D&D 5E Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?

[Snarf Zagyg]

Doesn't like bards 'cos wanna be one!

Oh yes you do

You know what, Clearstream, I LIKE YOU. You're not like the other people, here, on the Ennie World.
Oh, don't go get me wrong. They're fine people, they're
Good D&D players. But they're content to sit back, maybe
Watch a little Critical Role on the YouTube, maybe kick
Back a cool, Coors 16-ouncer. They're good, fine people,
Clearstream. But they don't know ... what the bards are doing
To the soil!

You know that @TwoSix kid, the kid that with the gnome avatar
In the forum. He's a strange one. Some of the commenters
Say he smokes crack, but I don't believe it.
Anyway, for his eighteenth anniversary on Ennie World, all he wanted was an Owlbear.
Kept bugging his friends. "Guys, get me an owlbear. I'll never
Ask for anything else as long as I live." So his friends
Break down and get Twosix an owlbear.
Anyway, 10:30, the other night, I go on ennie world, and there's
The Twosix kid, asking about trees. I say, "Why are you asking about trees?
What are you looking for?" He says "I'm looking for my owlbear."
I say, "Jumping Jesus on a Pogo Stick. Everybody knows
The. Owlbear. Lives. In a dungeon. In the ground. Why the hell do you
Think they call it an owlbear, anyway?" Now Clearstream, do you
Think a kid like Twosix is going to know what the bards are
Doing to the soil?

I first became aware of this about ten years ago, the summer
My good friend, Chad, died. You know that carnival comes into
Town every year? Well this year they came through with a ride
Called The Mixer. The man said, "Keep your head, and arms, inside
The Mixer at all times." But Chad, he was a DAAAREDEVIL, just
Like his favorite blind superhero. He was leaning out saying "Hey everybody,
Look at me! Look at me!" Pow! He was decapitated! They found
Chad's head over by the snow cone concession.
A few days after that, I open up the mail. And there's a pamphlet
In there. From Pueblo, Colorado, and it's addressed to Chad.
And it's entitled, "Do you know what the bards are doing to our
Soil?"

Now, Clearstream, if you look at the soil around any large D&D city,
There's a big underground bard population. Waterdeep,
For an example. Look at the soil around Waterdeep, Clearstream.
You can't build on it; you can't grow anything in it. The Lords of Waterdeep
Says it's due to poor farming. But I know what's really going on,
Clearstream. I know it's the bards. They're in it with the elves.
They're building special forests for Elvish Bards, I swear to
God.

You know what, Clearstream, I like you. You're not like the other
People, here on ennie world.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, we just disagree. There are billions of people on Earth, making billions of choices; inevitably, the same choices will be made again and again. So when people are firing birdshot again and again and again, so eventually somethings are going to reappear, even if entirely accidentally.

So I do think some sort of RPG game would emerge even if Gygax was never born, although I'll admit it might be very very different indeed.

After all, Chainmail was not made in a void; wargaming itself predated D&D, and Gygax ran with the concept from rules made by his friend Jeff Perren. Citing Wikipedia below;

In the late 1960s, fantasy elements were increasingly used in wargames. Linguist M. A. R. Barker began to use wargame-like sessions to develop his creation Tékumel.[7] In 1970, the New England Wargamers Association demonstrated a fantasy wargame called Middle Earth at a convention of the Military Figure Collectors Association.[13] Fantasy writer Greg Stafford created the board wargame White Bear and Red Moon to explore conflicts in his fantasy world Glorantha, though it did not see publication until 1974.[citation needed] A wargame session was held at the University of Minnesota in 1969, with Dave Wesely as the moderator, in which the players represented single characters in a Napoleonic scenario centering on a small town named Braunstein. This did not lead to any further experimentation in the same vein immediately, but the ground had been laid. It actually bore greater resemblance to later LARP games than what would conventionally be thought of as a role-playing game. Wesely would, later in the year, run a second "Braunstein," placing the players in the roles of government officials and revolutionaries in a fictional banana republic.

And roleplaying games (mostly focused on reenactments of history instead of fantasy) itself predate D&D by centuries. But anyway, I don't disagree that without Gygax the gaming landscape would probably look very different, so I'll drop it.

Arneson was in the Braunstein game, actually, and the very first D&D game was the same group as Braunstein minus Wesley. Wesley thought Braunstrin was a bust, but Arneson mixed those ideas with Gygax's Chsinmali rules and setting.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

The common wisdom is what Morrus says above:

Eventually, some of those new players will find their way to other games. Not all of them, not even a large percentage, but a small percentage of a lot of people is still a boon for the rest of the industry.

