History of Role-playing Games - 1990s: Decline

1990s: Decline

The game Ars Magica, originally published in 1988, emphasized characterization and storytelling over game mechanics and combat. The game was acquired by White Wolf, Inc., who took the same approach to their 1991 game Vampire: The Masquerade, a gothic horror themed game whose setting appealed to the growing Goth subculture; the game was a huge success and spawned a huge number of spinoffs which were brought together as the World of Darkness. This style of storytelling game lent itself well to live-action role-playing games.

The fall of communism allowed the hobby to spread even further. A Polish RPG magazine, Magia i Miecz (Magic and Sword), was published, and soon several Polish role-playing games followed, with other post-communist countries soon joining in.

With advances in home computing, role-playing video games increased in popularity. These games, which use settings and game-mechanics found in role-playing games, do not require a gamemaster or require a player to remain in-character. Although they helped to introduce new gamers to the hobby, the demands of time and money on players were split between the two.

In 1993, Peter Adkison and Richard Garfield, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, released a competitive card collecting game with a fantasy setting reminiscent of fantasy role-playing games called Magic: The Gathering. The game was extremely successful, and its publishers Wizards of the Coast (WotC) experienced phenomenal growth; A new genre of collectible card games emerged. The sudden appearance and remarkable popularity of Magic took many gamers (and game publishing companies) by surprise, as they tried to keep pace with fads and changes in the public opinion.

With gamers' time and money split three ways, the role-playing game industry declined. Articles appeared in Dragon Magazine and other industry magazines foretelling the "end of role-playing", since face-to-face time was spent playing Magic. TSR's attempts to become a publishing house further drained their reserves of cash, and the financially troubled company was eventually purchased by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. Articles criticising WotC's game in TSR's magazine stopped. WotC became a division of Hasbro in 1998, being bought for an estimated $325 million.

Meanwhile critical and theoretical reflection on role-playing game theory was developing. In 1994-95 Inter*Active, (later renamed Interactive Fiction) published a magazine devoted to the study of RPGs. In the late 1990s discussion on the nature of RPGs on rec.games.frp.advocacy generated the Threefold Model. The Scandinavian RPG scene saw several opposing ideological camps about the nature and function of RPGs emerge, which began having regular academic conferences called the knutepunkt conferences, which began in 1997 and continue to today.