-thinking uninformed gamers, who seem to feel that any statement of how bad the industry is doing is somehow an attack on their very identity, and hence argue the contrary with all of the reasoned and logical thought that you’d expect from a Relgious Fundamentalist.
C&GR is flawed, to be sure, since it relies primarily on estimates based on a self-selecting sample, but, as I’ve said before, it’s the best thing we’ve got, and I’ve seen no major indications in my 10 years of reading it that it has ever been too far off the mark.
So, how’s the industry doing?
Let me answer that by giving you the titles of the main analysis article in the issue:
“2006: Extinction-level Event.”
Articles on various facets of the industry (distribution, freelancing, retail) are sub-titled: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger,” “A hard year, but we’re still here,” “Freelancing in interesting times,” and “A glass half empty is still a glass half full.”
Are you getting the picture here?
Here are some sobering quotes from the main analysis, by James Mishler:
- “In 2004, the adventure-game industry lost 25% of its core game stores to closures, mergers or diversification. Over 2005, our estimates put the loss at an additional 20% from the number we stood at in January 2005. From 2000 core stores in January 2004 to 1200 core stores in December 2005 represents an overall loss of at least 40% — two out of every five stores that were with us two years ago are gone today. In addition to stores lost, the last year has seen dozens of role-playing game publishers close up shop, perhaps 25% of all game companies all told — albeit mostly d20 System publishers — even though that “shop” was often nothing more than a section of the garage at home. And we lost one major distributor, as well as at least one fulfillment house.”
- “Trading card games had a down year –down by about 11% — but not severely.”
- “Collectable miniatures game sales were down only 4% in 2005 [….] Traditional miniatures sales declined, especially Games Workshop sales, which were reportedly down as much as 20% in 2005.”
- “Role-playing games were the hardest hit in 2005, with sales dropping around 45% Yes, you read that right, that’s forty-five percent.”
- “the d20 glut is behind us, but so are the sales that came with that originally, and so are the wide variety of products that simply no longer exist to sell, were there anyone to even buy them. While some game lines hae developed to fill the void left by d20, not nearly enough new games have been released to fill that broad and deep loss. Third, of those games that are coming out, a lot of retailers, burned by having too much, decided that a very tight inventory was a better policy — and of course, you can’t sell what you don’t have. Finally, of those publishers that remain, many have reported astounding, record-breaking sales on their direct-to-consumer websites.”
- “Essentially, there are fewer role-playing games, retailers are not stocking them, and consumers are going to web to find them — in print or in PDF. These sales, my friends, are yours to lose. That’s what’s been happening in the last year.”
Those last two items are of particular interest to me and my company, Adamant Entertainment, because it confirms my experience over the past year — the print side of the industry is in a fucking tailspin, but there are consumers out there, and given that it is now possible to reach them directly, we’re seeing our sales go higher and higher every month, as more and more gamers realize that their local store (if they even have one any more) isn’t carrying what they want, and so they look online for it.
In my seminar at the GAMA Trade Show, I mentioned the October 2004 issue of WIRED, which talked about “The Long Tail.” To put it simply, it talks about the fact that for every niche interest, no matter how obscure, there are always folks out there interested in it, who represent a consumer base. Taken in a traditional distribution model, these people are far too little to make marketing to them worth the effort — however, with the internet and direct-to-consumer delivery, these people can be aggregated into a collective who are able to sustain a business. The term “The Long Tail” comes from a graph of interests, where the mainstream interests (top selling records, blockbuster films, etc) are a large chunk, and the niche interests (indie music, documentaries, etc), trail off in a long tail from that chunk:
The interesting thing is, that tail never reaches zero. There is always someone out there.
That’s the model that Adamant is operating on. Direct-to-consumer is going to be the future of most entertainment media, and I think that gaming is no exception. Those of us who have already made that leap are enjoying success….while folks stuck in the old model are suffering through year after year of declines which continue to cripple the industry.
I’d say it’s an even mixture of our two schools of thought. Yes, doctors are eager to call anything outside the accepted norm a sickness that needs to be heavily medicated. Children that can not or will not learn the required material for passing are passed to the next grade anyway, because the school is afraid of the parents.
But the kids are also willingly addicted to things that stifle their creativity. For most kids, if you took away their computer and their X-Box or other gaming system, they’d be totally lost. They just don’t have the imagination to entertain themselves without these items.
