D&D became the success it has been over three plus decades by emulating a certain genre.
D&D became a success by combining several different, almost mutually-incompatible genres together. Neat trick, that.
Or, to paraphrase Cowboy Bebop: "And the work which has become a genre unto itself shall be called: Dungeons and Dragons".
Where do people get the crazy idea that DnD hasn't changed and been influenced by the tropes of it's time.
They make it up in the heads?
They misremember the past?
They deliberately misrepresent the past?
I think that about covers it.
They already tried it your way. They already tried to push the "old guard" aside--changed things, rejected long-standing traditions, and gave the finger to nostalgic appeal--in 4th edition and look what happened?
The "traditions" 4e pushed aside were those of D&D 3E, specially, the
mechanics, not the collected works of Howard, Burroughs, Tolkien, et al.
I'm playing Pathfinder this afternoon, a game considered by a lot of current gamers to be the true successor to D&D. My character bears no resemblance to anything out of the old guard of fantasy authors. What *does* she resemble? Hawkeye from the Avengers with a dash of Storm from the X-Men. This is what D&D does well. Mash things up. Even relatively recent things.
No thanks. The "new guard" were given their chance and they dropped the ball.
This is a misreading of 4e's market failure. 3e and Pathfinder are also "new guard" in terms of their tone and fidelity to older literary sources like Tolkien and Howard.
Fans of the newer fantasy fiction failed to support the brand in sufficient numbers to make aiming the game at their tastes a worthwhile endeavor.
This is untrue. Newer fantasy fans help explain the popularity of 3e and Pathfinder.
Most of D&D is the way it is because a few young guys in the early 70s thought up some stuff, in a very short space of time, that seemed cool. It's a weird mix of wargame, classic fantasy and 70s pop culture.
Another excellent point, Doug. Some people have a tendency to treat original D&D as some kind of scholarly treatise that set out to define/catalog classic and essential fantasy literature.
Except it was just an eclectic bunch of
shi stuff two dudes really liked.
People will turn anything into orthodoxy, won't they? Even rule about about pretending to be elves....
They want nostalgia, and they're prepared to pay. If these guys had been around in 1974, in their mid-40s to mid-50s, they'd have *hated* D&D.
I'm closing in on my mid-40s, and I can't say I'm immune to nostalgia. I want to see plenty familiar elements in 5e. Then again, I'll take Cowboy Bebop over Conan the Cimmerian any day of the week, and I'll be deeply disappointed if 5e eschews contemporary influences/references.
It is also able to run space fantasy, although there are systems better suited for both.
