Why do you play games other than D&D?

GrahamWills said:

If you have another source of information, feel free to offer it!

I am a little curious why you expect people with less money to being significantly different in their playing habits from those with disposable income. Is there some reason you feel that rich people are more likely to play non-D&D games, and poor people are more likely to play D&D? Looking at prices of games from the time and now, it's not like it's a significantly different different buy-in cost, so it seems you are suggesting an innate correlation between wealth and liking D&D.

I'm going to challenge that assumption, based on anecdotal evidence. In fact, anecdotally, the people buying dwarven forge and flat screen TVs and blinged out gaming equipment that I know of seem to do so more for D&D than for for, say, Fate. But again, this is anecdotal. So I'll stick with the assumption that wealth has at best a weak correlation with roleplaying game preferences. But if anyone has some better metrics (outside of WOTC who I assume has all the metrics, but little incentive to share), I'd love to hear them, being a statistics sort of guy.


EDIT: The "games people typically play" comment seems more plausible. Anecdotally, I know people often go to cons to try new things, so new games, or unusual ones may be over-represented due to that factor. But, also anecdotally, people who's main home game is D&D do seem to play mostly or exclusively D&D at cons, so although it's more plausible, I'm not sure it will be enough of a factor to serious skew conclusions.

Click to expand...

It has to do with being a representative sample and the bias that self-selection introduces to the data collection process. It won’t have nearly as random a selection of hobby participants as data collected from, say, a list of 1000 people who bought games from a set of websites or a similar number of people selected entering or leaving game stores.

In my 42 or so years of personal experience in the hobby across 3 states and 5 cities, I’ve only gamed with 2 other people who ever attended an RPG convention...and they went with me. If you expand the selection parameters to include CCG tournaments, I get to about a dozen.

I doubt that my experiences are typical, however. In fact, based on my time at ENWorld, I suspect they’re not.

So while the GenCon crowd may be an actual mirror to the hobby’s general demographics, odds are pretty good that it isn’t.

I disagree that 5e is more flexible. I attribute most of its success in being wonderfully tuned to the predominant play pattern first established with Dragonlance and refined by 1990s games like Vampire, Shadowrun, Legend of the 5 Rings, etc. GM creates an elaborate plot for players to play through. Along the way they get to express their predefined awesomeness at controlled points, but never with any danger they will disrupt the plot or fail to express their "concept". It also pays just enough homage to classic tropes. Basically, everyone at the table gets their moments and is protected from having their individual creativity disrupted.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying the question, but I play RPGs other than D&D when I want to roleplay in a genre other than high fantasy? Like sci-fi, or horror. D&D does not have assault rifles or attack helicopters: one could certainly stat those things in D&D, and I probably will lol, but D&D's default assumptions are built around the high fantasy genre, not any other genre one might care to explore. (Actually, 5th Edition is the first edition of D&D that really proclaims that the system can be used for many other genres, and that is with the many optional rules outlined in the 5E DMG.)

But the answer to the question of "why do you play high fantasy RPGs other than D&D?" my answer would simply be I don't. It's not that I think D&D is "the best", it's that D&D is working for me, so I feel no need to go looking for something else to scratch that particular itch. I will also admit to a little bias in favor of D&D over various "D&D-likes": they all have their own merits, but the fact that D&D is the original does have some appeal to me. This was a large part of my stated reason for not playing Pathfinder until 2018, when I finally gave in and played Pathfinder.

I want to clarify my view, based on some of the other responses in this thread.

Many of my favorite systems- HERO, 3.X, etc,- are great for simulating a wide variety of settings with little or no tweaking. But sometimes, a system designed for the express purpose of modeling a particular bit of fiction will simply do it better, more immersively.

Other RPGs are lean and sleek, with just enough “system” in the system to provide all you need with none of the bells & whistles that occasionally get in the way. For example, shortly after D&D brought me into the hobby, The Fantasy Trip/In the Labyrinth proved that a game where 2-5 minutes of character generation were all you needed to run truly fun swords & sorcery games. Especially when you wanted something easier on the brain.

(Similarly I found Star Fleet Battles and Starfighter both to be great fun.)

Campbell said:

I disagree that 5e is more flexible.

Click to expand...

The flexibility comes in giving the DM latitude to go beyond, ignore, override, and, of course, if he wants to, formally change or 'house rule,' the system.

That's not really flexibility at all, but it's functionally used the same way.

It's like, you can break it, and fix it to be however you want. That's like being flexible - except for the loud snapping sound and the duct tape.

I attribute most of its success in being wonderfully tuned to the predominant play pattern first established with Dragonlance and refined by 1990s games like Vampire, Shadowrun, Legend of the 5 Rings, etc.

Click to expand...

Then why did none of those games take off like 5e is taking off now? (That's rhetorical... I mean, ST did do really well in the 90s, relative to the niche non-D&D RPG market of that decade.)

Well, for one thing, there's been a huge renaissance in TT gaming going for like 5 or 6 years now, that wasn't there 20+ years ago.