MMOGChart.com shows that, in its heyday, Everquest had slightly more than 500,000 users. Of course, it doesn’t have recent data showing how many subscribers WoW has, but it does show Blizzard’s MMO hitting 2 Million in July of last year, and still growing.
http://www.mmogchart.com/
state of gaming industry
One of the major causes of the downturn is prices.
I buy White Wolf product. From their old world of darkness product priced at $20-25USD printed in the USA/CAN, now they’ve jacked them up to $30-35USA and printed in china. their cost has dropped but they increased prices.
most players are on very limited income and cannot afford their prices.
hell, the cost of the PDF version of white wolf product on their site is still overpriced considering that you are buying product that you will have to print out yourself. When I ran the old WOD stuff, I could afford having all the books to round out my game, now i cannot afford it.
part of the blame is on the gaming companies, and the rest are on the other things out there that take up our time (mmog’s,game systems,work)
i agree. GW had a great product which was once well marketed. they have quickly turned their producted into something that is designed for kids and tried to take on WoTC head on. re-releasing new rules sets every other year for your games is not a good way to keep current players happy!!!
Re: Where are the FARKING Girls???
I run a 3.5 game on sundays, and have been gaming for over 20 years.
I have seen many women who roleplay, and roleplay in the TSR/d20 system. I have also seen plenty of non-white players. Your personal experience may be narrow, but that is not a representation of the entire game.
The game itself does favor combat, but games can easily be run to incorporate more intrigue and (dare I say it) role-playing. Those are the things that women tend to dig. A gaming system, when it comes down to it, is a set of rules that govern how things work in a universe. Those rules should never, and usually do not, interfere with the role playing aspect of the game. They are there to keep the game flowing and reasonable. If the over-ego’d warrior wants to charge into an oncoming army of orcs, there are mechanics there to let them know they are not going to survive (in short limit the ‘bunny’ factor from free form roleplaying)
I guess what I’m getting at is this:
It’s not the size of the system, but how you use it.
I’d have too agree with that. GW has been pushing new releases and their prices are on a costant increase. Not to mention the demands they put on stores that sell their product or try to host sanctioned tournements.
As far as RPGs, the money glut had to end. Instead of new content it was just the same rehashed crap repackaged into more things to buy. This is also helping video game RPFs pull away palyers.
I can spend almost $200 trying to pick up a full set od some new RPG, which is really just an old one repacked, or I can spend $50 for a new RPG video game and instantly have a world of people to game with.
Their books also used to contain more. I bought the new core book for a freind, took it home and read it in an hour, then took it back and got the reprinted Paranioa instead.
But if Blizz keeps it up with the horrible service of the last 5 months it may drive a lot of people away from WoW or evn away from MMoRPGs. Especially if it was their first encounter with the system.
GW will screw up their Dawn of War series, look at all the other completely horrible titles theive released over the years. They may also realize that DoW is stealing some of their miniature sales. Why pay $50 for 5 models when I can do whatever I want with a game?
Blizzard has reporting having more than 5 million subscribers.
I certainly admit to being part of the problem. There have definitely been weekends when I decided to play WoW rather than go to the FLGS. While my purchasing has slowed, I think that is due more to my limited interest in recent releases more than a distraction. And, umm . . . yes, obviously, WoW has distracted me from freelancing.
The distribution model for RPGs has been broken for years, and publishers have everything to gain and very little to lose by going for direct and pdf sales. The loss of stores is very troubling, both for the loss of sales and for the loss of opportunities to recruit new gamers.
Still, with the d20 glut behind us and some interesting non-d20 games arriving, the glass is half-full.
It is sad to see retail shops go. There are a couple of nice things they provide.
The first is the ability to browse product. That is not something you can do online as easily, and I think it is the biggest reason the big bookstore chains have surived the rise of Amazon.
The second is tables where you can meet up with people you might not want to have over your house, or have room to host (in my case, my parent’s basement is too small to get s decently-sized group over). This is especially important to the tabletop miniatures scene. Also, being able to drop your 8-12 year old off for trading card games is nice.
I guess I just mean to say if these types of services are going to be unsustainable in the future, it makes me sad.
