D&D General D&D's Utter Dominance Is Good or Bad Because...

[Aldarc]

This is a thread about the good and bad of D&D dominance.

These are the good and bad of dominance.

Your post seemed less concerned with the descriptive elements of "the good and bad of dominance" and more about the speculative fear-mongering of the TTRPG landscape without D&D to dominate it.

 

[Oofta]

Why must I or anyone else do anything of the sort?


Let's find out together if this is true or not. My goal, however, is to play what games that I find to be fun regardless of fears you may have about what happens if we stop feeding the 800 lb. Gorilla.

Did anyone actually state that you, or anyone else should not play what they want? Because that's not what was said.

What was said was that if there was no D&D there are 3 possibilities.

A) there would be some other 800 lbs gorilla.
B) the overall TTRPG player base would be smaller
C) about the same number of people would still play but no one company would dominate.

I think C is highly unlikely for multiple reasons. A ... maybe. But option B? Fewer people playing? I think that's the most likely outcome. I think it would likely be significantly fewer people playing because there would be no halo effect or gateway into TTRPGs without D&D.

You seem to think option B would be a good thing. That's the issue. Because you don't personally care for something, fewer people should have fun playing TTRPGs. Maybe that's not what you meant, but it iswhat it sounds like.

 

[Aldarc]

Did anyone actually state that you, or anyone else should not play what they want? Because that's not what was said.

No one needed to say anything for me to say what I said. I was just declaring my approach to this hobby that I enjoy will persist regardless of which game happpens to be thee 800 lb. gorilla. Now that I have addressed the core premise of your concern in your preface here, I think that there is little need to address the rest.

 

[Oofta]

No one needed to say anything for me to say what I said. I was just declaring my approach to this hobby that I enjoy will persist regardless of which game happpens to be thee 800 lb. gorilla. Now that I have addressed the core premise of your concern in your preface here, I think that I can safely ignore the rest.

It is not how it reads. Take or leave the feedback.

 

[TheSword]

Somebody mentioned about marketing budgets. If you want to compete with the big boys, you need big boys money. Small companies don't have large sums of money to burn on marketing, that's true. But let's be honest, without marketing, it's hard to capture market share. What good is excellent product if nobody knows that product exists? So they need to be creative how they use their money and shoot for biggest ROI. Or, you know, couple of smaller companies can merge into a bigger one with more funds. Corporate mergers are not that uncommon even with smaller companies.

It’s worth noting that marketing has never been more accessible to new companies.

Also worth noting that many of the games that we are talking about are owned by large companies putting out multiple product lines. They have marketing budgets.

They still get it wrong.

 

[Minigiant]

Your post seemed less concerned with the descriptive elements of "the good and bad of dominance" and more about the speculative fear-mongering of the TTRPG landscape without D&D to dominate it.

I'm not the type to simply repeat other people without adding much.

If there are pages and pages of "here's the bad", I'm not going to simply say "I agree what X said". We have an emote system for that.

So in order to add to the conversation, I stated that a dominant figure that makes itself seen is seen for good or ill.

 

[Swanosaurus]

Did anyone actually state that you, or anyone else should not play what they want? Because that's not what was said.

What was said was that if there was no D&D there are 3 possibilities.

A) there would be some other 800 lbs gorilla.
B) the overall TTRPG player base would be smaller
C) about the same number of people would still play but no one company would dominate.

I think C is highly unlikely for multiple reasons. A ... maybe. But option B? Fewer people playing? I think that's the most likely outcome. I think it would likely be significantly fewer people playing because there would be no halo effect or gateway into TTRPGs without D&D.

You seem to think option B would be a good thing. That's the issue. Because you don't personally care for something, fewer people should have fun playing TTRPGs. Maybe that's not what you meant, but it iswhat it sounds like.

Somehow I doubt that, were if the TTRPG player base were significantly smaller, there would be a lot of people sitting around not knowing about RPGs and just thinking "Something's missing from my life, but I don't know what." If people have the free time, they will usually find something that engages them - if not RPGs, then something else. Which is just as fine. RPGs are a great hobby, but nothing is "lost to the world" if the overall number of players is lower.

On the other hand, you could argue that the D&D monoculture keeps a lot of people within the RPG from discovering games that might be fun to them, because it's likely they'll start with D&D and then stick with it because they don't have the time or inclination to look at other systems. Maybe a lot of them will drop out of the hobby after half a year, thinking "Nah, RPGs just aren't for me", not knowing that some other game might be just right for them.

 

[Reynard]

It’s worth noting that marketing has never been more accessible to new companies.

Also worth noting that many of the games that we are talking about are owned by large companies putting out multiple product lines. They have marketing budgets.

They still get it wrong.

I just want to be clear: you are saying that any game could unseat D&D if the ones producing it matched WotC's marketing budget?

 

[Minigiant]

It’s worth noting that marketing has never been more accessible to new companies.

Also worth noting that many of the games that we are talking about are owned by large companies putting out multiple product lines. They have marketing budgets.

They still get it wrong.

Some of that goes to the old hipster gatekeeping @Kurotowa talked about.

The big dominant force typically attempts to appeal to everyone once it hits market saturation in it's niche fandom.

A lot of TTRPG fans want their way to be big without any alterations to meet the masses. And some don't even know what the masses want in order to be big.


That's another pro and con.

Pro: They actually attempt to appeal to you.

Con: If they screw up an element they made to appeal to you, they've warped the image and mechanics of that element for decades.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But again.

Someone has to be the big dog.

Can't have a little dog acting like the big dog.

TTRPGs is a hobby of many little dogs and one big dog. If you take out the current big dog, one of the little dogs gotta level up.

Because no one does, industry dies.

Disagree. As I said above, no one has to be that big.