D&D General D&D's Utter Dominance Is Good or Bad Because...

[DarkCrisis]

You are assuming that people are conditioned by D&D to want a D&D experience rather than people liking D&D because it provides the experience they want.

If you only know of one experience how can you say its the only thing you want?

Just because you drive Buicks all of your life doesn't mean you won't like a Toyota.

 

[Reynard]

I think it is a mistake to think D&D is the dominant game because it is a high power fantasy. It always has been the dominant game even when it wasn't a high power fantasy.

I think it is reasonable to say that because current D&D is a high power fantasy, and current D&D is overwhelmingly popular and the entry into the hobby for most, the fact that it is a high power fantasy establishes expectations of what RPGs are and how they play for those people coming in.

That said, it isn't incurable and those people that fall in love with the hobby, not just D&D are likely to.explore other games.

Then they will become GMs and try and convince their dirty casual friends to try other games but just end up running D&D AGAIN.

 

[DarkCrisis]

People only have so much free time whereas everyone eats multiple times a day and there is a lot more overhead in learning a new system than eating food that has been put in front of you. That people want to spend their limited free time doing something they know they enjoy rather than learning a new system and doing something they likely won't enjoy as much is not some irrational attitude.

Again how will you know you wont like it unless you try it?

My D&D 5E group never played VtM before. Most everyone loved it.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

Well, I wouldn't assume that just any RPG could be as succesful as D&D by simply conditioning people into liking it.
But I also wouldn't assume that there a naturally occuring D&D-shaped hole in the lives of people and they were just waiting for something exactly like D&D to fill it.
Obviously, there is some reciprocity involved here, and a huge part of it certainly is that D&D just happens to be the dominant RPG (however it became dominant), making it the easiest choice to get into rpgs, and thereby setting assumptions about what RPGs are (and are not) for many people.

How it became the dominant game isn't a minor issue. A lot of critics of D&D insist that it's only dominant because it happened to be first, but in reality it became dominant and continues to be dominant because it is a really good game that has many features that make it really fun for a very broad range of people.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

Yes. But players implicitly telling their GM "I know that you would rather spend your time preparing and running other rpgs, but really, as a player, I can't even be bothered to take the time to and approach them with an open mind" is a pretty dismissive attitude as well. Usually it is the GM who has to do most of the work, often down to explaining the rules to and managing them for everyone at the table. So maybe people could stop whining about their dwarf druid and just say "Okay, I give it a go, maybe it's different, but who knows, I might like it; as long as I don't have to do more than show up for sessions and roll the dice when the GM tells me to."

That is the burden of being the GM, you put in a ton of work but what you may want to play may not align with what the players want. The solution is to find players who want to play the games you want to run rather than getting upset that your current players don't have preferences that align with yours.

 

[TheSword]

I think there needs to be a bit of reality check about other game systems and their accessibility being the reason they aren’t played rather than because they are drowned out by D&D.

5e has perfected the art of introducing/recruiting new players.

• Starter sets
• Pre-written adventures that guide new DMs/players to the game.
• streaming videos that give real play demonstrations of the game (I watched Dice Camera Action before running CoS as my first 5e campaign and it was a godsend)
• Regular forum discussion to engage with and ask questions.
• Good VTT support.

Funnily enough the other game I now run (WFRP 4e) also has all of these things.

Maybe consider that the alternative game systems that just throw out a single rule book and maybe a cursory adventure are failing to provide the kind of introduction that a modern audience expects and requires.

 

[HomegrownHydra]

Again how will you know you wont like it unless you try it?

My D&D 5E group never played VtM before. Most everyone loved it.

You don't know, but we can't try everything so we have to decide if something is worth trying before we've tried it which means we always risk missing out on something awesome or trying something that turns out to be awful. That's life.

 

[Xenolith234]

I think it is a mistake to think D&D is the dominant game because it is a high power fantasy. It always has been the dominant game even when it wasn't a high power fantasy.

I think it is reasonable to say that because current D&D is a high power fantasy, and current D&D is overwhelmingly popular and the entry into the hobby for most, the fact that it is a high power fantasy establishes expectations of what RPGs are and how they play for those people coming in.

That said, it isn't incurable and those people that fall in love with the hobby, not just D&D are likely to.explore other games.

Then they will become GMs and try and convince their dirty casual friends to try other games but just end up running D&D AGAIN.

I think there’s something to be said that most average players would be perfectly fine with the power level and HP of D&D to continue to climb upwards. Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. Therefore it’s designers’ responsibility to protect players from themselves. It’s my opinion that continuing to power up players isn’t protecting them from themselves because it’s not necessarily making the game any better, it’s just giving them what they ask for every time and a race to the bottom (or top?)

It’s why I’m not a fan of the playtest-popularity contest because it will usually result in more power for the players (simply because they have the numbers to outvote GMs).

 

[Swanosaurus]

How it became the dominant game isn't a minor issue. A lot of critics of D&D insist that it's only dominant because it happened to be first, but in reality it became dominant and continues to be dominant because it is a really good game that has many features that make it really fun for a very broad range of people.

So what?
We know that it was first.
We know that it is dominant.
We can outline in what ways it is a really good game that has many features that make it really fun for a broad range of people.

How these three factors are related is speculation; it can be fun and enlightening to speculate, sure. It can also be annoying - and if someone hates D&D, sure, they will say "it's just succesful because it was first, because of Hasbro's marketing budget, because of Stranger Things ..." I get that this is annoying. But the answer to that should not be to deny any suggestion that there might be an element of historical contingency to the rise of D&D.

So yeah, in part, D&D is big because its great. There are a lot of other great RPGs out there. Does this mean that in a parallel reality, they could fill D&Ds spot? I seriously don't know. But there's no need to get defensive about the simple statement that, among the things that assure the continued dominance of D&D is the simple that a lot of people think that RPG=D&D. It certainly isn't the only reason.

 

[Reynard]

.

• streaming videos that give real play demonstrations of the game (I watched Dice Camera Action before running CoS as my first 5e campaign and it was a godsend)
• Regular forum discussion to engage with and ask questions.
• Good VTT support.

This is a chicken and egg thing.