When I was a kid, my friends and I would all go over to one guy’s house on a Saturday afternoon and play some RPG until 3am. And sometimes continue the next morning. We would do several times a month. I’m still close with some of those same guys. Four out of six of us are married and two have kids. One lives in New York, two in New Jersey, one in Florida, one San Jose and one in Chicago. Obviously we can’t get together to play anymore, so we started doing it online. Would I rather game in person, with pencil and paper?
Yes.
But it’s not an option. So we don’t do it much. Hell, I’ve bought maybe 2 RPG books since the nineties. The people I do game with now all have jobs, and girlfriends and other hobbies, so even they can’t play every week. So a lot of them have turned to MMORPGs, too.
And the new generation of gameers, they get the option of starting out with MMORPGs. It’s possible that pen and paper RPGs have had their heyday, and will never again be as big as they were. Sad, but possible.
As the manager of a gaming store for over a year I feel barely qualified to say this but Ill go for it anyway: Online sales are a good thing but they are just an out for people who are basically hurting the industry with what they do. Or rather what they dont do which is go out and buy things from their local stores. Gaming, especially in California, is notoriously fickle and saturated. I literally have four game stores in a 5 mile radius from my house. Probably a dozen within reasonable (<40 miles) driving distance. I talk to owners and people who live in the store as much as they can and even casual customers and passersby. The common denominator is people are lazy and impatient as a whole. Every store I've been to will special order whatever they can for their customers. Sure you will wait two to five days but you will get it and not pay shipping. But people just wont wait. They will order it online. To save some money while killing the store where they could meet like-minded people in the community. I suppose the point of this is, people who are into gaming, need to make the effort to establish a good relationship with their local retailers. If they dont like that store, find another, or tell the owner. All owners, for the most part, want to make money. They will listen to enough people to change things for the better. It take money and time to make things work. Dedication really helps too. So go out and support the store, it will help the industry as a whole and might do you some good as well.
It ended when the module of ” Conan ” to tie in with the movie hit the shelves. The market is eBay and the ‘ collectability / nostalgia ‘ of everything from the 70s for anyone who was there for anything that’s left over. If you’ve haven’t heard about this ‘ interweb ‘ thing or whatever it is, you’re a dead-ender.
Aside from that ~ if you’re a Phraint and you’ve got these three foot long antennas, and you’re swinging swords around over your head ? That’s probably not the best idea. Where did they get ‘ the Phraint ‘ in the first place ? ‘ the Deodanth ‘ is out of ” Dying Earth “. Where’s the Phraint from ?
No surprise there. Our local game stores refuse to carry most of the games that interest me (Savage Worlds, Warhammer, Deadlands, Paranoia etc). They only carry d20 and some white wolf. Neither of these systems have much merit other than a gateway drug. (come to the dork side…..) To make matters worse, if you order something through them, it can take weeks to show up if it shows up at all.
I finally got to the point where if I wanted a game, I had to order it online. I found out that many of the games I enjoy are actually sold at a discount, on release at amazon.
It’s having the same problems comics had, it went from being an elite culture to being pop culture. In doing so, it generated a lot more money but shifted the focus to a more populist audience. Now the public is bored and going onto the next fad. With any luck, it’ll kill d20 and we can get back to gaming.
MMORPG
I wonder how much of the downturn can be blamed on the rising popularity of MMORPG’s like World of Warcraft and the new D&D Online. People can get together on line and chat or even talk to each other via microphone, and thus it is much easier than all agreeing on a place and time once a week. In this age of convenience, I know how hard it is to coordinate a game. My D&D group tries to play at least twice a month, but with half of us married, it’s just tough.
When I was a kid, we had Atari… and it had even LESS imagination inherant to it than modern games. To insist that kids are less creative due to their gaming systems is unfair, and most likely inaccurate. I’m equally dubious that coddling parents would be responsible for a defined drop in creativity.
To insist that kids are less creative due to their gaming systems is unfair, and most likely inaccurate.
You can’t compare the days of having an Atari 2600 to today’s situation. Back then the home gaming market was nowhere near what it was today, and kids could still entertain themselves without it. Now, with gaming systems and computers being much more affordable, they’re more widespread, and the incentive to actually do anything that requires more than plugging a disc or cart into a computer / console is unthinkable to many kids.
I’ve seen kids almost go into a panic because their precious gaming system is not working. They literally have no idea what they’ll do to entertain themselves.
Paranoia… that brings back some great memories.
