I believe that the path to revitalizing the tabletop roleplaying game hobby requires a blank-sheet-of-paper approach.  We need to throw out virtually all of our assumptions about the hobby and start from a fresh, uncluttered perspective.

First:  Let us begin by changing the name of the game.

The term “Roleplaying Game” has a lot of baggage.  It makes the tacit assumption (demonstrably false) that the primary entertainment value is “playing a role”.  30+ years of negative brand equity have accumulated around “Roleplaying Games” (and Dungeons & Dragons in particular); from concerns about the satanic nature of the content to fears that the games are psychologically damaging, to simple social stigma attached to the geek image of the participants.  It’s time to cut that monicker loose.

Second:  Let us change the objective nature of the hobby itself.

It has been patently obvious to me for quite some time that “Roleplaying Game” was a bad term because it did not adequately capture the value proposition of the hobby well, if at all.  In fact, it acted as a straightjacket, trying to force behavior from the participants add odds with the parts of the hobby they genuinely enjoyed.  In an effort to produce & play “Roleplaying Games” a lot of non-fun was introduced into the hobby.

The goal of most of the people in the hobby is not “play a role”.  The goal of the hobby community is “tell a great story”.  Roleplaying is a tactic, not a strategy.  Some participants want to play roles, and that’s fine.  Others want to provide narrative structure.  Still others want to create systems for interaction and adjudication.  And another group wants to generate environments.  All of these people need to be made co-equal for the hobby to succeed long term.

Therefore, I think we need to engage in metamorphosis from “roleplaying games” to “storytelling games”.  And in that change lies the seeds of our success.

Cinemas gave the audience something that TV could not:  Spectacle.  Gigantic panoramic images and thundering multidirectional sound.  Scaling the TV experience up to the cinema experience took nearly 50 years (and still hasn’t fully succeeded).  And the icing on the cake was the large audience.  Humans react differently as a group than they do as individuals.  Something very basic in our nature makes us enjoy drama, comedy, romance, horror, and adventure as a group more than we enjoy it as individuals.  Unless you have a really, really big living room, you cannot recreate the “theater” experience at home.

So how do we follow this path?  We seize the key differences between our format and the MMORPG:  Joint creativity, and the group dynamic, and we refocus the hobby on making those differences the centerpiece of the experience.

The MMORPG platform (our “television”) has three critical areas of weakness (likely unfixable) which we can exploit to segment the storytelling hobby from the MMORPG hobby, to our advantage.

Here are three sustainable, believable, and valuable points of differentiation between tabletop storyteller games and MMORPGs:

1.     A truly persistent environment, where participant actions shape and redefine the game world in lasting and meaningful ways using the power of emergence.
   

1.     Participant created content which expands the game world, sorted & made accessible through the power of a reputation economy.
   

1.     The ability to interact with one another in various social network configurations, from very small (2 people) to very large (10,000+ gatherings), from “party” focused adventures to city, national, and world sized population systems.
   

What we need to do is avoid the temptation to try and make our hobby more like the MMORPG hobby.  We need to focus our efforts on segmentation:  making a clear difference between the two formats, and making strong and believable statements about why people will enjoy themselves participating in the Storytelling Game hobby.

We have to avoid dead end strategies designed to make tabletop games play like MMORPG games -- the worst thing we could do is spend time & resources trying to make a digital environment to virtualize the tabletop experience, or try to find ways to let people play a tabletop game across the internet.  That would be like a movie theater trying to scale their product down and show it in a whole bunch of small cubicles designed to replicate the experience of a living room.

On the other hand, success in this endeavor means that we need to embrace the technology of the internet in order to enable the three points of differentiation.  Embracing the internet is not the same as trying to make an internet version of a tabletop storyteller game.  Our internet services are going to be focused on making the tabletop experience more fun than it currently is, and making it easier and more fun to interact as a community.

The successful future companies supporting this new trend in gaming need to be significantly different than the existing model.  Current publishers are built around a focus on producing text content.  The successful Storyteller Industry company will be at heart a customer service company.  Most of its work product will be related to internet services and community tools, rather than making & printing rule books.  We need to rewire the fundamental DNA of the industry from book publishing to internet service & community support.