Why do you play games other than D&D?

I've seen people convert the Ars Magica system to GURPS but cant say how successful they have been. That style ofplay doesnt really appeal to me.

ccs said:

Well, if you played it "correctly", as in how the book described the game, each of you were supposed to create a mage + at least one of the supporting non-mage characters. And then 1 person played their mage, the rest the custos, & 1 person DMd (forget what they called it) for an adventure. Then a new adventure & the roles rotated with someone else playing a mage, yadada yadda yadda.
So everyone DM'd, everyone got a turn as their mage, & everyone played custos.
It was a pretty neat idea.
I never actually saw it happen.

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No joke, but that’s kind of how my longest running core gaming group ran one campaign world. The most powerful PCs weren’t all spellcasters- not single-classed, anyway- and we’d run parties of different power levels through adventures. Most of the lower-tier PCs were related to the heavy hitters in some capacity.

And we did rotary DMing, too.

In my case, I think it boils down to two reasons:

1) There are plenty of quirks in the D&D core that bother me. Some of them have rather subtle effects on the narrative, which I noticed when I tried other systems. As a most-of-the-time DM, it bothered me that I was fitting my world-design to the rules and not vice-versa. That got me into system-tourism as far back as the '90s, and quite frankly there are other systems that handle some things far better to the way D&D does them. (Often to support specific playgoals.)

2) I'm fine with detailed "tactical" combat as a game, but I don't find that it actually adds to the progress of a story much (at least the way rpgs usually handle it). Additionally, detail like D&D combat always slows things down. So, if I'm approaching a campaign/game as a way to explore a story or setting, I prefer systems that can handle that more smoothly.

ccs said:

Well, if you played it "correctly", as in how the book described the game, each of you were supposed to create a mage + at least one of the supporting non-mage characters. And then 1 person played their mage, the rest the custos, & 1 person DMd (forget what they called it) for an adventure. Then a new adventure & the roles rotated with someone else playing a mage, yadada yadda yadda.
So everyone DM'd, everyone got a turn as their mage, & everyone played custos.
It was a pretty neat idea.
I never actually saw it happen.

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I have... When it works, it's great.

When someone has managed to garner no clue about the setting tropes and throws a D&D type adventure in.... not so much. We voted one adventure off the campaign.

It does require a bit of paradigm shifting, because you never know which characters you're going to get to play... In a 6 month long campaign, I had a stretch of 3 weeks where neither my Magus nor Custos characters were suitable... so I wound up playing grogs. And not even the same grogs. My main PC was doing research, and my custos was training new grogs...

I've done enough dungeon-crawling, but I like playing roles. I do two fairly separate sets of gaming:

The D&D I play is mostly relics from college days (1979-83) and I spent all of last weekend in games that have grown from that. A science fantasy campaign set on a spaceship trading between several astroid belts in the same solar system; at least three of the crew are constructs of various kinds. Actual AD&D1e with characters from several campaigns, assisting a reform movement in the Church of Set. More 1e, DMing a police campaign in the fantasy city I created in 1979.

Apart from that, I mostly play GURPS, in a weekly group, which runs two campaigns alternate weeks. I run "Infinite Cabal", an Infinite Worlds game centred on the Cabal, which started nearly nine years ago. The other game is currently urban fantasy noir, set in an expy of New York in the 1930s that's infested with Fae. GURPS fels a lot more real than D&D-family game systems, and handles things on the scale of ordinary people much better.

Ratskinner said:

In my case, I think it boils down to two reasons:

1) There are plenty of quirks in the D&D core that bother me. Some of them have rather subtle effects on the narrative, which I noticed when I tried other systems. As a most-of-the-time DM, it bothered me that I was fitting my world-design to the rules and not vice-versa. That got me into system-tourism as far back as the '90s, and quite frankly there are other systems that handle some things far better to the way D&D does them. (Often to support specific playgoals.)

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This is probably my most consistent dissatisfaction with D&D. There are many times where I have brainstormed possible campaigns or games of D&D that I have wanted to run. But in the process, I invariably find myself feeling like my vision of the world becomes a slave to the rules and not the rules to the world. D&D does D&D fantasy well, and many could run nothing but these types of stories, worlds, and aesthetics. However, I have found myself fighting the D&D system when generating the sort of stories, worlds, and aesthetics I want for a campaign. Sure, the option to house rule games exists, but after a certain point, it's just easier to find systems that are less resistant or more flexible to those design intents.

I think of 'D&D-Style Fantasy' its own genre, with the attendant elements and expectations. So when I want to play that genre, I reach for D&D 5E, which I think does that articular genre better than anything else I've tried.

But when I want a different genre--pulp, sci-fi, supers, horror, or even D&D-style--I have to go with a different ruleset. I know there are 5E books for sci-fi and modern-era action, but I don't think class-and-level, escalating HP, and spell slot/spell list rules translate to the other genres I want. I think those tropes are too deeply embedded in D&D-style fantasy to work for me outside of it.

Edit: I see that I've essentially copied Aldarc's response, though they phrased it better. So let's pretend I wrote what they wrote!

