Troll Lord Games

This weekend I visited my old haunting grounds where I lived from 1995 to 2003. While there, I thought Id peak into the game stores I had bought all my roleplaying books from. These stores were a roleplayers wet dream. Well, to my horror, the roleplaying sections of both stores were a small fraction of what they once were, and one store had most of what was left on sale for 50% off! I asked employees at both stores what happened to their mega roleplaying sections and in short, they both said the same thing, roleplaying games dont sell anymore. That sales on RPGs have declined for the past 5+ years. It was so disheartening to hear this and to see the meager remnants of what once was. I'm so bummed!

They've been declining for the last 20 years actually. Just a sign of the times that, once again, a hobby that started as a niche, is going back there.
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"We'll go out through the kitchen!" Tanis Half-Elven

Peter Bradley

I read somewhere that the majority of role playing gamers are in their mid 30's to 40's. This means that most players are the people who grew up playing rpg's in the '70's and '80's and the hobby hasn't really attracted a younger audience. I suspect that once our generation starts dying off, paper and pen role playing games will become extinct.

I guess that means we have to get our kids reading, imagining and RPing instead of watching the brain destroyer, playing video games and watching the bad movies coming out these days.
Sir Osis of Liver

"Gamers of the world, procreate!"

Sir Osis of Liver wrote:
I guess that means we have to get our kids reading, imagining and RPing instead of watching the brain destroyer, playing video games and watching the bad movies coming out these days.

Hear hear!
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"We'll go out through the kitchen!" Tanis Half-Elven

Peter Bradley

It could mean that a lot of people are like me and buy 95% of their gaming books on line. Book stores in general have been going out of business, or losing business, because of Amazon, eBay, etc...
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The Ruby Lord, Earl of the Society

Next Con I am attending: http://www.neoncon.com/

My House Rules: http://www.freeyabb.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... llordgames

This question has been around for some time. I think a lot of factors have contributed to the decline of or RPGs in your FLGS.

The first is exactly what Treebore stated. A lot of gamers are going online to purchase their books now. With e-retailers offering books at very discounted prices, the cost conscious gamer will look for the better deals. The second was also stated earlier. Our particular hobby (pen and paper), has benn unable to replenish the ranks of the younger generations. Even within the non-video hobby world, most younger kids are turning to CCGs, Minis, or some combination.

In my opinion a large part of that is due to cost of RPGs. A kid with an extremely limited budget walks into his FLGS and sees 1 RPG book for $40, or an entire box of MTG cards for $20, what's he going to pick 99 times out of 100?

CCGs have always been game stores bread and butter. And with the economy the way it is currently, it's no wonder shops are turning away from stocking items that don't sell particularly well. Plus it doesn't help that most FLGSs don't run any type of RPG events in store. Walk into a shop on the weekends and you'll always see some type of CCG or Mini event going on. But when was the last time you saw a group of RPGers in a local game shop playing?

But yes, it's very rare to see a FLGS that stocks any great level of RPGs. The only one that comes to mind, is GenX Comics in Euless TX. They have a very large selection of RPGs (they even carry quite a bit of our stuff).
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Richard McBain

Trolllord Games

Convention Coordinator

Executive Director - TrollCon, Winter Dark
richard@trolllord.com

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ALEA IACTA EST - THE DIE IS CAST

When talking with the employees, and from my own experience as a game store owner, it seems there are multiple elements contributing to this.

As stated, increasing numbers of players buying online.

Many players preferring .pdf versions of books.

Players switching to video games.

And then

RPGs are no longer the first game of choice for the new generation of gamers.

My game store doesnt sell a lot of RPGs, and I expected that. Its a new store in a town that had no store. So RPGers around here are very used to buying online as that was most convenient. But I was surprised to see the game stores that had a large customer base of RPGers not have them anymore. As for my store, 80% of sales come from miniature games like Warhammer 40K and card games like Magic. When that happens, a game store has to put their efforts towards what is paying the bills.

