Interest was dwindling. Some wanted to try the NEXT rules, some wanted to keep with 4e. I always felt like this was a poor move on WOTC's part. 4e was done, still trying to support it through Encounters really just felt like a life support move. Worst of all, in my opinion, these new adventures (part of The Sundering mega-event) just were not up to snuff mechanically. Trying to balance rules for both 4e and NEXT left a feeling of phoning things in. We ran the first part with 4e rules and it did not play near as well as any past season. I had to devote a lot of time towards re-working the numbers on the fly to provide a challenging and interesting adventure.
We tried a few one-off playtest sessions of NEXT. In these early stages of the playtest, the majority of the regulars just did not enjoy it. For myself, I ranged mostly indifferent to dislike on NEXT. I really didn't feel like I could have a clear opinion till the game was finished and I wasn't keen on constantly shuffling the rules if we were to keep playing it as a regular thing. A lot of people were clamoring for Pathfinder. I found myself reluctant because I had read a lot of things online and knew well the "3.75" moniker it had. Never being a fan of 3.5, I didn't expect it to suit my taste very well.
But that was really the direction everyone wanted to go. I'm down to try any game once. In general, I think if the table has had a good time then I did something right. Maybe I cave in a little too easily on my own feelings to please others. That's kind of always been a thing. So for better or worse we left NEXT to do its thing and dove into Pathfinder. I snagged up the fancy hardcover for Rise of the Runelords and we hit the ground running. Attendance swelled as the Pathfinder name drew a lot of people.
And I hated it.
I hated every session of it. I tried so hard to set aside any assumptions I had, but it just did not work. The level of crunch in Pathfinder is just wholly unappealing to me. The giant skill list. The INT based focus with Skills which leave most martial characters with a paltry amount of skill points to work with. All the little nuanced situational rules that really just felt like overkill to me. Worst of all, I saw the power gamer come out of people in a way that I had never seen even with the worst aspects of 4e. We had one guy who only ever made gimmicks of particular race/class/feat combo's that did one thing game-breakingly well, but nothing else at all. He'd run that with little to no story or roleplaying till he ran up against something he couldn't push through, then want to say the character died (or even try to actively get them killed) to then look up and make some new combo he saw online that got around whatever the problem had been.
That's not fun. That's not telling an interesting story. When it comes to that, for me, I just say go play a video game. What separates a tabletop RPG from say the current Final Fantasy? To me, at least, a key element is the shared narrative that develops between everyone's input at the table. You can disagree with that and it's just fine. I don't think there really is one "right" way to play a tabletop. If everybody at the table had a good time, then you did right. That's the best way I can sum up my feelings. But I know what I enjoy personally and Pathfinder didn't cut it.
So I floundered with Pathfinder for quite awhile. We tried some other adjacent games like 13th Age, which I happened to like quite a bit but it never garnered much interest from any of my players. Ultimately, 5e was upon us. True to my word I gave it a fair chance and found it to be quite enjoyable. A lot of the things that didn't appeal to me during the NEXT playtests had been hashed out well enough. Personally, I was pleased to see more than a few 4e-isms make the jump, but of course, they were presented just different enough to avoid most of the hate on that system.
I'm a music guy. I have played bass guitar since I was in high school and have always had a deep appreciation for music. It probably started with a lot of the catchy tunes in video games from playing them growing up. I'm also really into horror films and genre cinema as a whole, so film scores are a whole other thing as well. When I can, which can be difficult in public gaming situations, I think incorporating background music for tabletop games really brings a whole cool element to the atmosphere. That's all set up to say that I have always felt a certain music analogy to what 5e wound up being in my eyes.
If D&D were a band then what 5e happens to be as an "album" they put out is pretty obvious I think. You had the original (a big simplification given all the versions of Basic and on, but roll with it) first album which kicked everything off. Like some demo recorded in a garage, it was raw, messy, unpolished but with so much potential. And then 1e was that technical polish of a first studio album. There are those who miss the edge that first demo had, but so it goes with any band. Then you've got 2e, the sophomore slump that many bands go through. A refinement upon the previous album, but with changes that prove problematic for some fans. 3/3.5 is that come back that builds on what they had done, but with a new level of polish, that really wins everybody over. 4e, then, is that experimental album. Well and established, the band takes that left turn off the road and into the depths of the cornfield for something that is grossly alienating to established fans. Maybe some stay true just due to the name, maybe it draws in new fans that never enjoyed the previous sound, but for good or ill, it marks a big change.
