Why Is There No CSI: The Roleplaying Game?

The post title says it all. It's a serious question. It came back to me while I was inputting a bunch of notes I made a couple years ago about adapting a nascent homebrew system to the police procedural genre. To me, this idea seems like such a no-brainer that I wonder why nobody in the industry ever thought of it. There are two major advantages to being the company that brings out that game.


Popularity

One of the weaknesses of the RPG industry is that most of its fans (and thus, presumably, its designers and bean-counters) are geeks who enamored of the relatively esoteric genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Thus, the industry has remained viable, though not spectacularly healthy, even in down times, due to the devotion of its fan base. However, it's never really been mainstream. Well, there were probably a couple of periods when it was on the cusp: the early 80s before the Dallas Egbert incident and the early 2000s when D&D 3e first came out.

I wonder if part of the problem is that nobody ever makes a tabletop RPG out of something that has mainstream popularity. It's not like there's no precedent for a non-sf roleplaying-type game to enjoy some success. For example, murder mystery dinner party games, which appear to still have a following due to the magic of internet downloads, were actually somewhat fashionable in the mid to late 80s. Crime and mystery (along with action-adventure) are genres with some crossover appeal to both geeks and everybody else. This has been even more the case in the last decade, with shows like the Law and Order and CSI franchises dominating fictional network TV. If mainstream culture is ever going to be convinced that roleplaying isn't something only done by the terminally weird, this is the genre to do it in. And the potential for actual profit in exploiting a popular genre is also a factor for an industry that's always short on money.


One Shots

One of the biggest hassles of roleplaying is the idea of the ongoing campaign. It's amazing how many ambitious campaigns are derailed by schedules and life changes. Something that was supposed to last for a year or more of weekly sessions often ends up lasting maybe a month. And that's with a bunch of dedicated sf/roleplaying geeks. Imagine how hard it is to get through a planned campaign with more casual players. The idea that roleplaying must be done in long, interconnected arcs covering many sessions is probably one of the biggest psychological barriers to entering the hobby.

Fortunately, using TV crime shows as source material directly addresses this concern. Every show is a one-shot, so duplicating the feel of the genre dictates one-shot scenarios. That means there are no continuity issues if a player can't make it one week. The availability of a more casual kind of tabletop gaming makes the hobby accessible to a large number of casual players, possibly increasing the customer base.


So why hasn't anyone thought of this idea before? Is the industry really that bad at marketing?

Charles Baxter, Dostoyevski, and Rush

I was reading an essay in Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext for my creative writing class. This particular essay was called "Creating a Scene." The title's a clever play on words, as the essay's really about causing a commotion in the world of your stories. The idea is that too many writers (particularly of literary fiction) have their characters avoid conflict, a behavior common in real life. Unfortunately, people read fiction for the excitement and conflict, so good fiction requires characters to be more confrontational than many people are in real life. The essay had three effects on me:

Validation: I like sturm and drang in my stories. Everything I write that isn't set in an imaginary world tends to involve getting inside the head of somebody mentally unstable and to have a body count. I didn't need anybody to tell me to have my characters say and do outrageous things that move the action along. It was just nice to have one of those authors of snobbish literary fiction endorse something I already instinctively believe in.

New Author to Read: Baxter went on and on in this essay about the famous 19th-Century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Specifically, he mentioned Dostoyevski's tendency to create characters who "make scenes" and to write intense scenes that made his readers uncomfortable. This tendency caused many of his contemporaries, including Anton Chekhov, to call him "indulgent." This attitude is apparently echoed by a lot of modern creative writing professors and students. But hearing about this disconcerting intensity made me decide that I'm going to have to read me some Dostoyevski at some point. The fact that the snub of Dostoyevski is mirrored by a near universal acclaim of authors like Alice Munro only adds to this urge. We've had to read a bunch of Alice Munro stories this quarter, and I've come to the conclusion that, while I can tell she's a skilled writer, reading thirty pages of her at a time is a chore for me.

Crazy Tangent on Music: Reading about all this indulgent intensity immediately made me think of some of my favorite bands. I had the new Coheed and Cambria album The Year of the Black Rainbow playing in my car's CD player last week, so I guess I was primed to think about why I like bands like Coheed and Rush. Their styles can also be described as indulgent and over-the-top. Rush has sometimes been slammed by music critics for their "too busy" arrangements. Of course, anyone who's ever listened to "Tom Sawyer" knows that's what makes them fun to listen to. Indulgence is the point of hard rock genres. Meanwhile, Coheed and Cambria has songs like "Welcome Home," which sport indulgent, over-the-top arrangements and lyrics that can make some listeners uncomfortable. So basically, I like my literature like I like my music: with an emphasis on mythic, intense subject matter or emotional states rather than real-life monotony.