TTRPG 2019

[stepnix]

I first got into TTRPGs beyond D&D in 2019, when I found out about the in-playtest Lancer and got hooked immediately. I think I realized that I was entering a whole new subcultural world, but what I didn't realize was that the world I had just entered was in the middle of a transformation.

In 2019, Google shut down the Google Plus/G+ social media service. I never used it, I don't remember any of my friends using it, but as I have since learned, Google Plus had a thriving TTRPG scene, particularly for Old School Renaissance games (inspired by early editions of D&D) and Powered by the Apocalypse games (inspired by Apocalypse World). The end of the platform inspired two major shifts that I've been able to identify.

Itch.io suddenly became a significant TTRPG publishing site. TTRPG jams like the Emotional Mecha Jam became a prominent feature of the site, and users began campaigning for a TTRPG forum on Itch.io to replace the doomed Google Plus communities. Designers had been on the lookout for an alternative to DriveThruRPG to sell their games through, Itch seemed to be an all-in-one solution. In 2018, about 700 physical games were published on Itch.io. In 2019, about four thousand physical games were published on Itch.io. The massive Bundle for Racial Justice in 2020 further cemented Itch as a fixture of the TTRPG community.

Second, the Google Plus migration causes twitter to explode with TTRPG activity (evidently it was more convenient than the Itch forum). there was probably a better way for me to test this but the search term "TTRPG discourse" only gets a few hits in 2018, and in 2019, it gets more hits than i can count. I think this reflects both 1) more people using twitter as a primary discussion area for TTRPGs and 2) more people with extremely different opinions on TTRPGs suddenly coming into virtual proximity with each other. Google Plus had been divided among sub-communities of interest, twitter is a free-for-all.

Two platform shifts at once is an opportunity for communities to transform, new voices to become influential, oddly specific mecha concepts to be enshrined, etc. etc. Maybe this new scene that started in 2019 is about to die, considering that Twitter is bleeding users who are setting up camp on other platforms. Or maybe it's about to prove its resiliency, truly settling into a new normal for TTRPGs.

okay now people who were actually there can tell me what I got wrong. fire away.

Comments

[stepnix]

A friend who was more active in the space during that time had a few extra comments:

A lot of G+ users came there from managing their own blogs, and enjoyed the extra convenience and "public forum" aspect of the site. Twitter had some of that same appeal, but without the group organization features or the same space to write lengthy, in-depth posts, which fragmented and exaggerated conversation

Google Plus was also one of the only available "neutral ground" locations for TTRPG community at all, (blogs were too isolated, forums were frequently centralized around specific games or companies, or were even managed by them, or had so much history of their own that people just didn't want to join them). Google Plus allowed the subcultures to mingle, but through their group management tools it could be curated. Twitter lacked those tools, so the floodgates were totally open.