Why do you play games other than D&D?

lowkey13 said:

I mean, you can bing all of this if you want.

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I -do- in fact use Bing. They pay for my yearly Amazon Prime subscription and then some in those nifty reward points!

To the topic at hand, however:

I play D&D 5E because it is about as Rules Lite as I like to play. Never had much success with Fate and the even lighter systems (not that there's anything wrong with them, just not my thing), so 5E feels darn perfect in that sense. Regardless of the system though, it's still "Hey, D&D night?" "Yep, D&D night."

For a great majority of our time, however, we prefer something with more crunch (not PF1 feat trees crunch, but more than 5E crunch). So we play D&D to get a break from Non-D&D.

I play other RPGs to experience something besides the default D&D experiences. Different magic systems, different settings, different genres.

Even though D&D was my gateway to the hobby in ‘77 and is still one of my all-time favorites (3.X being my favorite iteration), HERO is my #1.

Even staying within other FRPGs, the different mechanics and assumptions drove different play styles and feel. Stormbringer felt D&D, even if you used Deities & Demigods. The barbarian/sorceress I played in GURPS- one of a pair of identical twin sisters, with the other played by a buddy-felt nothing like a D&D version of the same.

Speaking of “the same”, I used to be in a group that- over time- played games in a dozens of systems. As a thought experiment with a practical side-effect, I decided to build a character in as many of the systems as made sense. “Slapstick” was a noir, gun-toting, antiheroic mercenary who wore clownface. Think of The Comedian from Watchmen and you’re on the right track. I statted him out in HERO, RIFTS/Heroes Unimited, MechWarrior, Torg, GURPS and several other systems we were either playing or contemplating playing. (I even did a D&D version who toted repeating crossbows.) Due to the different settings and mechanics in each of the various systems, every version of Slapstick was different enough that they would play differently. Some moreso than others.

Over the years I've played D&D in various flavors (including Pathfinder), CoC, Star Wars, Boot Hill, GURPS, RIFTS, Paranoia, Amber, Exalted, VtM, Gamma World, Mouse Gaurd, and Chill. I mostly play D&D because that's what people want to play. I've also read and/or own a ton of other rules sets.

Maybe it's me but of the above, only Amber, RIFTS, and Mouse Guard really played differently and none of those experiences were positive for me.

The mechanics for me are mostly math. How something plays has vastly more to do with what the GM prepared for the group to experience or how the GM handles the group experience than it does anything else. Systems have something that they are naturally designed to produce, and some of them - like D&D, Chill 2e, and WEG Star Wars - do a really good job of achieving it very naturally, but it's not that hard to shift your perspective and have say D&D play like CoC or CoC play like D&D or heck VtM play like D&D. In fact, if I could pin down why we dropped our CoC campaign after just a year of play it was that I had very inadvertently created a CoC campaign that was way too much like the D&D campaign I'd been running for years before - with Deep Ones running around, Cultists, and plots to put things in the heavens (I didn't know what the plot of 'Masks' before I bought it).

I play games other than D&D because some one offers to run them, or for the novelty. But I'm still waiting for the experience of a game that plays radically differently to D&D that I actually enjoy. I'd really been hoping to make it to some Cons this year to play a few radically different games with hopefully veterans of those games, but alas real life seems to always get in the way.

lowkey13 said:

There certainly wasn't a dearth of RPGs at the beginning. There was a vibrant hobby community! And not just Tunnels and Trolls and Rune Quest and other D&D-type games, but also sci-fi games and superhero games and dystopian sci fi games and so on ... and this is just the 70s.

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Yep, there was a flurry of 'em. And it never /really/ stopped. It was replaced with a flurry of d20 games at the turn of the millennium, but there's always some hopeful designer, publishing some brilliant innovative system, and watching it win an award or few, inspire a handful of zealous converts, and then vanish into obscurity while D&D marches on.

So I think it is profoundly unhelpful to simply say that D&D is just some complex, niche game that somehow lucked into market dominance and by the powers of pure luck and an undiscriminating and nostalgic population kept it, because that does a severe disservice to the people who play it.

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OK, I'll admit, I'm cynical, I don't often think the best, nor even the second-best, nor even the mediocre of people. It's a deep character flaw and one that I work on - off-line, with little success so far.

And, yes, it's not helpful, /because of how it paints people who play the game/.

It's also not helpful, because it's absolutely true. D&D /is/ a quixotic, narrow, primitive TTRPG which, had it not been first to market, and had it not gained notoriety in the 80s, and had any number of other perfect storm factors not swirled around it, would be as niche and unknown as the Barbara Cartland Romance RPG. And understanding that really doesn't help anyone with anything - it just indulges my impulse to cynicism.

