If the D&D brand became too hot to handle,what would be the next 80 pound gorilla?

[Dessert Nomad]

This sounds like you never played boardgames.

I've been playing boardgames since the 1980s, everything from simple common stuff like checkers to multi-day Avalon Hill wargames, I've organized groups that play board and card games, and I've even participated in making some board games from scratch, so you might want to examine whatever thought process led you to that conclusion.

You just schedule normally 1 evening/ afternoon.

And then you just play multiple games or the same game multiple times.

And if 1 person must leave early its no problem because the other X-1 can after the first (or second) just play another game with 1 person less.

That sounds like you're agreeing with my point, that a large part of the scheduling difficulty with D&D and similar games comes from trying to use a static group for the game. Like I said, if you ditch the static group then scheduling becomes much easier. If you don't ditch the idea of a static group and do need all players present each time, then 'play multiple games' and 'play one longer game' are indistinguishable from a scheduling perspective.

A 30 min boardgame (or rpg if it gets made) is a great filler. Like you can play it if the bigger game finished its late but not too late so 30 minutes fit perfectly into the gap.

How does the existence of a short game that's not the one under discussion make scheduling a D&D game or 'the theoretical new 80 pound gorilla' easier? I know that various short games exist, and there are other things you can do to use up 30 minutes of time, but I don't see how it's relevant here.

Also 30 minute RPGs already exist, they're not theoretical.

 

[Umbran]

I would say the opposite. If you compare the boardgame market to RPGs the boardgame market has a broader differentiation between products.

The boardgame market is dominated by Chess, Checkers, Monopoly (Hasbro), Scrabble (Hasbro), Clue (Hasbro), Catan (Teuber & BHG), Risk (Parker Bros), Game of Life (Parker Bros), Candyland (Hasbro), and Trivial Pursuit (currently Hasbro).

All that variety? It is supported and enabled by the market having these bog standards that establish board games as a thing, in general, to the world. For ttrpgs, that's D&D's role.

The boardgame space also covers long playtime.

Sure. But those are exceptions.

 

[aramis erak]

hypothetical: If for whatever reason the D&D brand were to be too hot to handle and shut down, what would then raise to the top in and possibly be resented for dominating the TTRPG sphere?

Pathfinder. It's the dominant contender.

 

[aramis erak]

D&D.

Because if it got too hot to handle, someone at Hasbro would be seeing a line go unacceptably down on a spreadsheet, and would do something about it. D&D makes a vast amount of money for relatively little investment. You don't leave that on the table. They'd sack everyone and hire a bunch of people who were vocally opposed to whatever the previous team did to make it toxic, and let them run the brand instead.

that's not how HasBro handled things with other games.
They shut the line down for 5 years, and reintroduced it in a mangled version. See also Game of Life.

 

[Thierry-Advent]

While Pathfinder is the contender, I'm not sure how many 5e players would want to go down that route. I never migrated to PF. There would certainly be adopters of PF. 50% or more, or less than 50%? Hard to tell. One thing is sure, there would be a great split in the D&D 5e player pool. One side would want the same complexity as 5e or less, not more. I was in the less complexity than 5e camp, which lead me to move on to Dragonbane. Is Nimble really less complex and with faster combat or is it just hype?

 

[gban007]

In the hypothetical situation, if DnD went down for brand issue, I could see dnd like games potentially being tarred with same brush and also going down, so i dont see Pathfinder taking it's place.
Instead it is more likely I think to be a completely different system like day Dragonbane, or potentially not fantasy at all, and something like Call of Cthulhu, or maybe with more overall brand power behind it than CoC, some Warhammer 40k game.

 

[Clint_L]

It's hard to imagine what would kill D&D but make people migrate to D&D by another name (Pathfinder et al).

I'd like to imagine that if folks suddenly gave up on D&D (not gonna happen), then it would be because a fundamentally different play style came into vogue. And thus we saw the rise of Dread.

 

[SteveC]

I think it's an interesting question. I think someone would step in to put money behind an existing system, or design a new system, that hit the sweet spot for complexity and genre.

Who would that be? Don't know. But as much as I love Pathfinder (I play and run it) I think it is too complex to hit the audience that D&D draws in. My thought is that some other similar system would be purchased by another large company and put up as an alternative.

 

[Mecheon]

I was reading an article recently about the underwhelming box office performances of "The Mandalorian and Grogu" and "Masters of the Universe" and how Gen Z/Alpha are calling Star Wars "unc slop" ("uncle slop" for out-of-touch, old-person media). The article suggested that the renaissance of geek culture is waning. We're coming to the end of celebrating Marvel and Stranger Things. Cool things will be cool again.

The exact counterargument to this though is the Backroom didn't flop, and the Backrooms sold like absolute hotcakes. The Backrooms is geek stuff, just a different blend. Go and dig around the Backrooms wiki or look at the lore and levels if you don't believe me, or all of the crazy theorycrafting on KanePixel's stuff

Anyway, the main thing with D&D is it isn't just an RPG. Its a media franchise. So we can immediately discard any hopes for GURPs to come back to life, they lost their chance when the GURPS license went to Interplay rather than Bethesda. I'd say the contenders are the ones who have moved into that mass market space, so Pathfinder, Cyberpunk, or Call of Cthulhu. While VtM has tried to expand out of that space, those attempts have infamously been baaad (with one exception that still runs on a janky early Source engine), and while Pathfinder has some pretty well received games its has nothing beyond that, meanwhile Cyberpunk has the games and the fairly popular show which pushes it up a bit. CoC I think is on the backfoot here given that Cthulhu stuff tends to be more niche, though game wise there have been some okay games, albeit not for a while, but very little movie wise. Like, I think the most popular Cthulhu related thing lately is A World That Doesn't Exist, and when I'm bringing up Minecraft machinima, you know we're in rough pickings.

However, considering that mixed media thing? I think its a dark horse. A really specific dark horse given that GURPS mention: Fallout. Yeah, the computer game inspired by GURPS. Its got mass market appeal, popular video games, and a popular TV show. Its got enough media presence that it could actually stand a chance at upsetting the market

 

[Dessert Nomad]

Fallout has had an official RPG for five years that has done well but hasn't really upset the market. I think if it was going to it would have already, especially since the TV show now has 2 seasons which is usually the end of life for streaming TV where they either get cancelled or lose whatever made them good.

Fallout The Roleplaying Game 2d20

In 2077, the storm of nuclear war reduced most of the planet to cinders. From the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization will struggle to arise, a civilization you will shape. Welcome to the Wasteland. Welcome to the world of Fallout.

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