It’s that time of the week! It’s the day I get up early in the morning and read me some Legends and Lore.
After going on my little tirade about what I thought this little column meant to the game and the brand, I found the last two entries to be a little…well…milquetoast. That is until I got to the end of this morning’s column. The majority of both were very broad and noncommittal; like someone waiting for a shoe to drop. Did you hear the thud?
Oooooh. Shiny!
Now there has been plenty of shoe drops when it comes to the D&D brand as of late, and most have been a good thing. One of the biggest shoes is that WotC now has computer game rights. Is this a good thing? It is from a certain point of view. It may not be your favorite point of view. If you are an old school, book-toting, long-bearded, dice chucker who hates the internet, PDF technology, and computer tools so much you have to post about it ad nausueam on every messageboard you can find (ironic, eh?) than you are not going to like this.
In the short run, I think you will see more digital tools for the existing game (whatever number edition or Vista-like moniker they put on it). If those digital tools don’t increased DDi subscriptions, you will see them spun off Quikster style (bullshit apology and all) in relatively short order.
Eventually the cyborg approach will be abandoned, and you’ll see D&D the tabletop game become D&D the MMOPRG type thing. That will not happen right away. That transition takes time, and the D&D brand to get a grip on their new power first, which could take a while. It will probably take so long that they will be dealing with a generation who thinks. Maybe so much time that most of the fanbase will forget the amount of vitriol it held in the past on that subject.
I’m not just spewing hyperbole here. To quote the President, “It’s not about class warfare, it’s about math.”
If you believe my math, there are a few hundred thousand people who are playing D&D now probably fairly even split between D&D and Pathfinder. If you believe WotC’s math, there are millions of people playing those games. That’s bullshit, but let’s pretend it is not. Before the release of the Cataclysm expansion, World of Warcraft had 12 million active players. Facebook games like FrontierVille have 5 million daily active users. The truth is that if you are a corporation sitting in the midst of a dramatic change in information distribution (good-bye books, hello tablets), eventually you are going to have to go big or go home. It’s inevitability. There’s gold in them thar hills. No large, publicly owned company is going to be satisfied with a copper mine.
But what do you do before lean mean transition? After all, it is one that takes years rather than months. Well I guess you get a person with a whole lot of gaming street cred to take over your column that is just a preview of the next edition of the game in drag.
And that’s what just happened. Take a gander. It’s a very interesting development. And, if this person is talking about the future of the game in a column, needless to say he is not a mouthpiece, he is an active architect of that future. Since he can’t go back and magically change the rules in existing books, what do you think he is working on? DDi updates?