I had a game store before and had a large selection of RPGs, though they sold poorly. The store was profitable with miniatures and card games bringing in the most money. I sold the store and the new owner changed the focus to RPGs. There were a LOT more RPG games and events going on at the store. They took up so much room though, that the miniature gamers and card gamers, either switched to playing RPGs or went to other stores. Within 18 months that store was out of business. RPGs no longer make enough money for stores to put their focus and energy into them. Sadly.

One other thing I noticed about my old favorite stores, they used to have huge selections of Reaper Miniatures. Now they have none! I guess it makes sense.

Treebore wrote:
It could mean that a lot of people are like me and buy 95% of their gaming books on line. Book stores in general have been going out of business, or losing business, because of Amazon, eBay, etc...

I don't know about this. I'm not arguing directly against you, Tree, but I don't think this is the case. Sure, online sales have increased, but it's not in direct proportion to the decline of sales of rpgs in brick-and-mortar stores. I think it is a cause, but not a major cause. I think the other points, such as a newer generation not being turned on to rpgs and the metoric rise of video games and MMOs (as opposed to the last generation or so) have been the major causes, IMHO, to the decline of rpgs. In 30 years this conversation wil be taking place again, I'm sure, but it will be the "MMO generation" wondering why no one plays them anymore and are playing [fill in the blank] instead.

As been said, I think rpgs are heading back to the niche market. It hit big in the late 70s/early 80s and again in the late 90s/early 00s. Maybe it will be cyclic - so keep an eye out in the late 10s/early 20s for a resurgence.
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

Sir Osis of Liver wrote:
I guess that means we have to get our kids reading, imagining and RPing instead of watching the brain destroyer, playing video games and watching the bad movies coming out these days.
Sir Osis of Liver

"Gamers of the world, procreate!"

My son has decided to pry himself away from WoW, and join our weekly game.
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Never throw rocks at a man with a Vorpal Sword!

Maliki wrote:
My son has decided to pry himself away from WoW, and join our weekly game.

That's excellent news! Congrats, sir!
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

Maliki wrote:
My son has decided to pry himself away from WoW, and join our weekly game.

A lot of my buddies are getting their kids into RPGs. Hopefully it sticks. Good job on directing your son on the right path. I look at it as an insurance policy...if I get my kids (whenever I wind up having them) into RPGs, they can come visit me in the nursing home and keep me busy (either that, or they'll be giving me a great cover while I ogle the 20-something nurses ).

Sir Osis of Liver

And these days with the 'Net and reliable e-commerce it's less error prone and often faster to order something myself than wait for my non-RPG-driven FLGS to get an order in.

I order online for most of my stuff. There is a gameshop close but they: 1) are unfriendly 2) don't stock what I want and 3) Don't give me the C&Cs discount TLG does.

And I agree the niche thing is happening again. RPG's will resurface but not for awhile. In the meantime I am teaching my kids the game and look to teaching others.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

When the grid goes down and the lights fail and no-one can travel anywhere for want of fuel - then the renaissance of the tabletop pen & paper rpg (and a few candles) will thrive once more...

seriously though, the lowest tech 'solution' for any given task or function is always the best and most enduring... and rpg's are the optimal solution for low-cost, low-energy, maximum imagination archetypal fun, participatory, communal experience, character and story, so there's every reason to be confident in that, it is their essence.

also - not being american and never having had the benefit of a 'flgs' anyway, i tend to feel 'so what?' if no-one buys the 'product' - are we so co-dependent we can't generate our own? roleplaying and imagination are not really 'products' anyway and they never were - wizards of the coast and such like are really just necrotising fetishists, rather like microsoft actually, or some clearcutting deforesting operation of the imagination.

