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

[DEFCON 1]

...but associating this thread to that movie is udderly ridiculous.

That's a bunch of bullcrap right there...

 

[FrozenNorth]

Lots of 3PP sell books of random names and stuff, too. Why should WotC "waste" pages on that and not Domain Management?

See, that’s precisely the problem. You seem to think those tables of names are a waste. I don’t.

Why should your preference for “Domain Management” rules trump my preference for a list of tables I can use to pull random names from when the party meets an NPC?

 

[DarkCrisis]

I appreciate a good Kung Pao Enter the Fist meme as anyone but associating this thread to that movie is udderly ridiculous.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My current group started out as 5e only. We have since played Blades in the Dark, Stars without Number, Lancer, Old gods of Appalachia and even one guys homebrew RPG. That said most of those only lasted a few sessions. But we do occasionally cycle back to them for a few more. Probably 90% of our time is spent on 5e.

I’d say if it wasn’t for 5e those 4-5 other boats wouldn’t have been lifted by my group either. I’m sure I’m far from the only one.

Yes, but as a percentage of the hobby, how much is that? And of course, is it self-contained? (As in, how much of your group splays out to others). As I said, if its increased the general populace of other parts of the hobby, that's not necessarily useful.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I am not seeing any evidence to the contrary either however… the premise certainly makes more sense than the alternative to me. If you have no one attracting players, how does that benefit anyone?

I'd say the frequent "I can't find anyone to play anything but 5e" is evidence. Its not overwhelming, but it doesn't exactly suggest the expansion has spilled out to other games in a significant way.

I can certainly see a case that once attracted to TTRPGs some people will branch out from the game they started with. I know I did

The question is what percentage is "some".

 

[Thomas Shey]

Conversely there's no evidence significantly more people would play TTRPGs if there were no D&D.

No, but it might be a little bit easier proportionately to find players; as it is, even people who prefer other games often get sucked into the 5e sphere because its at least something, and the larger amount that is around, the more its likely to happen.

(This isn't new, of course; to one degree or another its always been easier to find D&D games than anything else. But the bigger percentage of the hobby is D&D, the more true that'll be).

 

[Thomas Shey]

When I visit Drivethru I see a lot of non-D&D content. It would be interesting to see sales figures for all those, but I am guessing it's not insignificant. 5% of 100 is only 5, but 5% of a million is 50,000. The larger the player base D&D creates, the larger the pool of players who might be interested in trying something else.

I wouldn't draw too much conclusion from that, however; DriveThru can also sell a lot to people who are going to only end up reading it and never play. I own massive numbers of RPG pdfs that I'll never get around to playing; the combination of often modest prices and space storage issues makes that much more practical with PDFs.

 

[Thomas Shey]

None of us individually know or will ever know. That's correct and exactly the point.

Which means that yeah... the question of "Is the dominance of D&D good or bad?" has no articulated answer with regards to players playing other games. So really... it's an unnecessary question to ask, and an even more unnecessary question to bother wasting our time trying to answer. Because none of us know the true answer... all we know is what the answer is for us. But that doesn't help anyone else.

Entirely fair. Its just that people should seriously understand why people who are not primarily focused on D&D (or those who actively avoid it) are liable to potentially roll their eyes at the idea that D&D's success is good for everybody; its a premise without any obvious support.

 

[Micah Sweet]

See, that’s precisely the problem. You seem to think those tables of names are a waste. I don’t.

Why should your preference for “Domain Management” rules trump my preference for a list of tables I can use to pull random names from when the party meets an NPC?

Because you only need one book of names, and it doesn't even need to be system-specific. Anyone could make it, for relatively little effort and virtually no design sweat.

 

[SteveC]

I'm not sure where the "rising tide lifts all ships" gets complicated. Almost everyone who comes into RPGs for the first time comes through D&D. If you stay playing D&D and don't just leave the hobby, you see that there are more games than just D&D that you didn't even know existed before. And then you see something that interests you like, Dune or Avatar or One Ring or ... you name it, and then try that out. Maybe you then start playing that game. In effect D&D creates new gamers and let's them find out about games they never would have known about before joining the hobby. So unless your game has a significant ability to onboard new players from outside the hobby, you're getting people who started gaming with D&D.

Edited to add: in my own case, I discovered D&D through a friend in the White Box era. I went to my library and saw they had Traveller (the old little black books) and thought "oh, that's like D&D, but for sci-fi? Cool!" And then I had to figure out who sold these games. I found a hobby store and discovered Tunnels and Trolls (oh, solo adventures!) and I was hooked. But D&D was the gateway.