Maybe that is all dumb as far as analogies go, but if you follow it this far that leaves 5e. How do you follow up something like that? A shattered fanbase? 5e is the greatest hits album. It takes the best "tracks" from every album and presents them nicely packaged together maybe with a new song or two (Advantage/Disadvantage) designed from the ground up to be a solid hit. That's how I see 5e, it takes a lot of the best parts from every edition and kind of blends them together. I can see how that in itself might be unappealing to some players. For me, it's passable. The game was lighter than 3.5, more familiar with the older games than 4e and there definitely felt like it had a push towards putting a focus on telling a story.
DCC will always be my number one pick for a Fantasy game. If I had to give a runner up it'd be some sort of OSR game. Labyrinth Lord, Adventurer Conqueror King, Crypts & Things, or maybe even just B/X or the Rules Cyclopedia. I'd give 5e a solid third place in preference. There's a lot I like in 2e and 4e for that matter, but 5e has the added bonus of being currently in print and with a lot of buzz making it easy to find interest.
I was upfront with our playgroup. I couldn't stand Pathfinder. 5e looked viable enough. For all this time we basically had two rotations going on. During the week was a very focused Organized Play sort of deal first with Encounters then with Pathfinder Society. The weekends were devoted to demo's, one-shots and short-run campaigns with a variety of systems so people could try out different games or get a chance to share with everyone a game they really enjoyed. So for that prime time spot, we really needed a more mainstream game I suppose. I took the initiative, as I often do, and bought up the core books and starter box.
We spent a bit of time with The Lost Mines of Phandelver, enough for everyone to try things out and come to their own conclusion. 5e was a success and thus we found ourselves back around to D&D and the new Adventurer's League kicking things off right away with Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Things went smashingly well. They went so well my table had once again surged into the mid-teens in attendance. If there was one thing wrong with our open playgroup, it was available people to run tables. Quite often, due to people just wanting to play (which I can respect), I found myself wrangling games for 12+ people at once.
5e brought this problem back in full force, but we had someone willing to step up and for a time we started having multiple tables going on each game night. To me, that's a good thing. I don't mind running a big table, but it exponentially splits the amount of time you have to focus in on each individual character. So things were going good and as the months rolled on everyone continued their struggle against the Cult of Dragon.
As we reached the final climax of that book everything sort of fell apart.
To take stock of things, this was the gaming activity of the shop in the RPG realm. I oversaw and coordinated with the owner a facebook group for organizing public games anyone could come to. Through that group we regularly had two tables of AL-legal Hoard of the Dragon Queen going on during the week, usually one or two tables of random tabletop RPG's every Saturday and now and again some games on Sunday. There was another private group that had been gaming 4e and later 5e at the store. The local college had a gaming club that came once a week to host games in support of the store and a local high school had a D&D Club (excellent idea, wish we had that back when I was in high school) that met there once a week as well.
That's pretty good in my book. The shop also had all its usual activities you'd expect from a FLGS including a primary focus on Magic: The Gathering. This is where I really have to talk a little more about the shop itself and its owner to make clear what happened. As business grew, they were fortunate enough to expand into an adjacent building and grow beyond being just a FLGS to also having a board game cafe of sorts. Awesome concept, in my book. I think it's important to support your local store (provided they embody that friendly part of friendly local game store) and not to knock on anyone, but I've always had this sense that RPG gamers tend to not deal as much in buying stuff at the shop.
Maybe that is just my own subjective experience, but it seemed like most players were good in for a set of dice once in a blue moon and maybe a mini for a favorite character. They could download PDF's and borrow from others anything else. That's just how it is, I guess? To me, it's a hobby I care about, so I want to put a focus there and likewise support a place that's providing a play space and a means for people to come learn or enjoy the game. So I've always tried to get my books (when possible) from a store directly. Yeah, Amazon is cheaper. Almost always guaranteed. Amazon's not also fronting me a space to meet up with people and a table to game at for blocks of 4-5 hours each week. The Owner also really wanted to grow each avenue of gaming, so he tried a lot of incentives to bring in more people to run tables. GM's earned store credit per player in attendance at a session. I was never really a fan of this, I'm happy just for the play space and the opportunity, but by consequence, I accumulated a lot of store credit. Trying to make the best of it, I tended to put it towards stuff for the RPG group when possible. Getting a module everyone wanted to play. Dice or minis when needed.
So all that's really a long way to say that having a full on cafe to order from while gaming really did a lot to pull a profit from the RPG side of things. I can only speak for the sessions I was present for, but regularly the majority of my table would order something from the cafe. So that sounds like things are going excellent. Why then did things go south?
Something about the guy who owned the place, he always wanted to go bigger. I respected that trait in him. Generally, if you had asked around most people had an unfavorable opinion of the guy. "He's too rude" most would tell you. To me, I just saw a businessman trying to be successful in a field that is really hard to manage. I've read a lot here and there about game store management across different blogs and people sharing their personal stories. Magic subsidizes most everything else, is a common thing I've seen.