But people have been saying that for almost seven years now, and there hasn't been a big boom of non-DnD games
Apart from SEVENTH SEA. But even that dropped its second Kickstarter

There's been a nice little boom of indy and secondary publishers with Modiphius and Free League going strong. But still nothing nearing Paizo. And even that just seems to be maintaining past sales


At this point the question ain't "is DnD bad for other games?" and more "where's the boom that we've been expecting for half a decade?"
If a rising tide floats all boats, why is Pathfinder 2 at the same depth?

 

[Parmandur]

The common wisdom is what Morrus says above:

But people have been saying that for almost seven years now, and there hasn't been a big boom of non-DnD games
Apart from SEVENTH SEA. But even that dropped its second Kickstarter

There's been a nice little boom of indy and secondary publishers with Modiphius and Free League going strong. But still nothing nearing Paizo. And even that just seems to be maintaining past sales


At this point the question ain't "is DnD bad for other games?" and more "where's the boom that we've been expecting for half a decade?"
If a rising tide floats all boats, why is Pathfinder 2 at the same depth?

Because it's not in Target. Once more RPGs are sold in boxes at Target, then we'll be cooking with oil . The crazy thing is, I think that's going to happen the way things are going.

 

[Sithlord]

The

5th Ed does fantasy fine. Doing a fantasy game that is almost exactly like DnD but with ______ feels needless, when you can just ad ______ to DnD. And you already know the rules and own the books

I think the games that will do better in the long terms are games of a different genre. Where the _______ is spaceships or vampires or vampire spaceships. Where you can't easily add it to DnD without rewriting the whole game
Science fiction and fantasy, some horror, modern stuff, superheroes

Starfinder says hold my beer

 

[pogre]

I don't think it is bad 5e is dominant. A lot of folks playing D&D would not be playing RPGs if it were not for 5e. Taking away D&D would not open up the market - it would constrict the market.

 

[schneeland]

At this point the question ain't "is DnD bad for other games?" and more "where's the boom that we've been expecting for half a decade?"
If a rising tide floats all boats, why is Pathfinder 2 at the same depth?

I tend to agree. While I don't think D&D5 is bad for other games, I'm not sure if it's good for them, either. At least not beyond maintaining that roleplaying games are a thing at all. For the most part, D&D seems to grow its own player base (not that this is bad, but it doesn't necessarily help other games either).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

At this point the question ain't "is DnD bad for other games?" and more "where's the boom that we've been expecting for half a decade?"
If a rising tide floats all boats, why is Pathfinder 2 at the same depth?

People were expecting it too soon, that's the issue.

Look at the relationship between the early 1980s D&D boom and the success of other RPGs. It's not until the early 1990s that other RPGs start eating D&D's lunch.

5E came out in 2014, but it didn't "go huge" until 2017 or 2018, suddenly becoming dramatically more successful than the level 3E had been at. So if we saw a similar relationship - and we might not - we wouldn't expect to see other RPGs benefitting a huge amount from D&D until, what, 2027? Maybe a little earlier or later.

The ideal situations for other RPGs are essentially two-fold:

1) D&D just stays where it is and keeps pumping out material, but doesn't modernize. This will it hit extremely slowly, like really slowly, but it was a big part of what cause problems for 2E. 2E really wasn't modernized compared to 1E, or not every much, and it meant that as rare people played other systems, they came back and reported that D&D wasn't so hot in comparison. This had a very slow impact.

So if we see no new PHB etc., or really only a 5.5E (i.e. less than 1E/2E), and WotC don't keep up with what "the kids today" are into, this is gonna hit them.

2) D&D screws up bigtime somehow. Any number of ways. If it manages to make itself unpopular, people aren't going to want to just give up on RPGs. They dodged a bullet or three on this recently (i.e. last couple of years or so). Had they not changed leadership and changed attitudes I think they'd have got clipped there.

All this said, I think other RPGs are benefiting, just not in a huge-huge way. The number and scale of successful RPG Kickstarters is SKYROCKETING. The number of new and original RPGs is drastically increasing. The number of high-quality new RPGs is increasing. The daring and particular-ness of indie RPGs is increasing (I would argue, he said, looking at Spicepunk 1997 and Shadow of the Mogg on his desktop).

It's even possible we're at the beginning of a massive surge for other RPGs, given the huge Kickstarter stuff, but I think it's still a few years out - if it even happens. I don't buy D&D blocks other RPGs in the sense that people won't play them because of it though - the sort of people who go back to D&D or who won't play others never would have. The only ones it might impact are RPGs with a similar crunch level and theme, but which don't have tools like DNDBeyond, and that's not a large portion of RPGs.

 

[darjr]

Direct evidence would be hard to define, let alone find, but we have at least one publisher in this thread, our kind host Russ who is certainly not beholden to WotC, whose position is that it helps.

Who also publishes a large amount of 5e content.

But yea! Russ?

 

[Parmandur]

Who also publishes a large amount of 5e content.

True, but also his own systems, and other third parties.