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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1890945" data-attributes="member: 19893">No one in 1990 would have thought that a white wolf game about vampires by a guy with a dot in his name with lots of pretentious words would unseat AD&D and end up causing everyone to (unsuccessfully) mimick its formula, either.I have trouble with thinking that the kind of people who hang out at the forge or even the nobilis and exalted fanboys on RPGnet are the "gaming cultural elite".. more like the "self-appointed elite with a very bad concept of reality".  The truth is that D&D/D20 is the dominant and majoritarian force by a landslide in gaming today, and the only people who think otherwise are self-deluded fools engaged in games of mental masturbation.None of that means that those selfsame self-deluded fools won't get heard if the shout long and loud enough, or end up in positions of influence in the right places.Today they take over the GoO Amber boards and destroy Amber to promote their pet game. Tomorrow one of the vociferous exalted-nuts from RPGnet gets a seat judging the Ennies. The day after that someone from the Forge gets a job at Wizards and convinces confused marketing guys that his revolutionary RPG about zombie housewives buying groceries is going to be the next big thing, and they all listen to him because he speaks with big words.Not only is it possible, it happened before. TSR was in the hands of people who didn't really know what they were doing.Vampire comes out and its a moderate success.TSR; being intellectually bankrupt, see vampire's success and say "we have to copy what they did, instead of go with our own ideas or listen to our customers, and we're sure to succeed!".Every other company on the market (just about) copies TSR or WW, the latter of whom have now stolen the industry leader position without so much as a single shot fired.No one grasps that Vampires success was due to appealing to a non-gamer niche market, the new story-based games turn people off gaming by the thousands (in both numbers who leave, and those who simply never join) and the 99% of the gothkids who start playing vampire will never actually play another RPG, and grow out of vampire when they get over their wearing-black-and-being-sexually-ambiguous phase.End result: RPGs are powerless to defend themselves against other hobby niches that have their head on right, and gaming almost dies out as a viable hobby until D20 shows up to rescue it.Next time, there might not be a D20.Nisarg</blockquote>

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