Wow. That's cool to know.
Both numbers are a little higher (but not implausibly so) than I would have guessed. The number I keep in mind is from a 1984 Newsweek article that said estimated there were 4 million players then (at the height of the game's popularity, when it was worth doing Newsweek articles on, etc.).
I have discovered recently that there is a vast untapped demand for Dungeon Masters. Or rather, as one of my players said in response, "No, there is a vast untapped demand for good Dungeon Masters."
This is going to be real scattershot because I've got lots of thoughts but haven't organized them into anything coherent yet. This is more of a mind dump than a thesis.
When I offered to run a game I ended up with more players than I know what to do with. I've been turning players away, and I get the feeling that if I more widely advertised just within the small tech company I work for I could find enough lapsed players to fill three parties. There is simply alot more people who want to play than there are people willing to put in the work to create the game.
I'm more convinced than ever that the secret of D&D's success was that it was a game that focused on the game master rather than the players. The secret of D&D's success is in part I think the adventure module and the high status it traditional confers on 'the Dungeon Master'. The game system that is going to be successful is going to be the one that convinces good game masters to run it, and I think that it might actually be esoteric and poorly understood things that make a game game master friendly.
There are plenty of elegant rules systems out there that strike me more as game mastery art than games. I love reading GURPS supplements, and at one time spent alot of time tinkering with the rules, but I discovered that I didn't love running the game. I have great admiration for a game like 'Monsters and Other Childish Things' as an incredible work of the rules smith's art, but ultimately I think the game is next to impossible to run as imagined by those rules with much more than one player character. It's a great rules set, but on a practical level not that great of a game except for a very intimate one-on-one sort of RPG.
The fact that D&D is a game that features an explicit party on the other side of the screen from the DM and imagines the storylines as occuring explicitly around the adventures of a group rather than an individual is probably the other secret of its success. 'MaOCT' creates an amazing framework for exploring the internal conflicts of a child's life, but it creates next to no framework for exploring group dynamics. It doesn't expressly create 'a team', and having created a team, the dynamic of the interaction between monster and child central to its fluff is next to impossible for a game master to manage for the simple reason that any scene which features more than one NPC in a speaking role gets very hard to manage.
When I was younger and playing 1e, I focused hard on all the things that it got wrong: poor realism, lack of elegance, poor apparant versimilitude between the mechanics and fantasy stories, etc. Lately I'm increasing impressed by how much it got right, and how easy it can be to mess it up with the best of motives and the hottest theories of how game design should work. The fact is we are dealing with an organic evolved game guided by some pretty smart people in their own right, and I'm fairly sure that our own theories of what makes a game work aren't as robust as we think that they are. I'm increasingly convinced D&D's success was not inexplicable or merely an artifact of being the first game on the block.
I went in to a local game story recently and ended up in a coversation with the guy behind the counter who was bored and wanted to share what was going on in his current campaigns. He is playing in both a 4e and a Pathfinder game at the moment, and admitting that he's enjoying the Pathfinder game a good deal more. The reason had nothing to do with system esoterics or any the other theoretical crap we tend to flame each other about at EnWorld. His 'edition war' is being lost by 4e not because 4e is a bad game or because there is something about 4e that offends him, but because the DM running the Pathfinder game is putting more effort into the game.
Which makes me wonder whether trying to make games that don't need a game master, which minimize the need for adjudicatiion, and which make it easy are missing the point. Maybe alot of the best game masters put in the work because they like doing it.
Anyway, as a guy whose been doing it for 28 years now, thanks go out to all the other DM's out there for the shop talk and support, and thanks to all you rules smiths out there who've been making my game easy to run but not too easy. Paizo, I love you guys. Green Ronin, your the best. Long may you prosper.
