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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5980516" data-attributes="member: 22424">Well, fair enough. But the sheer size of D&D relative to any other game basically precludes that. But "Megatraveller" and the "New Imperium" were pretty damn divisive relative to the size of Traveller.It may be cultural, or it may be anecdotal. It's also worth noting that people with specific niche hobbies (in my case, both piping and RPGs) are more likely to find new friends in the related areas than those who don't - I've made several new friends over the past decade as well, but I don't recall the last one who wasn't either a gamer or a member of a pipe band.Well, leaving aside that your OP says otherwise, there's a reason it worked then but not now: unmet demand.Back when gaming was huge, there were only a few companies producing materials, every release from TSR was a huge thing, and it just wasn't enough. And so, when fans produced and shared material, that was meeting a demand that wasn't being met through 'official' channels.Meeting this demand meant that people stayed in the hobby, and kept the hobby vibrant, and so attractive to new people.The picture now is quite different. There are now plenty of companies producing materials, but relatively fewer gamers. As a result, even successful products sell in the low-hundreds of copies. Anyone who is interested can find a product on virtually any topic he wants, and thanks to eBay and file-sharing, nothing ever really becomes unavailable. Any demand is almost entirely satisfied.Meanwhile, gaming has, as you noted, shrunk to little clusters of people. This means that unless those clusters actively recruit, or unless someone actively searches, it's really quite difficult for people to find groups to join. And, of course, unless someone is already a gamer, they're hardly going to actively search very hard to find a group, for a game they might like.Blunlty, it's much easier for a hobby to grow when it's already popular. And, sadly, those days have passed for D&D, and will never return.If they want to survive, yes.Ryan Dancey wrote long essays on "network externalities" back in the early days of 3e. He noted that if the market expands generally, the market leader gains disproportionately from that, because the most commonly-played game serves as a least common denominator for groups (one guy might like Traveller, another M&M, another WFRP... but they'll probably all play some D&D at some point). Dancey was absolutely right about that.But a further corollary to his "network externalities" is this: the larger the network is to start with, the easier it is to grow. Because 100 people spread out across a population of 1,000,000 may well never come into contact with one another, but 100,000 people spread out across that same population most certainly will - and the easier it is to link to the existing network, the more the network will grow.</blockquote>

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