Anyway, this doesn't mean that D&D is the best because it is the biggest, but it does mean that it is more helpful to understand the things it does right in order to how it is the biggest, and why it has proven so impervious to challenges over time.

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Sometimes the thing a product does right are a lot less important than things that go right. ("Better to be lucky than good," as they say.)

There will always be a other RPGs, thankfully, but no game has ever seriously come close to toppling the D&D/PF hegeomony, and I think it is helpful to understand why instead of chalking it up to nostalgia, indoctrination, and stupid consumers.

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If you want to understand /why/, you really have to take into account all the explanations, including the cynical marketing & business reasons, not just the ones that might be interpreted to paint it in a positive light, or make our inner hardcore rule wonk sit up and debate.
Uninformed consumers, group-think, teen suicide, market forces, nerdrage, nostalgia, controversy - they all play a part. d20 instead of d%, irrelevant. 6 stats instead of 4, irrelevant.

And, most significantly, we should not offer up qualities as an explanation /that aren't real/. Like every time someone says D&D is "simple" I want to lock them in solitary with a 1e DMG until they can correctly recite, understand, and interpret every rule in it, resolving all apparent & actual contradictions.
..but housing lifers is /so/ expensive.

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lowkey13 said:

Well, here's a counterpoint- you're a cynical and grouchy old man.

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Not really /counter/.

And so I would start by saying that you are, in fact, incorrect by saying that D&D is complex; if you ever played any of the many games that reached prominence in the 80s that were SO MUCH MORE COMPLEX than D&D, you know of what I speak (ugh, Living Steel).

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Never even heard of Living Steel. But, Champions! and GURPS, both. So I've experienced notoriously complex systems.

And, honestly, familiarity papers over complexity very effectively. You /try/ a game like Hero after a decade of D&D, it seems so much more complex. Then, after mastering it you realize, no, that's not the case, at all.

And that's where the issue of path dependency comes in; sure, it is popular in some ways because it is popular, but because it is popular (widely disseminated and played) you also ended up getting a critical mass of people that could, and did, play it in different ways. It was enough of a canvas that people could use it to paint with. Follow me?

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I've certainly heard the canvas analogy before. Back in the day, one "D&D" game could have startlingly little in common with the next.

And so, by default, D&D became the baseline game that people could use in the ways that best suited them. Whereas other games didn't have quite the same community, didn't have that critical mass, and so you were more likely to learn it from the rulebook and attempt to faithfully play it.

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Very true, and entirely in support of what I've been saying, actually. That completely throws off my rhythm, I hope you realize.

Or, put another way, you look at D&D and can't understand how those rules were ever followed; .

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I don't just /look/ at AD&D, I played it for decades, and I /didn't/ follow /all/ the rules, and never met anyone who did. So I understand how those rules were never followed. It's also funny how some of us picked completely different rules out of the general chaos that was TSR D&D to follow (or even remember). Celebrim just mentioned the bizarre rules for Pummeling/Grappling/Overbearing (3.x Grapple rules get a /lot/ of flack, and deservedly so, but they were still a huge improvement, both in being more functional, and, incredibly, in being simpler, than that obscure section of the DMG). I used weapon v armor adjustment.

I look at D&D and see an amazing tradition that combined oral and written documents and formed a touchstone for people's lives

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That is such a nice way of saying, well exactly what I've been saying...


...but, really, in talking about "Why D&D?" we're being terribly non-responsive to the OP.

And, honestly, familiarity papers over complexity very effectively. You /try/ a game like Hero after a decade of D&D, it seems so much more complex. Then, after mastering it you realize, no, that's not the case, at all.

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Most of the complexity of HERO is in PC creation/advancement, anyway. Once you do that, you can usually play without touching the rulebook more than a few times per session...as a group.

I play games that aren't D&D for the same reason that I eat foods that aren't haggis.

I also watch TV shows that aren't Star Trek, read books that aren't A Song of Ice and Fire, go to movies that aren't Marvel Cinematic Universe, and listen to music that isn't American Top 40.

I do this because a monotonous diet of anything is BORING.

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I play games other than D&D because I'm not always interested in the leveling treadmill.
D&D is designed with the leveling treadmill of getting to more interesting content the more you level.

I like games where the challenges are less about scaling the enemies but solving the mystery or puzzle.

What 5th edition seems to be doing well is party synergy. Player A does a special thing, then player B does their special thing and then player C does their thing and boom encounter solved.
Running 5th edition has made me better at the encounter improve to scale up and down depending on how the players are doing.