Grognards & Gatekeepers

 As you can probably guess from my recent post about combat in Secrets of sha-Arthan, I've been re-reading RuneQuest and other Basic Role-Playing-derived games. Though I was never a regular player of RQ back in my youth, I came to admire it and its setting of Glorantha a great deal during their early 1990s renaissance. That admiration has not only remained to this day but has increased, thanks in no small part to the excellent work Chaosium has done in recent years to revitalize the game. Consequently, I've come to regret my one-time dismissal of RuneQuest as a product of too much Californian air and/or drugs. 

Over the course of the years I've delved into RuneQuest, one of the many things I've learned is that its fans, especially those who've been there since the '70s, have earned a reputation for being grumpy and unwelcoming to newcomers. Glorantha is such a rich fantasy setting, brimming with marvelous details and idiosyncrasies, that it's no wonder it's inspired a lot of devotion in its enthusiasts. At the same time, that detail can make it overwhelming, even intimidating, to those not fully initiated into its mysteries. Fear of being told that one is "doing it wrong" by old time Gloranthaphiles has no doubt been an obstacle to many a neophyte, though I don't believe I've ever directly experienced it myself.

RuneQuest fandom is hardly unique in this regard. The fandoms of two of my favorite settings, Traveller's Third Imperium and Empire of the Petal Throne's Tékumel, have both long had similar reputations as crotchety and inhospitable. For example, I remember well how, in the early days of the consumer Internet, I was very excited to join the Traveller Mailing List (or TML). The prospect of discussing Traveller with other fans across the globe seemed like a dream come true. Alas, one too many arguments over the plausibility of piracy in the Third Imperium, the use of near-C rocks as weapons, and Aslan footwear, among other topics, disabused me of that notion and I soon unsubscribed.

Of course, I was already a longtime fan of Traveller and the Third Imperium by the time I discovered the TML. Though I had no interest in the minutiae that tended to occupy its subscribers, I wasn't put off by the game entirely by their antics. I was already sold on the game and the Third Imperium, since, by this time, I was already a published author in the pages of GDW's Challenge and a member of the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG), a Traveller fan organization. Nevertheless, there were parts of Traveller's fandom, like the TML, that even I found a little off-putting and I would later learn that I was not alone in feeling this way.

And Tékumel – well, Tékumel fandom has always been filled with people so in love with its intricacies that they'd almost rather spend all their time and creativity talking about the setting instead of playing in it. I was fortunate, I suppose, that my own introduction to Tékumel in the early '90s was a welcoming one, because I can easily see how a newcomer might find its fans a cantankerous lot. Much like Glorantha and the Third Imperium, there's so much detail that it's exceedingly easy to get lost in it. Tékumel has the added wrinkle that it's a very niche setting, most of whose setting material has either been out of print for years or only available through publishers so small that it's effectively out of print. This lends Tékumel fandom a mystery cult quality to it that seems intended to scare off outsiders.

I thought about all of this recently, because I have a number of contacts within the RPG business and a regular topic of conversation among them is how to bring new players to games with complex settings and existing fanbases that reject any attempts to water down or otherwise alter them. It's a very real conundrum. All three of the games/settings I've mentioned have attempted to grapple with it to varying degrees. How successful they've been is a matter of debate. Of the three, I'd say Traveller is currently the one that's done the best job of it, thanks in part to the second Mongoose Publishing edition of the game. I have my issues with their version of the game, but it's pretty clear that Mongoose has done a good job of promoting and supporting Traveller for newcomers.

Previously, GDW had attempted to make a more accessible version of Traveller in the form of Traveller: The New Era (the subject of an upcoming Retrospective post), to very mixed success. Lots of old timers didn't like TNE and the way it thoroughly wrecked the Third Imperium setting – far more so than even MegaTraveller had – in the interests of wiping the slate clean for new players. The middling sales of TNE was not responsible for the demise of GDW, but many old Traveller hands often imply that it was. More recently, there's the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons, whose rules and overall approach deviated significantly from its predecessors in an effort to attract a new audience, with similarly middling results – and that's probably being kind. 

The fact is no one lives forever. The audience for many RPGs is aging and, if you're a game publisher, you need to have, if not an expanding customer base, at least not a declining one. That's why you need to find ways to make your games appealing to more than the existing fans. The problem is that many such efforts, while well intentioned, can tick off your existing fans to the point where they abandon your game forever. That's certainly what happened with me and D&D. I'd already jumped ship from Third Edition before Fourth was even announced, but, had 4e been more to my liking, I might well have returned to the game. Instead, I never looked back and, to this day, I haven't bought a single thing from Wizards of the Coast. 

Maybe it's because I'm old and crotchety myself, but I feel like older fans often get a bad rap. Yes, it's definitely true that we're set in our ways. Yes, it's true that we prefer that things never change or, if they do change, that they do so slowly and in accordance with previously established principles. Huge shifts unsettle us, as do repudiations or denigration of what came before. "This ain't your father's D&D!" or similar marketing campaigns are not going to endear your new edition to us. Neither will mocking or belittling the products of the past or those who created them. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" is a good rule of thumb here.

Oldtimers, properly motivated, can be among a company's most dedicated evangelists, singing the praises of your roleplaying game to anyone who will listen. I was inculcated into the mysteries of Tékumel, for example, by several such oldtimers, who pointed me in the right direction and patiently answered my many, many questions about the setting. There's no reason that my experience shouldn't be universal. I love introducing people to Tékumel and Traveller, because doing so means I get more players for games and settings that I love. That's a win-win situation, as far as I'm concerned. 

However, not all oldtimers are like that and I'd argue that it's not always their fault. The trick is to find ways to include the grognards, to draw upon their experience and devotion to help promote the game to the next generation. That means reaching out to them and listening to their concerns rather than just casting them aside. No one likes to feel abandoned, especially by something or someone for whom you have a deep affection. The problem with grognards in my experience isn't that they're necessarily unwelcoming to newcomers; it's that they're rightly suspicious of attempts to chase a new audience at the expense of the existing one – and that seems completely reasonable to me.