The Computer is your friend…
I’m still trying to figure out what is confusing to modern game distributors.
1) There was a mild bump in the nineties that allowed independant game shop owners to actually make profits, even in small towns. Before this, you bought your AD&D and Judges Guild products at the singular weirdo book store in town.
2) Magic came along and killed the market, and game shop business was distributed to whatever retail establishment wanted to shove a box of boosters onto its counter.
3) Every business in the world has suffered due to economies of scale and the prevelance of Wal-Mart-esqe business models. Modern business must evolve bigger or die.
4) Modern game shops must multitask, with computer games, comic books, action figures, romance novels or a zillion other niche collectables.
5) Every single one of the items they sell can be purchased for slightly less on the internet. So every sale is a tribute to the local loyalty rather than capitalistic ideals.
How anyone could think they can escape these simple truths amazes me. I really do wish these five things WEREN’T true, and that people could make heady profits from selling great games to the niche market that has always purchased them, but I’m not willing to poop in my hand and wait for it.
The comics comparison is a little too generalized. What’s really killing comics right now is that one company (Diamond) has a monopoly on distribution, and they are killing many small press books. Their way of killing them (cancelling the book without bothering to notify the creators) is discouraging other small-press companies from entering the business, as many a time a small-press group has their next 2 or 3 titles printed up and ready to go, only to find out that Diamond dropped their book… nothing like going into major unrecovorable debt to discourage others.
Where it’s similar is that the major companies are unhelpful towards the specialty shops. I’m not sure how bad the problem is in RPG’s, but in comics DC and Marvel are more interested in getting into Wal-Mart than they are helping the specialty stores.
I prefer Beer and Girls
Nothing like a long winters night setup at a kitchen table snorting some illegal substance of a hookers back!
I’ve seen kids go into a panic because they can’t find their stuffed animal, too. Some weirdo kids identify so strongly with one item that they can’t move past it. My future brother-in-law tries to get us to play Mario Party every single time we get together. But I don’t deny his creativity for it.
No, we easily spent as much time pushing big ansii blocks around the screen as many modern kids spend exploring intense and vibrant landscapes. I reject your assertion.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
“specifically designed to be a poisoned pill”
I’ll argue with that for ages. D20 created a system where people could bridge genres without rule changes, and had the Dungeons and Dragons momentum behind it to introduce it effectively. GURPS is a great system, and I played it for years, but we used it for specific genres and returned to other systems to ESCAPE its rules at times. Some of those same people play D20 Modern, Horror, Fantasy and Space. It worked…. and they were clever enough to include the rest of the market in their process.
The D20 open license wasn’t designed to KILL the market… it was designed to do exactly what it did… unify the gaming public behind a system. Call it an IEEE standard or a classification of stereo cables if you like, but it wasn’t designed to KILL the market… it was designed to simplify things and help creative gamers make money together, rather than struggle independantly for nickles and dimes.
The moment I saw that KOTOR was built on D20, I started jumping up and down in my friend’s den. In my eyes, that was a perfect introduction for non-pnp players to my happy little D&D world… I was ecstatic. Between Neverwinter Nights and the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons Online, I saw a truly fantastic opportunity for people who weren’t raised around pen and paper gaming to enter the field painlessly and simply. It just isn’t logical to deny the possibilities D20 has and is building.
But the sad fact behind all this discussion is that Pen and Paper gaming is hard work that takes a lot of time and preperation. Modern computer gaming provides us with Pen and Paper thrills without that investment, without the need to coordinate six friends to meet at once, and within the comfort of our own homes. It’s not some complex and sinister scheme that the Wizards of the Coast have dreamed up… It’s simple economics at work.
Other comments covered here: http://gmskarka.livejournal.com/141431.html?thread=894839#t894839
DING DING DING!
Cookie for the man with the brains!
The new version is pretty good.
Some parents use game stores that host events as child care though. Which is sad because it frustrates the owner’s and the regular patrons.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
Sorry, but let’s pop that bubble one more time. Ryan Dancy said a long time ago, when he came up with the whole D20 nifty little plan that it was designed to be a poison pill, to break competition and get competitors to publish the unprofitable stuff for D&D while they got the money making core sales.
Plain Simple. Can’t change the past. It’s what he said. And since he was the original ‘mastermind’ that says it all. No amount of later changes, retractions, restatements or rewrites eliminates it from the reality.
