Parmandur
Book-Friend
RuneQuest's skill system has had some significant influence, particularly on the Elder Scrolls games. But still, D&D owns the zeitgeist.
So what exactly is the root cause of the D&D rules' staying power?
ccs
41st lv DM
You've just described me and D&D. Especially Basic/Expert, 1e, & to a degree 5e.
I've "gotten" & loved D&D since the day I read my 1st copies of Moldvey Basic and 1e.
I've always had a very clear picture in my minds eye what Gygax & co were writing about. I want to play that game. I want to run that game. I'm still working on both btw.
By offspring I assume you're meaning fantasy?
Because it's successful. And success get's imitated. D&Ds success though stems from it being the 1st & getting to set the standard. So wether or not any particular edition of D&D is perfect, it's the standard that all others are measured against.
When things are good (IE, most of the games history) , everyone else sees the potential for profit by tagging along with a similar product. Or, during the 3x era, just also making D&D.
When things went south with 4e? Everyone saw profit in positioning themselves as either making a better game than D&D or selling the majority of the buying public more of the 3x they clearly wanted.
1) Interest/dis-interest in genres.
2) Finite amount of play time. (I've still only got the same 7 days to work with as I ever did, just a good chunk of each is consumed by adult life
)3) Finite amounts of $, shelf space, memory (both hardware and human - for God's sake, I've got 5! editions of D&D rolling around in my head. It's like I'm senile - I just pluck a rule out & force it to apply somehow leaving my players to translate as best they can.... Sometimes I get the response "what?" So why would I want to add yet another system to this soup?) & patience.
4) Negotiation within your gaming group. This is a group activity, so you gotta pick something everyone likes.... Or is at least willing to play - and this then loops back to 1-3.
pogre
Legend
As others have suggested it is in part because D&D is popular because it's popular. In my many years of gaming I have played tons of systems and even had a great time with most of them. However, there is simply no other game to quickly attract a gaming group the way D&D does. I enjoy my WFRP Campaign, and my occasional Ars Magica campaign, but if I want to meet lots of new people and get involved in a new group - the currency is going to be D&D.
A lot of these folks never leave D&D and that's OK. There is something about D&D besides its popularity that brings me back again and again. It is a playstyle I like a lot.
If you are into mysteries, swashbuckling, martial arts, horror, or any of a dozen other genres there are better systems. However, for heroic roleplay, it's tough to beat D&D.
A lot of these folks never leave D&D and that's OK. There is something about D&D besides its popularity that brings me back again and again. It is a playstyle I like a lot.
If you are into mysteries, swashbuckling, martial arts, horror, or any of a dozen other genres there are better systems. However, for heroic roleplay, it's tough to beat D&D.
innerdude
Legend
I XP'd your post, because I can appreciate having different tastes. I do wonder sometimes why Savage Worlds doesn't seem to connect with more people. For me, Savage Worlds is the first system that really delivers on the experience that I was promised in the pages of the BECMI Red and Blue boxes. It really isn't meant to emulate 3.x in any way. Like, at all. So I completely understand your point of view.
For me Savage Worlds delivers the fast, tight, consistently fun, improvisational style that I was playing when I was a teenager using Rules Cyclopedia, only with a BETTER, more consistent, elegant set of rules. If you're the kind of player who liked the experience of playing BECMI from levels 2-9, Savage Worlds is brilliant. For someone who wants more crunch and a longer curve into high-powered fantasy, Savage Worlds is never going to scratch that itch.
Sadras
Legend
1) Interest/dis-interest in genres.
2) Finite amount of play time. (I've still only got the same 7 days to work with as I ever did, just a good chunk of each is consumed by adult life
3) Finite amounts of $, shelf space, memory (both hardware and human - for God's sake, I've got 5! editions of D&D rolling around in my head. It's like I'm senile - I just pluck a rule out & force it to apply somehow leaving my players to translate as best they can.... Sometimes I get the response "what?" So why would I want to add yet another system to this soup?) & patience.
4) Negotiation within your gaming group. This is a group activity, so you gotta pick something everyone likes.... Or is at least willing to play - and this then loops back to 1-3.
This is it. I enjoy other systems and other genres, but I don't have the capacity for the many of the reasons you listed above to run them as well as our D&D campaign, and TBH without me running these other games for our playgroup, the result is they fizzle out because others (in my playgroup) lack the dedication required as GMs/Storytellers to keep their campaigns ongoing - which leaves us with me running D&D.
Jacob Lewis
Ye Olde GM
That was me over a year ago when I finally discovered Edge of the Empire and never looked back. 5e failed to keep my interest for many reasons despite the purity and familiarity of the system I have used for decades. Welcome to a bigger world.
Aldarc
Legend
And yet Vancian magic is scarcely found anywhere outside of D&D, particularly in video games. It is almost always one of the first things that gets discarded and replaced, typically by a mana point system.
