I wasn't going to post in this thread, but
@Ovinomancer called me into it.
I'm not American, and so don't quite get the American relationship to chain restaurants. I live in a city that - whether right or wrong - thinks of itself as the food and coffee capital of Australia. Chain restaurants and cafes (eg Starbucks) exist, and presumably get a reasonable amount of custom (at least the restaurants; at least one Starbucks in a major cafe/restaurant strip had to close due to a lack of patronage). But they wouldn't normally figure in a
taste-based discussion about where to go out for dinner. As opposed to, say, a price-based one - when I was a student the chain burger restaurants were very cheap - or a
is there a climbing frame for the kids-based one. To some extent there are geographic differences here - there are more chain restaurants in middle-to-outer than in inner suburbs - but as is often the case with cultural trends the suburbs have themselves changed over the past decade or two, catching up with cafe and restaurant culture.
I also don't play 5e D&D, and have no interest in doing so. As I posted a while ago on another active thread, the only version of D&D I have interest in playing these days is 4e. The three main (and related) reasons why I am not interested in 5e are that it (i) has little in the way of non-combat resolution, (ii) tends to emphasise GM rather than player influence over the outcome of action declarations (especially outside the space of combat resolution and the hit point/damage framework) and (iii) relies upon strong GM control over the "adventuring day" in order to ensure the intraparty balance of mechanical effectiveness.
What those three things have in common is that they all push towards a GM-as-storyteller approach to RPGing which doesn't appeal to me. That impression of 5e D&D is reinforced by scanning threads on these boards, where the overwhelming discussion of mechanical issues seems to be focused on combat resolution, while the predominant approach to other features of play, both non-combat resolution and "bigger picture" matters like pacing, establishing stakes, etc seems to be one that emphasises GM authority and "spotlighting" of characters rather than either (a) player protagonism producing character-driven play (such as I would associate with Burning Wheel or PbtA systems) or (b) strong and binding mechanics that produce outcomes in the fiction somewhat independent of what anyone might want at the moment (such as I would associate with Rolemaster, to some extent RuneQuest, and to some extent Classic Traveller). Part of what I like about 4e D&D is that it tends fairly strongly towards (a) in many parts of play, and in those parts - especially combat - where it doesn't, it tends fairly strongly towards (b) instead.
My view is that there are a range of reasons that explain 5e D&D's popularity. A number of them have been canvassed in this thread. I think one important one is that, for a lot of RPGers,
RPGing is largely synonymous with
working through a story that the GM (or module writer) has set out in advance while
evoking their character from time-to-time in ways that are fairly immediate and memorably colourful. 5e D&D's emphasis on GM authority and "spoltlighting" of characters is well-suited to that sort of play.
Sounds like something a movie critic would say. A lot of movies get panned by critics, yet at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is does the audience enjoy the movie.
<snip>
Maybe you like the art-house version of TTRPGs. That's fine. But year in year out growth with no other TTRPG nipping at their heels? You don't get that with a bad game.
If you define
bad game so that it is inconsistent with
commercial success then your last two sentences follow. But that definition is not self-evident.
All the evidence available to me suggests that chain hamburger stores are doing fine in Australia. That doesn't settle the question of whether or not they're selling bad food - where the basis for the judgement of
bad food could be health, or gastronomics, or environmental, or socio-cultural, or any of a number of other potentially applicable frameworks for evaluation.
Avengers: Age of Ultron seemed a pretty popular movie. That didn't stop a prominent Australian reviewer panning it (the online journal is called The Daily Review). The fact that a lot of people paid money to see it, and didn't agree with the critic, doesn't show the critic was wrong. Teju Cole had a pretty critical review of The Black Panther. It's a very interesting review. The popularity of the film has no bearing on whether his criticisms are sound or not.
In my view, the dominant screen personalities in The Avengers, that make it an enjoyable film, are Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. Ruffalo came up through small films - the ones I remember are You Can Count on Me, My Life Without Me (a wonderful film) and the Kids Are All Right (not so good in my view, and you can start to see Ruffalo projecting a persona that it's about him rather than the character). Someone who measures the quality of movies by reference to their box office is, even if they don't realise it, wishing away the necessary conditions of Ruffalo appearing as The Hulk.
To go back to food, in Melbourne today it is utterly routine to walk past a building site and see a construction worker eating take away sushi. That would not have happened but for the "avant garde" sushi restaurants of 20 and 30 years ago. The hamburger chains now advertise their "plant-based" burgers on primetime TV. They will sell more vegetarian food than Shakahari, the vegetarian restaurant in Carlton that's been there for maybe 50 years (once a hippy restaurant, it is now quite upmarket). But those plant-based burgers would not exist but for Shakahari and its ilk.
The relationship between the avant-garde and the mainstream, and the relationship of both to quality, is not just one of relative popularity or relative sales. It's much more complex than that.