It was never designed to unify squat, and it is a pretty lowest common denominator product that I and lots of other folks refuse to buy in any way form or shape.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
can you provide me with a source?
Looking up “Ryan Dancy” and poison pill finds nothing.
Not only do you reject it, you do so without any real proof, and you act like a pompous ass while doing so. Christ, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Are you capable of acting like a mature adult? According to your user info, you’re older than I am… so it’s really sad that you act so childish.
Re: not so fast
> If your use of the graph were accurate, that would mean the best sales
> of the gaming industry were around 1976-77 and have been steadily
> declining ever since.
The best sales of the RPG category of the gaming industry were in the late 1970s, and they have been declining ever since.
The decline has not been a steady one, and has been more cyclical, with increases in the late 1980s and the Y2K/D20 nexus. That said, if you plotted the trend line it would be declining.
> The dip in sales we’re seeing now is the result of market saturation
> after one large-scale producer (WotC) dominated the market and
> capitalized on their consumer base
The drop we’re seeing now is due to the fact that most RPG players play on-line, not on the tabletop, and huge portions of the tabletop RPG player network have migrated to on-line play and have abandoned their old tabletop gaming groups, weakening the tabletop gaming network, and making it harder for those gamers still interested in tabletop games to find a game they can play in regularly.
Ryan
Oh come on… it’s a DEBATE… please tell me you’re kidding when you call me a pompous ass just because I reject an unsupported assertion. The burden of proof is on the person MAKING the assertion… not on the person opposing it. Where is YOUR supporting evidence?
What the fuck is wrong with YOU?
Jeez, and here I thought we were old-time debate buddies, and you go and get your FEELINGS hurt.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
Here’s the interview, on Wizards of the Coast’s own website.
The relevant quote (emphasis added):
“The logical conclusion says that reducing the “cost” to other people to publishing and supporting the core D&D game to zero should eventually drive support for all other game systems to the lowest level possible in the market, create customer resistance to the introduction of new systems, and the result of all that “support” redirected to the D&D game will be to steadily increase the number of people who play D&D, thus driving sales of the core books. “
… and this would be where YOU throw a childish tantrum and resort to ad hominem.
Were you attempting to make a point through irony?
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
That’s a nice exclusion of the REST of the idea.
1) Since d&d is the most popular game system, increase in market sales are good for TSR. I.E. When more people like games, more people buy OUR games.
2) Creation of fringe RPG systems create a bubble of inefficiency that tap market resources but provide no long-term sales for the market. I.E. Earthdawn as a competitive system hurt the market more than it helped it.
3) Supporting a central system will increase market sales overall for ALL companies and never create inefficiency by producing dated goods. I.E. You can sell a product as long as the system is supported.
I see where you are coming from, but the argument they put forward is legitimate, even if it is bad news for the makers of Torg and Earthdawn. Stereo components would be more difficult to sell if makers used competing connector cables. Simple economics.
Does it suck… yes. But trying to run a home-brew paint shop next door to Wal-Mart sucks too… and yet I don’t know a single person who doesn’t shop at Wal-Mart. If you can make customers buy more expensive products, then you will learn how to shape markets… but for now, I can’t really argue with the economic theory presented here.
Sigh… whatever. I’m not going to decorate someone else’s journal with this bullshit. Maybe that’s something you enjoy doing, but it’ll have to be a one-sided discussion because I’m done with you and the other immature ass.
Indeed. Our store actually got in trouble when the manager posted a sign that said “We are not a daycare” and a parent complained to the mall owners that our store did not care about the safety of children within our own store.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
Whatever, jackass. You wanted a citation, I provided it. Naturally, you’ve now moved the goalposts that you can “win.”
Do me a favor and fuck off back to FARK, or where ever it is that you crawled from.
My two cents is that every industry will inevitably hit a slump. Even right now the computer industry is so saturated by programmers that it is easy to find people seeking a job but next to impossible to employ them all. Same thing with the gaming industry.
The industry prospered at its inception and there were dozens of gamelines out there. Then a big slump happened and during the nineties it slowly rebuilt itself up. New games came out, old versions were revised, and even new forms of games became more popular like CCG’s and collectible miniatures.
Right now things are going to slump but they’ll pick up again. It may take a year, it may take ten years, but gaming will manage to revitalize itself. It always does.