And they live by lawsuits and the threat of court action for infringement of 'intellectual property' - thus commodifying (and killing) the very lifeblood of the game anyway (for the sake of a few dollars more)... the way i see it, that's an old paradigm that has very little to recommend it, and even less of a future. No-one 'owns' imagination, not even their 'own' imagination (don't believe me? go to sleep and enter dream then... who created that? was it you? or did the imaginal just arise of its own accord and present you with a series of images out of the goodness of its freedom asserting Self, around which you stamped an ego-approved 'mine' upon waking?)

i would also say that bespoke and quality expressions of creativity (such as i see here from TLG) represent a different scale of activity and a healthier expression of imagination than that i was just attacking - a hallmark being that it includes, rather than alienates, the 'audience' (I refuse the term 'consumer' in this instance, since I inhabit the games I buy from the Trolls, I do not consume them - I add to them and they enrich me, its a mutuality, an imaginal exhange of juices, antithetical to 'property', more anarchic, allowing and liberating)

Plus, I always knew my generation (b 1971) was special and unique and this thread just confirms it!

ha!

Another factor that many may not have looked at is the rise of self made and self published games. Looks at games like S&W or LL. Granted they are 'retro-clones' but, I say it is the beginning of gamers developing their own systems to use. If this is a new phase in gaming I'd say we're going back to the roots of the hobby.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog

I think it's a combination of factors.

Mainly though, it is society that has changed and technology has fostered a lot of those changes. All we have to do is take a look at the way at the fast-paced nature of communication and the nature of media today.

Despite my love for the game, I don't find myself playing a lot and the reason is simply constraints on my time now as compared to 10-15 years ago. For me, my 'golden age' of gaming was between 1988 and 1993. I was in highschool and my friends and I managed to game a solid 3 times a week, typically on weekends and starting on Friday nights. The main feature was always AD&D but during these many weekends, we also played a variety of other games from time to time such as Shadowrun, MERP, and Call of Cthulhu.

Those days weren't so far back that we didn't have console or computers to game on. Hell, my friends and I also spent many-an-hour playing a variety of video games but these didn't seem to interfere much in terms of our regular gaming. Mind you, these were the days before the Playstation or the X-Box and within our group, one tended to play these on the Super Nintendo, the Commodore 64, and PC. Of course the nature of these sort of games also changed significantly. Who else misses the good old Sierra 'Quest' games? Another thread for another time...
As I got older and there were more responsibilities and commitments to deal with. On top of that, society also seems to be moving at a faster pace. I think there are simply more constraints on our time than there used to be and part of that has been caused by the convenience of technology.

The only way I get to game at all is I make the time to permit it to happen. The problem I face with that is everyone around me, young or old, are faced with similar challenges.

M
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"You face Death itself in the form of... 1d4 Tarrasques!"

Partner to Brave Halfling Publishing
http://www.arcanacreations.com

It's because of D&D.

To a point, anyway.

Hear me out, here.

In 2000, when D&D 3 came out, the hobby exploded. People were making good livings publishing materials under the OGL. Hell, some companies like Mongoose and even Troll Lord were able to superheroically leap in four-color glory onto the scene and make a real name and impact.

Dungeons and Dragons, meanwhile, kept gaming stores alive. This is not an exaggeration. The D&D/d20 revolution enabled game stores to pay bills well, and stock a good variety of product. As long as the d20 stuff was selling, they could afford to have WEG, GoO, and other publishers sitting for awhile.

Even after the d20 bubble burst, 3.5 kept going stronger than ever. A lot of little guys drowned in the whirlpool of the crash, but the ones with solid footing--TLG and Mongoose come to mind again, as well as Goodman Games, AEG, and Green Ronin, among others--got even stronger, as they were now more visible.

Game stores still chugged along on the strength of 3.5 sales. A veritable flood of "complete" books from WotC kept the cash rolling in. Hate it if you must, but 3.5 sold better than any edition, version, or iteration of D&D since first edition AD&D in the early 80s--and it did it without a cartoon and TV commercials. It even showed up in mainstream stores again for the first time since the early 80's--book stores this time instead of toy stores, but still...

