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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 5731723" data-attributes="member: 40166">I am familiar with statistics. You've missed my position. My position is that if you want to say "I don't know", that's fine, but if you want to take a position, it should be based on data, not assumption.Yay! I'm doing the happy dance! Finally we're out of the assumption area and we're talking about data!Taking the real data (not the prevailing wisdom) as the null hypothesis is entirely reasonable. But I submit that the data you're relying on tells you very little.The data: <a href="http://www.seankreynolds.com/rpgfiles/gaming/WotCMarketResearchSummary.html" target="_blank">Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0 -- Wizards of the Coast</a>In particular:With Werewolf: The Apocalypse at 15% and Alternity at 4%. We have WotC games at 66-70% of the players and WW games at 25-40%. Hardly 800 lb gorilla material.Notice also that it says D&D, not AD&D. This survey was done in 1999, before D&D 3 came out, so they're obviously lumping in all editions of D&D and AD&D. So taking the D&D numbers as your D&D 4 numbers is obviously incorrect. How many people there were playing an in-print version of D&D? It doesn't say. While D&D players 25-35 spent $1600 a year on their RPGs ($500 less than RPers as a whole), they also tell us that non-miniature players (all ages) averaged $139, with miniature players spending $4,413, so I'd say a lot of that is miniatures. (And possibly used material and books for non-D&D systems.) Extrapolating forward, even if they were buying new D&D books, would they continue to buy them from WotC once WotC gave up their monopoly? Would they change to a new system if their old system was still supported by D20 companies?The most literal interpretation of this survey is that nobody plays D&D 3, 4 or Pathfinder, since none of the people they surveyed did. When extending this, should we conclude that Pathfinder would fall under D&D or not? Yes or no, I think we're assuming what we're trying to prove. When a patent or copyright expires or is given up, generics and other brands come into the market, so I see no reason to assume the OGL & SRD didn't change things.Basically, we have a 12-year-old figure for the number of people who played D&D, all editions. It is completely wrong to extrapolate that to people who play just the current edition of D&D; that's not what the original data was measuring. The changes that the OGL & SRD wrought on the market don't incline me to assume the D&D numbers then don't apply to the sum total of all D&D derived games now.</blockquote>

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