The Advantages of Lifestyle Games

But a couple of days later something else occurred to...

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There is a DnD club at my kids highschool with over 20 members. It's a formal representation of groups we formed in high school after school. It's great to see and there is cross over with board games, with games of dark souls and king of Tokyo being played.

I think this is pretty spot on... there are negatives to playing one game, which I think D+D and 40k illustrate pretty well (see GorillaGrody's columns on getting into 40k scene) but overall there is a lot more cross-talk to be had.

There's also an age aspect to lifestyle games. I would expect your average 16-year-old to sample a lot from a lot of different gaming avenues. I would also expect your average 40-year-old to have a certain array of calcified tastes that result in them taking a reliable route into lifestyle games.

What is funny is seeing folks attempting to sample lifestyle games as though they were just picking up the latest Feld game. The people that drop $500 on starter sets, boosters, terrain, paints, dice, deluxe tokens, and the whole shebang... only to figure out a week later that they aren't really into it, so they dump it on eBay for about a third of what they just shelled out at retail. (As an eBay bargain shopper, god bless those people!)

I don't know, I think high school age kids are also fairly likely to find something they like and keep playing, at least for a while.

Cost is a factor, for a start. They usually can't drop hundreds on games every few weeks or months.
They also, for all their supposed Internet savviness, aren't that into researching stuff let alone looking at forums and things to find out about different games. Often it's circumstantial but I've seen high schoolers just adopt a game and play nothing but that.
The games club where i work might as well be the High Society club.

That was my experience playing with teens and younger adults as well. We played the same thing every time, no matter how much I tried introducing something new. Discovering games does not hold pleasure for most people.

Learning games is its own almost separate hobby.

Gary Sax wrote: Learning games is its own almost separate hobby.

It is. Some nights my group will be like"We don't want to learn a new game!" I find that odd because I personally love learning new games most of the time.

Maybe my transition over to D&D has been driven somewhat by the exhaustion from learning new games. I have the rules for D&D mostly internalized now, so I don't feel quite so...I guess spent when something new comes up.

Part of it is that RPGs are a very good fit for me personally. I generally function well in extemporaneous environments, and I come away from most D&D nights feeling recharged in a way I don't for a lot of board games. The other side of that coin is that RPGs require more focus and preparation, and I'm not always up for that.

It's funny because I gave up on RPGs because of a lack of dedication from my group. For a few years, we played constantly and I was always the GM (D&D, Gamma World, V&V, several created by me) because I always had the stories. In many ways, GMing taught me how to write fiction because I learned how to create a narrative and keep it exciting for my players. But, once people didn't have time (families, careers) to keep up with the constant flow of story from my brain, we stopped and I shifted to Magic, full-time. I was a tournament player for years and then decided that I didn't have time to keep up with the scene, so I shifted to GW (40K, WHFB, BFG, Necromunda, Mordheim, and my beloved Epic) and was fully immersed in building, painting, and playing. But then much of the group moved away and I shifted back to boardgames as my only regular thing (they'd been played in the background alongside Magic and GW for a couple decades.)

I like learning new games, too, but I think I've reached the point where I'm kind of tapped out and there are a few that I just want to play again on a regular basis now.