finarvyn wrote:I've heard of it but I have a dumb phone that can call and text only. No cool screen, no internet. I have a vague notion of what an "app" is, only because my daughter seems to have bunches of them on
her phone.
Yes, I probably am too "old school" for my own good.
As old school as I like to be, I have to admit that, at my age, carrying a ton of crap around with me to game is getting even older. It is liberating, in the physical sense as well as the mental, theater of the mind sense. There is less interruption in the flow when you have a device handling a lot of the more tedious chores that come with table-top gaming. So in a way, using such devices allows you to play more fluidly, without tons of page flipping and delays while you search for rules, etc, which can only enhance the role-playing experience, which is really the whole point. True, those of us with great experience, who were often taught by others, can easily make crap up on the fly if we're stuck, but modern generations are less likely to get to that level if we can't streamline the process for them.
I still like rolling dice, though. I can't stand computer generated random numbers, as no program I have ever seen seems to generate them properly. But if I'm stuck without a proper surface to play on or I don't have my gear with me, I'll use it in a heartbeat. Right now, with the CC, the PDF rulebook, and my collection of adventure PDFs on my phone, I could run a game of DCC in an instant no matter where I am, including the middle of the woods or in a car going down the highway (so long as I'm not driving). And with all the tools on the internet and in app form at my disposal and the disposal of my smartphone equipped players, we don't need any sort of physical anything to play DCC, especially when all that technology is coupled with my 30+ years of GMing experience and ability to whip things out of the air on the fly. How pure old school is that?
MrHemlocks wrote:I also do not have, nor want, one of those fancy cell, cancer stick, phones. I have a cheap phone, no internet nor text, that the entire family share. Only used in emergencies. People are so glued to the internet, cell phones, tablets these days. Guess that is why most people look and act like zombies...living in the matrix.
Old school and loving it....life is better this way. Try it?
Part of being a game designer (and the focus of my grad studies these days) tends to include finding ways to pull younger folks, who share no experiential base with those of us who played at the dawn of our hobby, away from video games to the table-top. You and I can play with a book some dice and paper and pencils, but if we want the hobby to carry on, we've got to make allowances for the next generation of gamers for whom digital devices are like a secondary body part.
Marcus Aurelius said, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'if you want to understand a thing, you must break it down to its base nature.' I have identified three elements that separate TTRPGs from other game mediums, like video games or board games:
1. Play takes place in the acoustic area of the brain, not the literal visual center. This creates 'truer' secondary memories, exo-memories, that are more personal and more mentally stimulating, more second life than 'Second Life.'
2. Play is unrestricted in length, and very often spontaneous, something largely impossible with board and video games.
3. Social interaction is a necessary focus of the game (solo games are possible but not as gratifying) and a large draw of the medium. As such, behavioral contracts are necessary, though often unspoken. In other words, you behave very differently in the presence of people who are within striking distance of your nose than you would with random people you're slagging off on the internet.
Technology, interestingly enough, is not one of those things that defines TTPRGs and you can have an old school experience even if your tools are all digital, so long as those other three essential elements are present. The smell of books, the clatter of dice, the scratchings of pencil on paper covered with Cheeto dust is not essential to creating an old school experience, but a series of mneumonic hooks that attach the actual elements of role-playing to the shared experience of those a who grew up playing D&D in the 70's and early eighties (most typically in a basement with Pink Floyd in the background, the smell of incense in the air and feet deep in shag carpet).
I assure you (based on my research), players under the age of 30 do not share this experiential base with us and trying to get them to truly understand growing up in that time would require a time machine and is largely an exercise in futility. But they can and will take up the old school banner if you can present it to them in a language they can understand based upon their frame of reference, which typically involves personal technology. I know, I do it weekly. I did it all summer by introducing kids in their early twenties to a lot of old school gaming experiences from the dawn of RPGs and giving them historical references to explain why we played the way we did back then. They ate it up. It fascinated them. And they're running their own games. In fact, I'm giving them a demo of DCC in a month to show them Appendix N role-playing and introduce them to classic fantasy and sci-fi literature.
They are not zombies, that is a gross over-simplification of the problem, they are just not forced to interact in the same way as we did when we were kids. Their world is much more insular due to technology. And if you want to get them to be more 'old school', you meet them half-way, absorb their technological culture into the hobby and mold it to enhance those elements that make RPGs great. Succeed and years from now, they'll be experienced GMs struggling with new generations demanding holographic miniatures and so on and talking about how back in their day, miniatures were made of metal. And you had to paint them. And they didn't move on their own. And they LIKED IT!
My company is trying to pioneer this next generation of RPG publishing, which you can see an example of here
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jab ... al-the-rpg, but, oddly enough, the resistance isn't coming from the younger crowd, but the older one. In this particular case, the failure of this Kickstarter is in part because I'm trying to use a new medium (a totally tablet based publishing one), which the older gamers dislike, coupled with referential material (eighties gaming and music) that calls back to a day and age younger players don't 'get.' There were other reasons the KS failed (a $900 backer had to drop out and this caused a 1929 style collapse in the funding, for example) but I think this product, which was meant to bridge that gap, was entirely too niche for its own good. It is an interesting challenge trying to bridge the generation gap...
If going to make a box set for Pete's sake add something new to the table...like campaign setting.