Then there's the magic trick WotC pulled in developing & releasing 5e without any of it's longtime fans crying foul. 3e & 4e both suffered excessive criticism from what became the OSR crowd for not being traditional-D&D enough. (And 4e for not being 3e enough, /either/) 5e presents as both traditional-D&D-enough and 3e-enough to avoid that sort of controversy, which means when a potential new player looks into this D&D he's heard vaguely about, he doesn't find it's ardent fans arguing about how badwrongfun it is, and just write it off. So 5e fully benefits from the D&D name recognition and legacy of past market dominance.

And, even more so than earlier in WotC's tenure, D&D has gotten mainstream exposure in the media and via people streaming examples of play.

I'm sure there are other factors.

GM creates an elaborate plot for players to play through. Along the way they get to express their predefined awesomeness at controlled points, but never with any danger they will disrupt the plot or fail to express their "concept". It also pays just enough homage to classic tropes. Basically, everyone at the table gets their moments and is protected from having their individual creativity disrupted.

Click to expand...

I mean, a DM could totally run 5e that way, and the AP paradigm it lifted from Paizo certainly fits neatly into it, too, with /long/ elaborate adventure 'paths' instead of itty bitty modules or home-cook'n adventures or random dungeoncrawls.

OTOH, the DM can do prettymuch anything else he wants with it, too, like said home-campaign adventures or random dungeon crawls, or even collaborative storytelling campaigns, PvP contests, borderline wargaming, whatever - he could take it further than just style, to genre &c, at least nominally, but might scrub away everything making it remotely recognizeable in the process, and have just "a d20 game" at the end of the day.


Besides, growth comes from new players, who don't come to the game with any particular agenda rooted in how games were played in the 90s.

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 ...)

Click to expand...

(chart snipped to save space)

The chart says how many events were offered but doesn't say how many of them sold out, or got cancelled due to not enough interest. It's a decent guide to who was willing to run what type of game but not so useful in gauging player interest.

2003 was my first GenCon and I'll freely admit to not remembering much of it (I ran on about 8 hours total sleep over 4+ days) but I do recall D&D/AD&D (0e, 1e or similar) events being hard if not impossible to get into unless one flew standby and hoped for a no-show.

In more recent years I recall better, PF has become hugely popular largely because Paizo maintain a big presence at GC while WotC have pulled out of the Con. Also, every CoC session offered sells out in seconds flat. Every 0e-1e D&D event also sells out immediately. After that...you'd have to ask the GenCon people themselves.

I can't imagine only playing one game system. I enjoy a variety of games, and love trying new ones. D&D is fun, but far from my favourite system, and I would get tired of playing it exclusively.

Gumshoe offers great rules for a variety of investigative games. Fate is my favourite system, because it hits all the narrative story beats, is elegant and immersive. Star Trek appeals to my inner trekkie that has never gone away. Icons, Worlds in Peril and Marvel Cortex are great for super heroes. There is a wealth of well designed and exciting rpgs that are not D&D. There's a variety of styles I enjoy and want to try. Only playing D&D? That's a limited diet.

Four pages in and no one has still linked or contextualized the original tweet?

ORIGINAL TWEET THAT [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] REFERENCES HERE

Why play a RPG other than D&D? For the professional game designers out there working on non-D&D systems, do you try to do what D&D already does well but do it better? Or, do you look at what D&D doesn't do well and try to make your mark there?

Click to expand...

And here are some follow-up questions that they ask some of the responding posts that tease at the issues that press the author:

For argument's sake, let's assume that most new RPG players are getting pulled in by 5e (I suspect that's true, but I couldn't produce hard evidence). So, as a professional game developer competing with 5e, how do you lure those players? How do you answer that important question?

Click to expand...

Interesting. D&D is obviously the 800 pound gorilla in the room. What's your thinking here about ignoring it? It has such an impact on the industry.

Click to expand...

Has ignoring D&D translated into business success? Has it pulled in customers? I'm not trying to sell anybody on D&D being the only RPG worth playing (I feel like I've had to repeat that a lot in this thread). I love all sorts of RPGs.

Click to expand...

Not sure I agree that it's a bad premise that D&D has the largest audience of players and pulling players away from D&D to try something different isn't a question professional RPG designers should be trying to answer.

Click to expand...

Someone wrote:

I’m getting from your responses that part of this question is about how we contextualize the realities of DnD’s stranglehold on the industry when we design a game. For a current project, I’m actually interested in capitalizing on some things people love most about DnD ...

Click to expand...

To which the author responded:

Someone gets it!

Click to expand...

I could keep going, but hopefully I have helped more strongly ground the question posed in the OP.

Aldarc said:

I could keep going, but hopefully I have helped more strongly ground the question posed in the OP.

Click to expand...

I was only asking about players. My question was prompted by that tweet, but it isn't the same question. The question I wanted to ask is the one I posted.

I like the way different systems generate different effects, moods, stories, or how my mind interacts with the mechanics.
It can also be that some systems and settings are **so** symbiotic that to experience one you have to use the other.