Then 4e happened.

Let's be plain, here: 4e is not selling. I mean, it's making a profit, but since the first printing sold out overnight, numbers are DOWN. I have it from my own FLGS owner, plus owners in Albany and Chicago.

The Albany owner said, "Eh. It's selling, but not like 3rd ed. There's been really noticeable diminishing returns on supplements. The PHB is still doing pretty good."

The Chicago owner was not as diplomatic. His words? "[it's selling] like ass."

My own FLGS owner said, "What the hell is going on with 4th edition? Nobody's buying it. Third edition kept me in business, but this..." and when I asked him if sales were down in general, he said, "No, everything else is pretty much as steady as it's ever been. D&D sales are tanking."

So pretty much, yeah...D&D is killing game stores. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Similar results around here (I had a similar conversation with DD a while back, but he didn't want to believe me ). In this case, maybe we can chalk it up to an increase of online sales, better deals online, etc. But the internet was alive and kicking in 2000, when 3e came out. I remember similar deals online. Now, sheer numbers of online sales have increased over the online sales of '00, but I can't that they are so bad that it it the sole reason for this tradegy.

I think between the large resistance to 4e, the speed of society as moriarty was referring to (and my high school days were in the 88-93 years, too...good gaming times, hoss! ), and the general swing in attention that this generation is giving away from tabletop gaming are the primary reasons that this hobby is suffering.
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

Holy crap, are we all late 80's/early 90's high schoolers? Buncha real grognards, we are.

I started Junior High in 86. Graduated high school in 93 due to repeating 11th grade when we moved school districts.

I gratuated in '93 also, but my mother held me back a year before kindergarten.
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

Youngsters!

Some of us here are quite a bit older.
I for one, graduated high school in 1979.
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Lord Aladar

Warden of the Welk Wood

Baron of the Castles & Crusades Society

The Poster formerly known as Alwyn

Senior Gamer - Member of the Senior RPG Tour

"NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT - At least not in Yu Gi Oh"
http://www.cncsociety.org/

Aladar wrote:
Youngsters!

Some of us here are quite a bit older.
I for one, graduated high school in 1979.

Daaamn...how's that senior discount working for ya?
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

Not quite there yet. One year and change to go. Fifty here I come!
I'm not kidding when I say "Senior Gamer".
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Lord Aladar

Warden of the Welk Wood

Baron of the Castles & Crusades Society

The Poster formerly known as Alwyn

Senior Gamer - Member of the Senior RPG Tour

"NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT - At least not in Yu Gi Oh"
http://www.cncsociety.org/

1989 graduate here. Born in late 1970. A child of the "Star Wars" generation you might say. The golden age younger years of gaming for me were from 1982 or 83-1989(D&D basic, AD&D, Star Frontiers, Gamma WOrld 2 and 3, James Bond, Doctor Who, Star Trek, TSR Indiana Jones, Marvel Superheroes, Axis and Allies, Star Wars WEG, etc). I took somewhat of a break after that(other than the odd D&D, SHadowrun, or regular A&A game), but returned stronger than ever in 1996. Back when D&D 2nd got new covers and interiors. From 1996 on, I usually played D&D 2nd, Shadowrun 2nd and 3rd, Star Wars(WOTC), later incarnations of STar Trek, D&D 3rd, Alternity, Rifts, etc. and eventually CASTLES AND CRUSADES and SAVAGE WORLDS! Those are my new golden age games. Incidentally, Pinnacle Entertainment(makers of Deadlands and Savage Worlds) is another company who seems to be thriving. Not to mention TLG. Is the hobby dead? No, but could we become all but extinct near the end of our lifetimes? It's a possibility. Look at what happened to the glory years of Avalon Hill. Some of those war gamers are still out there, and there are a few companies providing the old-style war games. That said, it's not the hobby it used to be. Chances are, if you're much under mid-late 30's, or early 40's, you probably even haven't played an old Avalon Hill game. There are exceptions to the rule however. Wonder if our hobby will go the way of wargaming? I hope not. At least pdf's have preserved the hobby for those of who will probably rely on them when we're 70+. It may be all we have by that time. For now, I'm trying to promote C&C and Savage Worlds to as many people as I can.