But he always wanted to go bigger. We had a lot of talks in private, as he wanted to keep tabs on the different areas of gaming, and I was always glad to coordinate and do whatever to help push the RPG side of things. He'd mention being in these groups for shop owners on Facebook and talk about the numbers (attendance, profit, etc.) they pull for RPG events or this or that and how he ought to be able to do the same. That never added up to me. We're a college town, yeah, but ultimately we're a smaller place in eastern Kentucky. We're 20 minutes from one of the larger cities in the state and none of their game stores go that big on any front. You go somewhere like New York, LA, etc. any metropolitan area and of course things are going to be different.
One day things kind of came to a head. The owner spoke with me in private to discuss a situation with the RPG group. He wanted to know how I felt it would be received if he issued a mandatory table fee for playing RPG's at the shop. At the time I had a lot of respect for this guy. I've always felt like honesty was the best policy so I was straight up with him. I told him that the majority would probably balk at the idea and one way or another a lot of drama would come from it. Personally, I didn't mind. If it had been that way from the start I would have paid it. If that was how things had to be now, then so be it. It's a hobby I enjoy so I don't see it as any different from paying to go to the theater and see a film I really want to see.
I inquired what had brought this on because I thought, if anything, as of late they would have been pulling more profits from the RPG side of things thanks to the cafe. As I was told, the group I oversaw was an outlier to things. He stated that some of the other groups meeting there rarely, if ever, purchased anything even going as low as a drink now and again. That, additionally, some of these other groups were bringing in an exorbitant amount of people and were ending up taking up space in conflict with other games (Magic, in particular, of course). The shop was growing across the board and space was becoming a premium. It wasn't really anything that had personally occurred due to the players I oversaw, but if a change was made it had to go across the board.
He asked me if I thought people would take it better if, in the table fee, they got reimbursed store credit that they could then use for whatever they would have purchased anyways. My point had been that most players I knew were buying something every time they walked in for a game so technically nothing would change. But I felt like I knew my players well and told him that there would be a hang up on the principle of the matter. As easily as you could say "hey, you already would have spent this money so it doesn't make a difference" one could also say "I spent that money because I wanted to support the store, not because it was demanded to walk through the door." That's splitting hairs really, but the phrasing does cast a different light between the two.
To me, it didn't make a difference but I had been gaming with most of these people for quite a while now and felt confident in gauging their reaction. Ultimately, the owner had to do what he thought was best for his store. I offered to do whatever I could to help smooth things over. His conclusion was that if people weren't okay with this change, which was for the good of the store in his mind, then he did not want their patronage anymore. That was a pretty hard line in the sand. I've always felt that understanding and finding common ground is the best way to handle any situation, but that was how things fell.
To my prediction, people balked hard at the notion when it got announced and exactly for the reasoning I quoted above. Things spiraled out of control on Facebook. We had one member that usually never spent money because at the time he didn't have a job and usually just bummed rides to the store. I don't think it's my place or anyone's to really make a judgment on that. It was what it was. Regardless, he was a pretty beloved member of the group and his situation got brought to the forefront by several concerned members, to which the owner dismissed as "you don't pay, you don't play" and moved on. We had picked up some new members in the prior few months, two of which if I can fairly say were something of rabble-rousers. They tended to never seem content with what was going on. and were always looking to complain about things. They stirred people up even more.
Others took a different angle on things. If the money they spent to play RPG's there were a fee, then they wanted to see better service out of the store. Truth be told, the cafe side had a lot of stumbling blocks getting going. We even had a player who one night received broken glass in his meal, who really didn't make much of a deal about at the time and tried to be understanding. That came back up in light of a fee. A lot of incidents like that came up. Maybe that was a fair point to make. Maybe not.
In the end, things got pretty nasty. If I can say one thing for sure negative about the guy who owned the store, it's that he did not take criticism well at all. Any sort of criticism or negative review towards the store or his treatment of a situation was met quickly with a rude or vicious comeback. Social media is kind of a crazy thing. It may just be a generational thing, but a lot of people seem to have very bad PR skills when it comes to the online presence of a brand or company. Even as recent as last year, 1-star reviews of that cafe on Facebook were met with vitriolic dismissals from the owner trying to discredit those complaining. It seems, as of late, he or somebody wised up and removed such comments. To me, that kind of attitude only hurts the image of your place even more. There's virtue in being stern, but there should probably be balance in all things.
So it was unfortunate. Is all that can really be said.
Regrettably, I can't sit back and act like I was above it. Things got really nasty. Things got personal. As a very present force for organizing and managing the RPG activities, I got thrown into the middle of everything and said quite a few rude things in the heat of the moment which I regret. That's kind of just life I guess. You do or say dumb crap in the moment sometimes and it's only really after the fact that you can reflect with a level head and wonder what you were thinking. I always try to sit back and really analyze a situation. If we're talking D&D Alignments I'm a Neutral guy through and through. But we are only human.