GrahamWills said:

On the popularity and default state of D&D ...

I think people tend to overstate the dominance of D&D -- not that it isn't the biggest player by far, but it seems common to assume that most games are D&D. Even at "Peak d20" this was not the case -- here's the list of events from GenCon 2003 (events counts only, I could not get details on the players allowed per event). I'm not sure that even if we assume some of the living events had huge numbers of players, that even then half the people were playing a d20 game.

So dominant in terms of "no close competitor", but not dominant in terms of "more of this than everything else".
(determination as to which events were d20 does by me using name, rules version and genre. Not evenly slightly guaranteed to be accurate, but I hope errors roughly balance either way ...)

Game	Event Count
*** ALL D20 ***	368
*** ALL Others ***	833
Grand Total	1201

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Flaws with GenCon and Origins data: many games are there because the developers are there to push it; the numbers look much more like the ratio of staffers than players...

Likewise, the sales numbers for some 3rd tier but well known publishers run to the 4000 lifetime print run, and POD thereafter, for the sales life of the product. D&D, Star Wars, and Pathfinder initial print runs are in the 10K to 20K range... and 2 of those are the second tier.

Pathfinder 2 corebooks, we saw dozens of pallets full...
Burning Wheel Gold: one pallet, not as tall.
T5.0: 1.5 pallets.

Surveys have repeatedly been done of players... 90% play D&D. Not all exclusively, but 90% of RPG players play D&D. (have ever played, those ratios climb.)

Likewise, the dataset lacks attendance data. Without which... the gen con numbers are worthless for describing players. It's a good sign of the number of companies; there, it's probably a fairly representative sample.

ALso, the data has categorization issues. Star Wars TSR doesn't describe a known system; it's likely that it was Star Wars d20.

Further, many of the "Living ___" events are setting for D&D 3.X, rather than being generic d20. And they tended to be, according to the coverage, large.

And then, there's the issue that non-D20 D&D is not connected with core 3.X... some 300±20 are actually D&D rules, and include some of the largest events at Gen Con...

I can supply some observations from my local con...

D&D 2 events... but over 30 players between them.
Me: 3 events 3 systems (MLP:TOE, STA, and Feng Shui 2), total 14 players, half of whom also played D&D. 1 of whom was totally new to tabletop RPGing. (She'd come to drop off her eldest, who was one of those 14, as well, and decided to stay for boardgames... but knowing she'd been playing MMOs... She started RPGing with Feng Shui...)

other RPGs: 4 that I saw... total about 12 players (yes, overlap) and 4 GM's; almost all of those players were there for D&D, but taking a chance to play something else.

The ones I know were not there for D&D but for some other RPG? 4... C's group - who were there primarily for boardgames, but also played in my MLP game... Yeah, I ran a kid-oriented RPG at 10pm for a group of adults. We had a bunch of really silly fun.

aramis erak said:

Flaws with GenCon and Origins data: many games are there because the developers are there to push it; the numbers look much more like the ratio of staffers than players...

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So, you are saying that the huge numbers of 5E players at Gen Con this year are a mirage, and the large number of tables actually reflect the number of WOTC staffers? That seems ... unlikely.

Surveys have repeatedly been done of players... 90% play D&D. Not all exclusively, but 90% of RPG players play D&D. (have ever played, those ratios climb.)

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Now this is interesting; could you please link to your sources? It's OK if they are US-centric, I'd be interested in any other actual data sources.

Also, the data has categorization issues. Star Wars TSR doesn't describe a known system; it's likely that it was Star Wars d20. Further, many of the "Living ___" events are setting for D&D 3.X, rather than being generic d20. And they tended to be, according to the coverage, large.
And then, there's the issue that non-D20 D&D is not connected with core 3.X... some 300±20 are actually D&D rules, and include some of the largest events at Gen Con...

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There were other columns fo data I used to make calculations -- feel free to do a better job and post it. I doubt it will make more than a 10% or so difference, but better data always appreciated.

GrahamWills said:

So, you are saying that the huge numbers of 5E players at Gen Con this year are a mirage, and the large number of tables actually reflect the number of WOTC staffers? That seems ... unlikely.

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I cannot tell if you are intentionally trying to misunderstand what flaw aramis erak was pointing out or not but having experience with many SF Bay Area conventions, the number of games being run in systems other than D&D are a reflection of the game events being run by the staff of an RPG team or just dedicated players/playtesters.

Having a list of events without the attendance data for each event only shows that a number of events made it to the list and doesn't help measure out the players.


Here's data on a really old survey (1999) with when asked what games
TRPG players play monthly, the answers (multiple choices allowed) were:
D&D: 66%
Vampire: The Masquerade: 25%
Star Wars: 21%
Palladium: 16%
Werewolf: The Apocalypse: 15%
Shadowrun: 15%
Star Trek: 12%
Call of Cthulu: 8%
Legend of the Five Rings: 8%
Deadlands: 5%
Alternity: 4%
GURPS: 3%

edit for link to data results http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html