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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8092903" data-attributes="member: 42582">From a high-level perspective D&D is socially and economically easy.From other perspectives, of course, it's not easy. D&D has the potential to be far more expensive then many other RPGs - given its large number of large rulebooks, sourcebooks etc. And from an actual system/game-play point of view there are many things that are not at all easy to do in D&D. Not only stuff that might be seen as somewhat outre relative to the core D&D experience (eg a cooking and eating competition) but even relatively genre-core stuff like races and chases. (I mention these because Burning Wheel handles both pretty easily, and a cooking and eating competition is the sample scenario in The Dying Earth RPG core book. 4e D&D can do the races and chases, but still isn't very well-suited to the cooking and eating.)For a given, established group of RPGers the significance of network externalities and path dependency reduces, as they have already met up with one another, and at any moment can choose whether to buy another D&D book or to buy and use a book for a different game. There may be that one member of the group who is very set in his/her ways and so won't try anything new, but as [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER] said that's not really an issue of path dependency. (The analogy to disliking Vietnamese food doesn't work here, either, as it's typically not about disliking the new thing but rather about a disinclination to try the new thing.)Of course it's none of my business whether people stick to what they know and like, or branch out and take risks. What does sometimes frustrate me, though, is when people who seem to be familiar only with one approach to RPGing make pronouncements about what is or isn't possible in RPGing which were possibly false even in the late 70s (given what could and can be done with Classic Traveller and RuneQuest) and have almost certainly been false since the late 90s (when Prince Valiant was already 10 years old, and Maelstrom Storytelling was published).</blockquote>

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