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

[Reynard]

The problem is precisely the volume of games, that have limited runs without sustained support that don’t make themselves easily accessible and market themselves effectively.

there are tons of modern games that equal or outpace 5E's support. 5E is anemic by previous edition standards.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not saying D&D is best designed for every fantasy campaign.

I am saying that is precisely why other game publishers should attempt to get in on being gateways instead of fully and obviously attempting to eat D&D's lunch. Or the lunch of some other RPG that already bit D&D's lunch.

Because that just fuels D&D's dominance.

Sometimes people do. Neither Outgunned nor Raven (other titles I either purchased or backed in the last few months) are self-evidently trying to move in on any specific extent successful game. But there's enough games out there now that at least some are going to go "We're trying to do something similar to Game X but think we can do it better" and I don't think it makes much sense to say they shouldn't.

But as for being gateways--being so in the sense that D&D is is, functionally, impossible. The only reason D&D is that is that they have a big marketing budget and were a gateway from the time they dropped in 1974 when, well, they were it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You'd think a big Superhero RPG would break out with streaming show and fan animations to pull itself into the mainstream as groups get together to fight named supervillians and villain teams. Just books and books of Rogues Galleries.

I can give some analysis of why that hasn't happened--superhero RPGs have been my jam for decades--but it'd be far afield for this thread.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not sure how viable that is as a growth strategy. For over a decade, video game companies went to great expense to launch a "World of Warcraft killer" that would supplant it at the top of the lucrative MMORPG market. Every single one of them failed. The Network Effect says that people aren't just using the dominant market entry because it's the best, but because everyone else is using it. So being just a little better isn't enough to trigger a mass migration. Especially not when the big dog is offering a buffet of options and most competitors can only manage being better at one thing at the cost of something else.

The closest thing that's come to killing WoW is WoW itself. Or rather, the company that makes WoW growing bloated and corrupt and being ruthlessly milked for monetization by a corporate owner that doesn't care about the players. Which is usually how it goes. The big dog grows ill and decrepit, users start to drift away or look into alternatives, and that leaves an opening for a vigorous young rival to move in. The last time I saw a new big dog claim a throne purely on overwhelming merit was when Google first hit the search engine scene 25 years ago. And Google's looking a little unhealthy these days, with the search results junked up by ads and SEO and AI gibberish.

It's nice to dream of being king, but it's usually better to plan around the big dog existing than plotting for its downfall. Those opportunities come rarely and unpredictably, and are usually more due to internal rot than external pressure. Instead, find a niche the big dog isn't serving well and focus on it. Pick a genre or playstyle that D&D doesn't cover and deliver it. I mean, that's why Pathfinder is doing as well as it does.

Maybe someone who has cash, clout, or charisma should attempt to make something other than a D&D-killer.

There are other genre. Heck there are other major subgenre of fantasy.

 

[Swanosaurus]

I am saying that is precisely why other game publishers should attempt to get in on being gateways instead of fully and obviously attempting to eat D&D's lunch. Or the lunch of some other RPG that already bit D&D's lunch.

Isn't that exactly what two of the other slightly bigger players - Modiphius and Fria Ligan - are doing? They're using familiar IPs to push their respective house systems, support at least some of them well and publish well-designed beginner's boxes. And they are both most definitely not trying to eat D&D's lunch - both in terms of system and of settings, everything they're doing is pretty far removed from D&D (Fria Ligan's Dragonbane maybe comes closest, but only on a very superficial level).
Both seem to do well trying to be gateways on their own, so to me, it seems like this is already happening.

 

[Minigiant]

But as for being gateways--being so in the sense that D&D is is, functionally, impossible. The only reason D&D is that is that they have a big marketing budget and were a gateway from the time they dropped in 1974 when, well, they were it.

D&D dropped its gateway when it was cheap. I'm not gonna lie about that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

there are tons of modern games that equal or outpace 5E's support. 5E is anemic by previous edition standards.

That's only true if you only count in-house support. That's one of the insidious things about a situation like 5e's; the can also ride on all the the third party source books and adventures without having to put aside resources for them themselves. There's only a couple other game systems I know of that also can play that card currently.

 

[Thomas Shey]

D&D dropped its gateway when it was cheap. I'm not gonna lie about that.

And that's the point; they started, effectively, building their network when there were no others. Its a heck of a different thing doing so now (and even if you could do it the way they did, its not like it was that big a thing for a number of years; certainly nothing like the modern behemoth).

 

[Reynard]

That's only true if you only count in-house support. That's one of the insidious things about a situation like 5e's; the can also ride on all the the third party source books and adventures without having to put aside resources for them themselves. There's only a couple other game systems I know of that also can play that card currently.

If you include 3rd party support, 5E is even more anemic compared to 3E.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Isn't that exactly what two of the other slightly bigger players - Modiphius and Fria Ligan - are doing? They're using familiar IPs to push their respective house systems, support at least some of them well and publish well-designed beginner's boxes. And they are both most definitely not trying to eat D&D's lunch - both in terms of system and of settings, everything they're doing is pretty far removed from D&D (Fria Ligan's Dragonbane maybe comes closest, but only on a very superficial level).
Both seem to do well trying to be gateways on their own, so to me, it seems like this is already happening.

Yes and no. They certainly are probably going about it about the only way you can now, but they're also grabbing at--slices--of a market. If you're a big fan of the Aliens franchise, then the Aliens game will potentially drag you in, but its not grabbing everyone interested in fantasy and a fair number of wargamers to boot (which is what OD&D was able to do back in the day to some extent), or more on target, everyone interested in SF. So its network is intrinsically smaller.