The RAW Generation

Oh, how I hate that acronym.  RAW – Rules As Written.

Once upon a time, there was a really really nifty little niche hobby called role-playing games, or RPGs.

Then the companies that made them wanted mass appeal, and as with so many other things that have done that the focus was lost and something new was born, something that bore the same old name but in reality was a completely different animal.

These games used to be written by hobbyists for hobbyists, with the profit being something nice to get out of it.  As the big corporations took over, the focus became making the game appeal to as many people as possible to rake in the cash.

Looking back, the first signs are evident in the history of Games Workshop, as they turned from a few guys making games for a mail-order business into a mass-producer of miniatures.  Just looking at the various editions of their rulebooks over the years, you can see how they turned from interesting little fantasy battles into a sales pitch for their miniatures business.  They’re also quite possibly the party most responsible for turning our related wargaming hobby from a way to fight out an imaginary battle into a competition where the rulebook is king. and are a big proponent of RAW.

Competition. Balance.  I hate those terms as much as Rules As Written.  They have no place in this hobby.  Our roots are in fantasy works such as Lord of the Rings, and Gandalf sure as hell was not balanced with Bilbo.

Over the years, the evil that is RAW has spread to the mainstream roleplaying products.  Once upon a time, the first page of any rulebook told the DM/GM/Judge that this was their game, to ignore any rules that didn’t fit with their group, to make up any others they needed to cover unforseen situations, and that having fun was paramount.  This was our beloved hobby, one where the rules existed primarily to help define the physics of a fantasy world in which we were creating a collaborative story.  When we wanted RAW, we brought out Chess and Monopoly boards.  When we wanted to dive into a world of our own creation, we brought out the RPG rulebooks.

Pick up the latest edition of the more mainstream RPG products, and you’ll probably not recognise them as RPG rulebooks at all.  They read more like instructions for playing a board game, a CCG, or as the system behind a computer game.  Everything is clearly defined.  Some assume you’ll be playing on a grid with miniatures or counters, and don’t even mention not using them.  Some even discourage players from performing actions that aren’t in the rulebook…

It was all done, of course, to make RPGs appeal to the mass market.  Initially that seemed like a good thing – it brought more players into the hobby, and more money.  The problem was, it also changed the hobby from the thing we actually wanted to play.  It’s happening everywhere – just ask fans of Science Fiction what happened to the Sci-Fi channel.  Niche markets just aren’t profitable enough1, so they’re being pushed aside.

So what about those of us who actually liked the niche market?


1 – That is to say, the company owner/board/shareholders can see more profit if they drop what they’re doing and do something different instead.  Maybe that’s what business is all about, but if all the toilet paper factories thought they could make more money making stationery we’d all be in trouble, wouldn’t we?

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