In many ways a tabletop role-playing game is very social. You sit around a table with friends and interact a lot with each other during hours. In other ways however the hobby is somewhat insular: Your table is the virtual world, and that world does not necessarily have much connection with other virtual worlds or players out there. Even the companies making those pen & paper role-playing games aren't quite sure how many people are actually out there playing, as any given sold rules book could either be long lost in the garbage, or be the centerpiece of a group of several people. Having myself played tabletop RPGs, mostly various editions of Dungeons & Dragons, for over 30 years, I always considered this to be an active hobby with many other players out there, even if I didn't see them. I might have been wrong.

In a recent market study, the North American "hobby game market" was found to have hit $700 million at retail in 2013. But of those $700 million collectibles made $450 million, miniatures $125 million, board games $75 million, non-collectible card and dice games $35 million. What about tabletop role-playing games? Only $5 million. Wow! That is nothing! There are single Facebook games that earn more money than that!

While it is theoretically possible that people play on forever with old books, such low sales volume are indicative of an ailing hobby. With a game like World of Warcraft making over 100 times more money per year than all pen & paper role-playing games together it appears obvious that people interested in fantasy role-playing today are online, and not sitting around a table with friends. And if you look around for example for role-playing material on YouTube you'll find that the people there don't exactly look like teenagers; this is a hobby with not much fresh blood and a lot of 40+ year old players.

Obviously Wizards of the Coast hopes to revive the hobby with the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I've seen several games stores reporting the new Player's Handbook having sold out on the first day. I went to a local games store yesterday and could only get hold of a Starter Set. There are a lot of things that make 5th edition quite suitable for people new to the tabletop role-playing hobby: The Starter Set is affordable, the Basic Rules are free, and while 110 pages of rules might still seem daunting to some people, that is already a lot less than previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder (and many of those pages are actually spell lists).

The biggest obstacle to playing a tabletop role-playing game is organization. Already in MMORPGs it is only a small fraction of the players who meet online regularly for a continuous block of several hours to play together. A pen & paper game not only requires that block of hours, but also for people to physically travel to the same location, and you'll probably want some food and drink there as well. But as a reward you get a game which feels a lot less restrained by the limits of technology and the imagination of some game designer. Instead of meeting to kill the same boss mob for the tenth time, you get a fresh story every session, limited only by the collective imagination of all the players around the table. That is well worth the organizational effort. I hope that the role-playing hobby can recover from it's current low.