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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
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Is 5e's Success Actually Bad for Other Games?
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<blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8301969" data-attributes="member: 59082"><p>D&D is both the gateway drug to RPGs and also the home that people come back to. That's kind of always been the case, and is still the case today. I suppose one difference from the 90s is back then, you had two major streams: D&D and World of Darkness. But the difference now is the "secondary stream" is just more varied, and includes a wide range of games, some with very established niches (there were obviously a lot of other games in the 90s, but probably not as much as today, and the player base was more centralized around the two streams).</p><p></p><p>There are also game companies that come along and offer something that WotC doesn't, like Fria Ligua, which in my mind is the current market leader on quality of presentation. But it is also more niche; maybe Fria Ligua games would be even more popular if they got more exposure, but the simply fact of the matter is that popularity has little to nothing to do with quality, and the most popular things are those with widest appeal, while higher concept stuff tends to gain only cult followings (e.g. Cthulhu, Numenera, etc).</p><p></p><p>That said, it probably has hurt the OSR, at least as far as total numbers are concerned. The OSR is sort of like model railroading: there are more fans aging out then there are new people coming in. Further, a lot of OSR folks went that direction because they didn't like the excesses of 3E and 4E. 5E, while not perfect for old school D&D, is "good enough" so that the positives outweigh the deficits for a large number of OSR folks. It isn't uncommon on OSR forums for people to say something like, "I play 5E because of X, Y, and Z" (and then often get attacked for it by the more "edgelordy" folks).</p><p></p><p>(All of the above is just my impressionistic take and not meant to be confused with factual reality, whatever that is)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mercurius, post: 8301969, member: 59082"] D&D is both the gateway drug to RPGs and also the home that people come back to. That's kind of always been the case, and is still the case today. I suppose one difference from the 90s is back then, you had two major streams: D&D and World of Darkness. But the difference now is the "secondary stream" is just more varied, and includes a wide range of games, some with very established niches (there were obviously a lot of other games in the 90s, but probably not as much as today, and the player base was more centralized around the two streams). There are also game companies that come along and offer something that WotC doesn't, like Fria Ligua, which in my mind is the current market leader on quality of presentation. But it is also more niche; maybe Fria Ligua games would be even more popular if they got more exposure, but the simply fact of the matter is that popularity has little to nothing to do with quality, and the most popular things are those with widest appeal, while higher concept stuff tends to gain only cult followings (e.g. Cthulhu, Numenera, etc). That said, it probably has hurt the OSR, at least as far as total numbers are concerned. The OSR is sort of like model railroading: there are more fans aging out then there are new people coming in. Further, a lot of OSR folks went that direction because they didn't like the excesses of 3E and 4E. 5E, while not perfect for old school D&D, is "good enough" so that the positives outweigh the deficits for a large number of OSR folks. It isn't uncommon on OSR forums for people to say something like, "I play 5E because of X, Y, and Z" (and then often get attacked for it by the more "edgelordy" folks). (All of the above is just my impressionistic take and not meant to be confused with factual reality, whatever that is) [/QUOTE]
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