And as for buying books online, Amazon.com and to a lesser extent (which is debatable) eBay are doing exactly what Walmart is doing. They buy books in bulk and cut out the middle man in order to sell you the book at a cheaper price. They make their profits off advertising, and they draw in mass crowds by having cheap product. There is not an easy way to compete with this, so gaming stores for the time being will have to struggle to draw people into their store.
A local store around here, Game Preserve, offers a point system where for each dollar you spend you get a point in their machine. It’s a gimmick they use to help draw in people, and it works. I find myself buying books from there when I can get discounts when I reach a certain price range.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
I can try, but this was all some time ago that he said this (back when the OGL D20 stuff was in it’s infancy when he was working for WOTC) and they’ve made a good effort of trying to get rid of references to it on the net for some years now because they regretted that he said it something fierce.
I spent a good 30 minutes or so doing google searches. I can find neither the original quotes nor the document involved, as they seem to have been deleted long ago from the various systems that they sat on (and in some cases the sites involved are long dead). Someone who has a good Usenet backlog might be able to dig them up, but I don’t have that nor the time to do it the hard way on my dialup.
I’m sure there are other folks who may have the document tucked away from back then on old backups or archives (I’ve changed computers 3 times since then) that might be able to pull up this info as well.
Sorry for not being able to pull it up on a moment’s notice.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
Thank you for trying.
It sounds highly improbable to me that anyone involved with D20 would want to poison the game industry for the very reasons provided by the article posted above. TSR rightfully views itself as the dominant force in the pen and paper gaming market, and hurting that market will only hurt themselves. That does not mean that I don’t believe your “poisonous pill” quote might not be accurate, just that it’s going to take more than a casual mention of it to make me agree it was said.
I’ve been called a Jackass and a Pompous Ass so far in this thread, but I try to avoid being a GULLIBLE ass.. heh…
I will continue searching for the quote as well.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
You’d look a helluva lot smarter if you stopped referring to “TSR”, a company that went out of business almost 10 years ago.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
I’m not trying to “win”… and I think a simple scan of my journal and my interests would show that it’s not surprising I would end up over here.
What IS surprising is how verbally abusive people have become once I challenge the overly trite and generic assumption that D20 and Wizards of the Coast are the bane of the gaming industry. I don’t have to “move” any “goalposts” to adequately demonstrate that the quote you provided was presenting an incomplete idea. Underpants gnomes might go from “Steal Underwear” to “Profit”, but I tend to require a few more steps for me to believe in a train of thought.
But hey, once the journal owner calls me a Jackass, I tend to skeedaddle… I like to think that communication and debate are the mainstays of intellectual interaction… but I guess that I’m left out since I don’t buy into the anti-TSR dogma.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
I’m sorry… I’m old school… You say WOTC, I think Magic Cards.
Please interpret the phrase TSR in my posts to imply the D20 branch of WOTC.
Re: I actually blame d20 for this.
I understand. It’s just hard, with the ephemeral nature of the internet to ensure that information will be there 5, 6 or more years ago. Discussions about it were hot and heavy at the time on Usenet, but of course the Usenet archives aren’t what they used to be.
I may have some hardcopy from that period, as I remember we did some discussing of the statements in some of the zines and apas at that time, but it takes a lot of effort to dig thru stacks of paper.
Re: to all those arguing….
Hmm… I own my own home and am married with kids.
That alone debunks the original trollish comment.
Re: Where are the FARKING Girls???
The girls are playing. They are playing male toons because they are sick and tired of all the 12 year old boys asking if they can get a picture of their boobs.
As for the sims… Bah.
Re: Where are the FARKING Girls???
mis-read. going away now. :D
I used to D20 back in the day… A lack of anything close to even an acceptable GM made me run off to online games.
Re: Where are the FARKING Girls???
LOL!!! That’s great. Thank you for that. It’s so true.
Re: Where are the FARKING Girls???
I GM’d for a group of friends, boys and girls. We all had friends too! But we made it as social as possible. Every game was a choice: Euchre or RPG?
We most often played euchre for shots, but the *strip* version of RPG was always a hoot.
The new version is fantastic! I think it retains the spirit of the old one perfectly, but it’s much more playable now that it’s been updated. The new supplements to the core book are a lot of fun, too.