To be honest, I do think that all this "we gotta get the young 'uns on board" approach is a piece of bogus youth-cult marketing.
If I was selling cars, or hi-fis, or designer clothes, I'd be quite happy with my target demographic being "grown-ups" with a significant disposable income. RPGs have a gradually aging demographic, which to me just means keener gamers with more money
.
I'm quite sanguine about leaving the task of trying to recruit "young gamers" by dragging them away from their mobile phones and playstations to companies with a marketing budget to do so. BRP will be (re)entering a pre-existing client base (which includes all of us), and its job will be to garner new gamers from amongst them. It already has a solid rules base which is intuitive and easily expandable - it now needs some "killer app" settings and scenarios to follow up and induce *existing* gamers to give it a go.
Also, RQ/BRP/etc has always had an older demographic than D&D et al. This is probably due to it always being more interested in game background than D&D, which has more or less stuck to its vanilla "go down a dungeon, kill a bunch of critters and take their stuff" approach. If I was going to present a "BRP Lite", I'd bundle it with exactly that type of easy-entry dungeon-crawl scenario, and make some more thoughtful stuff available online.
RPGs entering their twilight? Not IMHO. Certainly the way *I* play RPGs has changed since I was 12, and rightly so
. But that doesn't mean it's the end of the world as we know it. IMHO RPGs are still a young hobby - and of course computers are changing the "round the table" nature of the games. Computers aren't yet sophisticated enough to enable the smooth flow of round-the-table gameplay, but they will be - which will be an added option (and eventually probably the default option) for play. Apps like Neverwinter Nights (with the GM option switched on) and KloogeWerks point to an RPGing Brave New World, and I - with my Insane Messianic Hat on - look forwards one day to strolling virtually through Beast Valley in my chainmail bikini and my broadsword over my shoulder, with my best allied spirit by my side...
The one certain thing about life is change.
Cheers,
Sarah