D&D does have the advantage of popularity and brand name recognition. It doesn't make the system "better," but it does make it enduring and with a sizable enough group of players and support. D&D plays D&D well, but not much else. D&D (3.0) was my first tabletop RPG, but it has also been one of the most frustrating RPGs for me. When I got into D&D, I kinda grew fairly quickly bored of it and its D&Disms. As an RP novice, I mainly explored a number of titles in the d20/OGL side of things (e.g., Arcana Evolved, True20), only later expanding my repertoire to games such as Fate, the Cypher System (admittedly a modded d20 system), and Savage Worlds. (Also beginning to look at Powered by the Apocalypse, Blades in the Dark, Rise of the Demon Lord, and Cortex Plus/Prime.) But when it came to convincing a new group of players that we should do tabletop gaming and form a regular group, then D&D/Pathfinder became the go-to game. I was never really thrilled with that, but it was what it was. Even now, I think that my new group in Austria is increasingly feeling D&D fatigue. So we are transitioning to splitting up gaming between the regular 5E D&D campaign and experimenting with alternative systems in one-shots. I'm just thrilled that we are doing something other than D&D.
pogre
Legend
I get where you are coming from - I still enjoy D&D a fair amount and I'm fortunate that I am not disappointed when a group is not willing to try new systems. There was a time when I was an "anything but D&D" game master, but I have come to appreciate it more as I grow older. Still, I have used D&D as a gateway for dozens of other systems.
I have given up on finding the perfect system. I like tons of games for what they do well. When I least enjoy D&D is when it is twisted for long periods to do something the system does not handle well. Let D&D do its thing.
Celebrim
Legend
Well, magic systems in computer games are fairly diverse, but there are still some that use quasi-Vancian systems for the same sorts of reasons Vancian works. Blizzard in particular has evolved to a sort of Vancian spell slot system for most of its games, differing only in that it has faster cool downs for your chosen spells - seconds rather than 'a game day'. The reason this works is enforced diversity. If you have slots on a cool down, well you are forced to use something else after you've spent a slot. That's one of the reasons I feel Vancian captures the feeling of old school fantasy so well, even settings that aren't Vancian (such as Middle Earth). Mana point systems tend to devolve down to one single trick that the player invests in and plays almost exclusively, which is fine and even works better for certain settings you may be trying to emulate, but is a tradeoff.
Mana point systems work in table top RPGs, but having played with both one doesn't work better than the other.
Since computer games handle book keeping well and typically have more combat and a faster pace of combat, mana point systems and particularly rapid recharging mana point systems work well for certain play styles that have nothing to do with table top RPGs. A video game like Path of Exile isn't in its gameplay concerned about creating an experience of being in a novel, because it has the visceral element of reflex play and immediate visual feedback as it's core aesthetic experience.
The point is that I have played a lot of different RPGs over the years (D6 Star Wars, CoC, Chill, Boot Hill, Gamma World, GURPS, Paranoia, Rifts, VtM, Exalted) and I've read the rules of tons more (I just got the Mousegaurd book for Christmas), and I no longer have this view of RPGs that there is this right way and this wrong way, or that there is this old way and this new better higher tech way. Heck, tons of the things that I thought were stupid advice in the old 1e AD&D DMG suddenly made sense when I found myself in Gygax's shoes running a game similar in many ways to the one he was running. Go ahead and try to run a game like Burning Wheel or FATE with 12 players and you'll see what I mean. (It's amazing how many indy games implicitly assume you have only 2-3 players ever, and code that assumption into the rules without realizing it.)
D&D's biggest advantage over most systems is that it evolved rather than was designed. The result was a kludgy mess in a lot of ways but by being evolved it did serve the gameplay it was designed to serve. The 1e AD&D DMG runs like it reads, and provides tons of examples of play that prove that. (Compare with the FATE book which doesn't run like it reads and provides tons of examples of play that prove that.) Compared to the book for Mousegaurd I just bought, that's pretty amazing because as good as the book reads, it's obvious to me after 30 years of running games that it doesn't run like it reads. (And to me watching a game like FATE being run is so entirely cringy because it is so obviously not creating the game it was intended to create.) For me, 3e is the near perfect system (granted, saying that, I admit I rewrote half the rules) because it serves that gameplay I was doing in the 80's in a more elegant way, letting me run my 1e AD&D game with the elegance that I wanted but couldn't manage back in the day.
Things I'm looking for in a system:
a) Players can make propositions with some expectation of the difficulty of the proposition and the likely consequences of failure. One consequence of this is that the adjustment of difficulty has to be fairly natural and granular, so that the GM also knows how he's effecting the odds.
b) Player have a linear experience of play, meaning that causes happen before consequences and decisions are made linearly in the same way you experience life or story.
c) DMs can enter into a just contract with the players where they are promising a fair game with fair rewards and deserved penalties. Good play isn't merely entertaining, wheedling, or conjoling the GM to be given breaks or rewards.
d) Players can become as immersed in the game as they like and the play encouraged by the game is natural "make believe". That is, as much as possible, good propositions in the play are the same as good propositions in a child's game of pretend and are phrased as much as possible exactly like that. Once the rules are understood, they should become invisible or at least transparent.
e) There is a certain amount of cinematic play where the dice create description, but not necessarily so much detail in resolution that the game slows down to a crawl.
f) As a player, the rules allow you to invest in a character with very meaningful connections between what you invested in and what you can do.
g) As a player, that there is a real risk of failure, but also the possibility of heroic success.
Systems I know I like: D6 Star Wars, 3e D&D and D20 generally, 2e Chill, classic Call of Cthulhu.
Systems I expect I would like: Pendragon, N.E.W.
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