Is roleplaying having a hard time recruiting younger people?

[Loukas]

When I visited my old hobby shop, in north London's Finchley, one of the staff there said the local games club is little changed, and that 20 years later I'd still be one of the younger players.

Talking to one of the staff at Stockholm's SF/F Bookshop he says something similar, that the players nowadays are mid 30s and up.

Where's the new generation?

Is this a problem where you are?

[namada]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[corwyn]

In flgs in Saskatoon, SK, I see a lot of younger players; they mostly play DnD/Pathfinder but some other stuff as well.

I personally run a DnD Encounters game and while there are a few grognards getting back into it after a decade or two of absence, most are young - as young as 10 to 20. A few I've even poached for another game in Savage Worlds = I haven't had the nerve to try them in GURPS yet. I think the two best young players I saw there were two girls, 10 and 15. Raw on skills but very outgoing and enthusiastic - gives me hope.

My regular group is up there now; the last 'young' kid I recruited was about 15 years ago, now, but he was 20-ish when the rest of us were mid-30s.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Loukas

Where's the new generation?

On line, apparently. And it's not just gaming bookshops that are struggling, but all sorts except antiquarian.

I listen regularly to Ken Hite's and Robin Laws' mostly-gaming podcast, and after the latest con season they were talking about a boom in gaming and unprecedented crowds of youngsters at the cons. When I was looking for players at Roll20.com all the response was from high-school and college kids.

[Johnny Angel]

Maybe it's a local oddity, but the local gaming store in this area seems to be getting a lot of new (and young) faces coming through the door.

[Nymdok]

Kids just dont play em as much anymore.

Comp RPG vs PNP Rpg. The FInal Fantasy guys feed alot of that need without the need for social interaction that we've been slowly breeding out of kids for the last 20 years. It demands people.

Big Time Slot - Ive palyed in games where it runs for a 12-14 hour stetch. Kids just dont have that level of time to commit. Even a 6 hour game can be tough to fit in. It demands a certain amount of time.

No slick interface - MapTools et al is improving this, but as long as someone is trotting out a map and putting real world figs on a board, RPG is goign to suffer by comparison for space and just general 'slickness' of the interface. It demands a certain amount of space.

Not enough evangelisim - I raised my kids to be GURPS people and GURPS people they have become. I like to think that D&D and WOD people do the smae thing with their kids, but I dont know thats the case. I still think its one of the most interesting forms of gaming and indeed a media all its own, but until kids can experience that from a first person perspective, it looks weird from the outside.

Persistent NERD stigma - The Geek/Nerd division is one that for somereason hasnt been kind to RPGs. Geeks play Japanese RPGs like final Fantasy, but only NERDS drop dice and describe their pretend actions.

Nerd Competition - Nerds are getting lured in by OTHER nerd things. CCGs only take one other player. Some people prefer to take their 'pretend' to the next level and go full on LARP. Some people are warhammer people. For various reasons, young nerds are taking thier playtime elsewhere.

Whats odd is that I would have surely thought that having a computer and printer in almost every house everywhere would have caused a boom in the RPG industry that would have catapulted it to a more mainstream audience. Sadly this has not been the case.

Nymdok

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Nymdok

Persistent NERD stigma - The Geek/Nerd division is one that for somereason hasnt been kind to RPGs. Geeks play Japanese RPGs like final Fantasy, but only NERDS drop dice and describe their pretend actions.

Meh, given how the term geek gets expanded to cover very un-nerdy things, I think I'd rather stick to being referred to as a nerd.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Meh, given how the term geek gets expanded to cover very un-nerdy things, I think I'd rather stick to being referred to as a nerd.

These days it's become just another marketing category. Like "punk".

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I listen regularly to Ken Hite's and Robin Laws' mostly-gaming podcast, and after the latest con season they were talking about a boom in gaming and unprecedented crowds of youngsters at the cons. When I was looking for players at Roll20.com all the response was from high-school and college kids.

I have been smacked down in person by both Ken and Robin for daring to suggest that tabletop gaming might be an aging hobby... this while they were on a convention panel where the median vintage of panelists was age 51. They gestured around the audience of 120 or so and mentioned the remarkable numbers of young people at cons. I looked around the room and saw many grey heads and shining pates and maybe four people there who might have been teenagers.

It is possible that many of us are just lousy at judging age of those they see casually (maybe I am, maybe they are) -- I met Gary Gygax at the first GenCon I went to as a teenager and it is with some shock that I realize the balding, grizzled, grey-bearded guy who signed my DMG was a couple of years younger than I am now (and several years younger than 2013 Ken or Robin),

Anecdotally, when I was in high school in the eighties there were at least ten RPG groups that I knew of in my school of around a thousand students (and this was well before the mainstreaming of nerd culture); to some extent, your social circle was connected whether you played in Dominic's Game or Jeff's Game or whatever. Twenty-five years later a friend and fellow gamer of mine introduced his kids to D&D when they were high-school-aged and they loved it, but could find literally no one else in their school who had ever even heard of it.

When I started playing RPGs there were at least six hobby stores in my city of ~300,000 where I could pick up game stuff; the last of them closed this summer, having outlasted the rest by twenty years or so. Nowadays I travel all across Canada for work and I would be hard-pressed to name that many solid stores in the entire country. Weirdly, while Toronto was the epicentre of great games stores in my part of the world thirty-odd years ago, those stores have all been gone for decades as well, and the best place to find gamer central these days is in what used to be a variety store that (as I recall) began selling Magic decks in the mid-nineties as one more thing among the canned goods and newspapers and potato chips, and now has grown into an impressive games warehouse and relocated into a much larger space. They often seem to have a thriving bunch of teenagers playing CCGs up front, but how many of these have interests that run to RPGs, I could not guess.

Perhaps it is as Kromm says, that the generation differences in play styles means that the gamers of one group simply never encounter the other. That would explain it as well as anything.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

I have been smacked down in person by both Ken and Robin for daring to suggest that tabletop gaming might be an aging hobby... this while they were on a convention panel where the median vintage of panelists was age 51. They gestured around the audience of 120 or so and mentioned the remarkable numbers of young people at cons. I looked around the room and saw many grey heads and shining pates and maybe four people there who might have been teenagers.

I'm seeing the same thing at sf conventions. I think we may be going through a generational succession in which all our established fandoms are dying out. Of course, sfnal memes and gaming memes are all through Internet culture, but they don't necessarily select for as distinct a population.

Bill Stoddard