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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4352052" data-attributes="member: 2205">No, they're not insulting.  Grognard and fantasy heartbreaker as succint, not insulting.Theoretically, sure.  But very improbable.  Time and time again folks have tried to challenge D&D's supremacy, and nobody has managed to do so.  White Wolf was the only company to even make some significant headway in that direction in the mid-90s, and they did that by staking out brand new territory, not in trying to out-D&D D&D itself.The reason D&D style fantasy RPGs are called fantasy heartbreakers is because they don't offer enough to challenge D&D in the market.  There's no compelling reason to switch to them unless you happen to have a group that's excited about the idea.I know it sounds cliche to say so, but the breadth of material available for D&D and the "network externalities"--i.e., the fact that almost anyone can find D&D players while it's often difficult to find players for other games, are obstacles that no game is going to overcome simply by being good.The OGL has actually possibly opened the door for D&D like games that aren't fantasy heartbreakers, because they at least overcome the first obstacle I mentioned there (other OGL material is fairly compatible) and somewhat alleviate the second (similar enough that many players will play it) and think a few endeavors like Castles & Crusades, and hopefully Pathfinder turn out to not be fantasy heartbreakers.But in many ways the odds are stacked against them.  Even such "you think they'd be hits" games as the Warcraft and EverQuest RPGs are really just fantasy heartbreakers too, when you get right down to it.That seems an extraordinary thing to believe.  It hasn't happened in over thirty years, and now the entire market is shrinking, making it more difficult than ever that it could happen.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /> Make up your mind; did D&D cede that ground, or did it never cover it to begin with?  IMO, it never covered it to begin with.  That hasn't hampered its success any, though.  Your complaints about D&D today could easily have been made ten or fifteen years ago and been just as true.Why would that make it more successful, though?  As I said above, genericness has never been indicative of success in this industry.  GURPS is just about the only system that styles itself truly generic, and while it's been successful enough, it's still modest compared to D&D and I don't think that the market demands more genericness than that.That all sounds nice, but it's extremely vague.  What exactly does it really mean? You mean like D&D today? You'd like to see that.  What's your basis for thinking that that's what "the market" itself wants to see? Same as above. No, they wouldn't.  Do you see marked success of such "stealth schoolwork but we're calling it games" in any other market?  It's a niche.  A tiny portion.  Educational video games, for instance, or educational movies, are a tiny speedbump compared to juggernauts like Super Smash Brothers, Grand Theft Auto or Spongebob.People don't want to spend their entertainment time being educated, by and large.  Some parents may want their younger kids to do so, and that's a big part of what drives the market for this kind of thing, but once they're old enough to figure out that just plain playing is funner than "learning while you play" it starts to fall apart. You sure are proposing an awful lot of content that even you admit people will ignore.That's not a good sign for the success of your hypothetical venture. Like 2e, you mean?  Like one of the main things that's commonly held to have been a contributing factor of the failure of 2e to maintain TSR's solvency, as a matter of fact? Chicken, meet egg.  To be heavily supported, you need to be successful.  Development and printing of new books ain't cheap, and you've got to be generating capital to do so.  Then again, if this is an element necessary for a game to challenge D&D, it needs to be heavily supported before it can start being successful.Catch-22. Why?  What makes you think that's a contributing factor to a game's success? See; here's the reason people are "tarring" this conversation with the fantasy heartbreaker brush.  It's not because they're being insulting, as you claim, it's because you fit the classical definition.You've got a laundry list of things you would want to see in your Holy Grail game system, but you show little to no understanding or even awareness of what the market wants, of what other gamers want, of what's successful today and why, of what's been a failure in the past and why...Seriously, that's classic 100% fantasy heartbreaker territory there.</blockquote>

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