The Last Lap Dance Of Candy The Cat

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…no, she wasn’t a real feline

Television Note

Next Monday, the History Channel is going to show a 2 hour program called “Life After Us”. The basic premise is what would happen to all of the human artifacts if we all disappeared from the planet. It looks to be a pretty fascinating show. I’m not sure, but I think the Discovery Channel might also show it.

Violet Note

Hopefully, I’ll have a rather lengthy Violet post up tonight. It’s looking to be 99% exposition and appears to be getting longer as I write it. Oh, and you’ll get to vote at the end of it, I promise.

Movie Note

Cloverfield hits movie screens this Friday and you can bet I’ll have my ass in a movie seat watching it on Saturday afternoon. I love giant monster movies.

Gaming Question

Every so often, when discussing D&D, someone says that if WOTC/D&D were to fold, the gaming hobby would be in huge trouble (and, often, it is implied that the whole adventure gaming industry would just dry up and blow away).

My question is: Why would anyone think this?

Did rock & roll implode after the Beatles broke up/Buddy Holly died/Elvis Died/The Ramones began dying? Nope. Did television collapse after (insert name of hugely popular series of your choice) went off the air? Nope. Did the deaths of any number of great actors and directors kill off motion pictures. Nope.

So why would the collapse of WOTC or the disappearence of D&D kill off adventure gaming? There would still be older versions of D&D, as well as the hundreds of other RPG’s out there. Gaming life would go on…and possibly for the better, tho that’s a topic for another day.

You may let fly your thoughts on this.

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Published by Doc Cross

I write things that I think people might enjoy reading, especially if they are roleplayers or just strange.

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11 thoughts on “The Last Lap Dance Of Candy The Cat”

  1. WOTC collapse
    I agree. If D&D were the only game system out there and WOTC collapsed, people would still play the game. As it is, if D&D disappeared, people would still play it and other game systems. When TSR was near bankruptcy, my worry was that GenCon would go away. Now, since GenCon is no longer owned by TSR/WOTC, it wouldn’t matter.
    Peter

    1. Re: WOTC collapse
      Same here, altho I suspect that without the big cash infusion that it gets from WOTC and the other D&D based companies, GenCon would be much smaller. Which actually would be a good thing, in my opinion.

  2. The difference is that lots of people bought records by bands other than the Beatles. D&D dwarfs its competitors far more than the Beatles did theirs.
    RPGs could still continue as a folk art (although it would slowly die out as the original generation passed away), but the industry itself would gradually vanish, and one incentive to creativity would dry up.
    So would the end of D&D immediately kill off the hobby? No. Would it deeply damage it? Almost certainly.

    1. So, you don’t think some other company/RPG would step into that vacant slot and fill it? I rather think one weould, altho surely there would be a period of much chaos before it happened.

  4. This is a totally consumerist argument. The HOBBY wouldn’t collapse. Hundreds (thousands?) of gaming-related stores would go out of business, yes, but those that survived would do so because they picked up some slack with Yu-Gi-Oh! and HeroClix and other stuff. RPGs would cease to be a viable retail product line, so online stores and companies that vend their own products on their web site would still be around.
    RPGs aren’t even a majority of sales in the market any more. WotC is obviously the biggest by far, but there are so many fringers out there running their own home-brew systems that people who truly wanted to role-play would find other games.
    My guess as to why people would think that is that they can’t imagine a world without D&D and/or WotC.
    B.

    1. My guess as to why people would think that is that they can’t imagine a world without D&D and/or WotC.
      I suspect you are right. For a bunch of people, D&D = Roleplaying.

  5. An end to D&D wouldn’t kill the hobby, no. It could very well kill the distributors and a number of retail hobby games stores, plus seriously erode the presence of RPG material in both chain bookstores and retail hobby games stores. And that would reduce the exposure of non-gamers to the game, which could reduce the influx of new players.
    But, of course, D&D won’t go anywhere. If Hasbro/WotC decide to cease doing it, they’ll be sane enough to sell it to someone, because it’s worth something.

    1. But, of course, D&D won’t go anywhere. If Hasbro/WotC decide to cease doing it, they’ll be sane enough to sell it to someone, because it’s worth something.
      True…but…It would not surprise me at all if, a few years down the road, Hasbro/WOTC decided to just port the whole D&D thing over to online play only. Remember, the bean counters rule the world and millions of monthly subscription fees (to say nothing of the money made off of selling “extras” to those same online players) will always trump the sale of mere thousands of books per month. Indeed, what they are doing now with Gleemax and such looks like a step in that direction.
      Which still doesn’t mean some company might not get the rights to publish the dead tree version of D&D, but it would probably be a much less played RPG.

      1. I’d think a licensed paper version would be pretty much inevitable if Hasbro decided to go out of the paper RPG business. The beancounters at World of Warcraft and Everquest licensed paper versions of their games, after all.
        D&D-paper would probably become less played, but that’d be much more gradual, and adaptations could be made much more effectively than a sudden disappearance of D&D. Whether the result would be the same in the end, well . . . at least it would take longer.

  6. Personally I don’t think D&D will ever go away. Even if WOTC went under they would certainly sell the property to someone. There are also enough game companies out there now that they would easily pick up the slack from WOTC and in turn become much stronger companies themselves.
    By the way thanks for the reminder about “Life After Us” I really want to see it.

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