NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6579361" data-attributes="member: 996">'Clarity,' somehow, feels like a good example right now.  Say you crack open a gaming book, and it is dense with jargon that it never bothers to define, totally lacking in organization, and flatly contradicts itself every time it does manage to convey a rule.  You couldn't play that game.  No one but the inarticulate designer could.  It's fallen far short.  Not of some arbitrary standard, but, indeed, of a universal one.Now, sure, someone could set an unreasonably high or low bar for clarity, or for any other quality.  If you set the bar for clarity low enough for early versions of D&D to comfortably clear, there's hardly a game published, except, perhaps, Spawn of Fshawn and it's ilk, that wouldn't also clear it.   Nod. The analysis has long since been done.  Valid criticisms of D&D have been hashed out decades since (not that there aren't plenty of invalid ones, as well).  Any reader could easily supply some well-known ones as D&D's 'shortcomings' - unless they were somehow convinced D&D were perfect (are you convinced D&D is perfect?  Would you care to prove that it is?).  There was some analysis - speculation really - in the post you quoted, but it wasn't about the quality of D&D, but why D&D is so resistant to improvement, and why the hobby is, similarly, so prone to niche fragmentation and very low growth.Now, if you want to assume that D&D is a fantastic, accessible game and that everyone who tries it loves it, you could, and then you could come up with some alternative explanation for the consistently miniscule size of the TTRPG hobby.  Something that accounts for D&D having mainstream name recognition, and it yet remaining unpopular even as closely-related hobbies, like CRPGs, MMOs, CCGs and board gaming are successful.I'd be delighted to hear something more optimistic than what I could come up with.</blockquote>

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