The Grey Elf wrote:
Let's be plain, here: 4e is not selling. I mean, it's making a profit, but since the first printing sold out overnight, numbers are DOWN. I have it from my own FLGS owner, plus owners in Albany and Chicago.

The Albany owner said, "Eh. It's selling, but not like 3rd ed. There's been really noticeable diminishing returns on supplements. The PHB is still doing pretty good."

The Chicago owner was not as diplomatic. His words? "[it's selling] like ass."

My own FLGS owner said, "What the hell is going on with 4th edition? Nobody's buying it. Third edition kept me in business, but this..." and when I asked him if sales were down in general, he said, "No, everything else is pretty much as steady as it's ever been. D&D sales are tanking."

So pretty much, yeah...D&D is killing game stores. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

It's really interesting since my FLGS can't seem to keep the books in stock. However, I've heard about the problems sales-wise down in the States. I even heard about WOTC (or whoever is doing some of their distribution) discounting the books further to entice stores to buy.

There is a large fanbase at our store and 3.x sales have slowed to a trickle compared to the volume that moves for 4th Edition. I know the store also had a strong base for miniatures base games like Warhammer and a few others...

I do hear what you are saying about the d20 explosion though however, I remember my FLGS have plenty of selection and just as much varied product before 2000 and having no problem in carrying the various lines.

Now, if you postulated the theory that d20 killed a lot of these other games off -- that I'd buy into!

M
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"You face Death itself in the form of... 1d4 Tarrasques!"

Partner to Brave Halfling Publishing
http://www.arcanacreations.com

I'm a bit older than you fellers, too. Graduated high school in 1982. Now those four years of high school were the AD&D golden age. we didn't have a FLGS, back then, but I was able to buy all my TSR stuff at Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble, back in the day . . . Course I had to walk five miles uphill both ways, in a snow storm to get to those bookstores. But heck, it was worth it.
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Sir Dachda McKinty,

Margrave and Knight of Portlandia
Castles & Crusades Society

You know tylermo, it's funny, a bunch of my old friends and I still get together and play a lot of the old Avalon Hill and SPI wargames, as well as table top miniature wargaming when we have the time.

I am training my kids in the old school stuff, such as wargames, D&D, and the like. At least they can do their little part to carry on the hobby.
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Lord Aladar

Warden of the Welk Wood

Baron of the Castles & Crusades Society

The Poster formerly known as Alwyn

Senior Gamer - Member of the Senior RPG Tour

"NEMO ME IMPUNE LACESSIT - At least not in Yu Gi Oh"
http://www.cncsociety.org/

moriarty777 wrote:
Now, if you postulated the theory that d20 killed a lot of these other games off -- that I'd buy into!

I believe this to be true also, to an extent. I think that instead of games coming out with whatever house system, they came out under the d20 rules instead, thus killing a lot of the diversity of systems (aside from the strong house systems that survived d20 like GURPS, WoD, HERO, Palladium, WFRP, among others).
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LD's C&C creations - the witch, a half-ogre, skill and 0-level rules

Troll Lord wrote:
Lord D: you understand where I"m coming from.

I gradiitated (Hillbilly speak) in 1993 and played through Jr High and High School. And I agree those were the 'gold years' for me as well. However I am trying to fit more gaming into my family time since we all do like it and it is cheap entertainment.

However, for me, the draw of games like Bladur's Gate and others is that I can 'game' whenever I want there is no prep time and I don't need to scratch the group up. For many I would say this is where the CRPG market wins over the Table top market.
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The Lord of Ravens
My blog