In the end, almost everybody walked. The majority of my players took a stand together to boycott the store. Those clubs bailed. I think one maybe tried to hang on for a bit, but it only took a session or two before they bounced as well. RPG's were essentially dead at our only FLGS. I was around and willing to run anything, but despite being able to draw over-crowded tables there was nobody willing to now give money to this guy to play an RPG. The owner's sentiments were basically good riddance. He took all the backlash pretty personal I guess, but in the end, rationalized it as the RPG players were disruptive elements that didn't support the store. And so it goes.
So that's the first phase of things, but to keep everything grouped together well I figure I should talk about that game shop up to how things are today.
Unfortunately, the owner and I had a falling out in the wake of things. That's not too surprising I guess. I still had a lot of respect for him all things considered. Pretty much anywhere you went or anyone you talked to regarding RPG stuff, if that guy came up people could only rant and talk pretty nasty about him. Despite it all, I always took up for him and kind of just had the stance of "Hey, he's a guy trying to run a business just looking to do what he thinks he needs to keep it going" on things.
A year or two later, we kind of reconciled and he was interested in getting RPG's back in the store again. I offered to give it a shot but made it pretty clear that his FLGS had more of a not-so-friendly local game store reputation if you asked around RPG regulars in town. He was confident that the usual influx of college students would make it a non-issue. Except every new college student joined the campus gaming club. The same campus gaming club that had already had a falling out with the shop.
But I gave it my all, he wanted a really unique experience that would justify the admission fee. I whipped up what I thought was a pretty cool setting designed exactly for the in-store format pulling some of the coolest ideas from things I really found compelling like Vornheim to draft up a sort of hub city to play in with the PC's gaining ownership of a ran down shop and the idea of Living Dungeons from 13th Age as a means of a persistent, but ever-changing source of adventure and stock for said storefront. It was weird, different from the standard Forgotten Realms of organized play but compelling and mysterious.
It was truly an experience you could only get coming to that place to play at my table. It was also an experience that nobody would have. The first day came and we had 1 player turn out for it. The stigma against the store was as strong as it had ever been. He thanked me for trying, refunded that one guy and I apologized for whatever that was worth. I gave it my all to sell it to the old players, but not a one would give this guy's shop another chance.
We went through that a few times more. Nothing ever fired off. About a year or two ago, I thought that I had not heard from him for some time. Looked it up and found at some point he had unfriended me on Facebook without a word. I'm not really one to care a lot about Facebook, I generally try to stay out of drama as much as I can. To me, Facebook is a thing to keep tabs on companies I like or to discuss RPG's, movies, etc. or organize games. So I'm not sure what caused it. If he was just done with fooling on RPG's and thus had no use to be in contact with me. If he found that when a new competing FLGS opened and RPG's took off there, I ultimately got involved (a story I'll definitely get to) came as some sort of slight to him. Who knows. I don't know and I guess really it doesn't matter in the end.
As for now? That place still exists, but it is no longer a gaming store. I obviously never kept tabs, but somewhere along the way (there were equal levels of store-based drama in the Magic circles which caused a hemorrhage of players on that front, so I've heard) they had to close down the gaming side and carry on as just a board game cafe. For a time they brought in having alcohol which raised a lot of image questions, but that focus shifted after it didn't take off. And that was always a problem I felt they had. The shop would bandwagon on an idea or a new game, then quickly drop it after a short time if it didn't pull the same numbers as Magic. Which, if I can make a not-so-wild guess, no game is going to pull numbers like Magic. First board games were free to play if you bought something. Then there became a fee to play their "premium" games. Unsurprisingly, that rough transition sparked a new wave of complaints.
Pretty regularly they seem to get a lot of negative reviews online and they usually touch on the same sort of stuff that came up back in the day. But they're still open and keeping afloat. Not on the backs of gamers, to be certain, that stigma is as strong as ever. I tend to just keep quiet when I hear the topic come up. It's a topic best left forgotten to time, but I felt like writing it all up once to sort of lay it all to rest in my mind.
So that ended my first phase in trying to really build some sort of open gaming community for RPG's.
Who is to blame? It's hard to say. I think the fault lies on all sides of the battle line. Back at that time, the only other game shop had already closed up so there was really nowhere to congregate for public games outside of being in the campus gaming club. Our group was pretty big with a lot of players that couldn't host their own private games, so it left a lot of people displaced.
For my core table that had come so far in Hoard of the Dragon Queen, I opened up my home despite not really having the best accommodations to seat such a large group so we could hopefully carry on. In the meantime, a lot of us began looking for some sort of alternative.
And thus the next phase of things...
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