Most influential RPG

[Theory of Games]

My guess is that its influence results from the fact that D&D is the biggest game in town and—at least in North America—most people's introduction to the hobby. Lots of TTRPG designers got their start playing D&D, and many of them designed third party content for it as well. It would be surprising if they didn't take something from that experience.

In terms of why D&D is so dominant in the hobby, my guess is that it's because TTRPGs display network externalities, meaning a game is more valuable to consumers the more players it has. D&D has the largest network, which gives it an advantage in keeping the largest network: new consumers entering the hobby want to play an RPG with many players, not something niche. There's almost surely also a "contact" effect where people join their friends' gaming groups and, because D&D has the largest network, the modal TTRPG group plays D&D. Probably, there are lots of different "equilibria" of the market where some other RPG is on top, and it only happens to be D&D because of a first-mover advantage. (For all you game theory nerds, I'm envisioning an n-player repeated stag hunt. In principle, that would mean some sufficiently large shock could lead a bunch of the D&D players to switch to another system, such that a new system ended up on top.)

D&D has remained the most popular (after Paizo kicked their butt a few years) because HasBro dumps millions and millions of dollars of marketing into the game. Books, magazine articles, TV shows, movies, YouTube and thousands of online streamers ect.ect.ect. It isn't by accident - it's by MONEY, and no other ttrpg can compete. And HasBro's CEO will continue to expand D&D as an IP to get the game EVERYWHERE. Doesn't matter if people play it - what matters is that people buy-in to the brand. D&D the game? The movie?

 

[jian]

It’s really hard to know what games were most influential on subsequent RPG culture and design, partly because there’s also the influence on general culture. Was Call of Cthulhu more influential on horror games after, or is it more notable for its effect on general culture, which then produces a lot of RPGs riffing off the tropes (such as Cthulhutech)?

If I’m allowed to pick the RPGs that have affected general culture most to then feed back into RPG culture to influence a lot of games via films, TV, books, comics, video games, etc then I’d have to say the following:

1) Dungeons and Dragons. Pick whichever edition or version you prefer, but the whole decades-long juggernaut is clearly the most influential. It’s the one everyone’s heard of, that has affected cultural development on multiple continents (like fantasy JRPGs, manga, anime, manhwa etc), that is frequently mentioned in various famous properties and by various famous people (ET, Stranger Things, Riddick, Elon Musk, Vin Diesel etc), influenced thousands of fantasy books, films, video games and so on. For a certain genre of media, it defines fantasy. You may not like its influence but it is gigantic and undeniable.

2) Call of Cthulhu. Honestly, the main reason that the oeuvre of an otherwise obscure xenophobic writer from New England has stood the test of time (yes, Lovecraft would probably have still been well known to horror and pulp fans but honestly, about as well known generally as Clark Ashton Smith or C L Moore, so you’d be hard pressed to find one person in a hundred who’d heard of him). Not only is CoC now the most popular RPG in Japan and South Korea (especially with women) but like D&D it’s influenced thousands upon thousands of books, films, manga, video games etc. and its tropes are deeply ingrained into modern culture.

3) Vampire the Masquerade. This is a tough one because how much did Vampire ride the wave of goth culture, Anne Rice books, vampire films/songs, etc and how much did it cause or influence it in the 90s and after? There would have been Forever Knight, Buffy, Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive, etc without VtM, I’m sure. But it was deeply entwined, especially in fan culture, so I’m putting it there, if only in third place.

 

[zedhatool]

D&D has remained the most popular (after Paizo kicked their butt a few years) because HasBro dumps millions and millions of dollars of marketing into the game. Books, magazine articles, TV shows, movies, YouTube and thousands of online streamers ect.ect.ect. It isn't by accident - it's by MONEY, and no other ttrpg can compete. And HasBro's CEO will continue to expand D&D as an IP to get the game EVERYWHERE. Doesn't matter if people play it - what matters is that people buy-in to the brand. D&D the game? The movie?

Lots of companies spend a lot of money on marketing and don't achieve the kind of industry dominance that Hasbro has. I'm sure marketing plays a role in D&D's success, but given that marketing happens in every industry and centralization does not, I think D&D's dominance comes from the history and structure of the industry, not everyone getting suckered by slick ads.

I don't believe Paizo products ever outsold D&D ones, at least not in terms of overall sales numbers. If you're referring to 4e, as far as I know it's a myth.

 

[Theory of Games]

3) Vampire the Masquerade. This is a tough one because how much did Vampire ride the wave of goth culture, Anne Rice books, vampire films/songs, etc and how much did it cause or influence it in the 90s and after? There would have been Forever Knight, Buffy, Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive, etc without VtM, I’m sure. But it was deeply entwined, especially in fan culture, so I’m putting it there, if only in third place.

Okay so I was willing to let peoples' opinions be their opinions BUT THIS ONE You wrote:

"If I’m allowed to pick the RPGs that have affected general culture most to then feed back into RPG culture to influence a lot of games via films, TV, books, comics, video games, etc ..."

No WAY VtM influenced general culture. It was a creature of Anne Rice's books + all those vampire flicks of the 80s. VtM LARPs got hot from a merging of the vampire culture (that had been around since at least the 60's) + Goth subculture + VtM.

Lots of companies spend a lot of money on marketing and don't achieve the kind of industry dominance that Hasbro has. I'm sure marketing plays a role in D&D's success, but given that marketing happens in every industry and centralization does not, I think D&D's dominance comes from the history and structure of the industry, not everyone getting suckered by slick ads.

I don't believe Paizo products ever outsold D&D ones, at least not in terms of overall sales numbers. If you're referring to 4e, as far as I know it's a myth.

You don't believe Paizo products outsold D&D ...?

 

[Staffan]

You don't believe Paizo products outsold D&D ...?

There was a thread (or a couple of them) a year or two back about it, where we had some Twitter posts by people who had worked for both Paizo and Wizards who denied that it did. Most of that is in the link @zedhatool posted. The one public indicator we have are the ICV2 rankings, but those are very iffy, because they're basically based on game store vibes.

There may have been short windows where Paizo products sold better than Wizards products (as in "Pathfinder outsold 4e in Q3 2013", rather than "Pathfinder outsold 4e, period"), primarily when Wizards wasn't releasing anything because they were busy working on 5e. But that's on the level of "The pen is mightier than the sword (if the pen is very sharp and the sword is very small)."

 

[MGibster]

No WAY VtM influenced general culture. It was a creature of Anne Rice's books + all those vampire flicks of the 80s. VtM LARPs got hot from a merging of the vampire culture (that had been around since at least the 60's) + Goth subculture + VtM.

Are you kidding? Vampire made an appearance on the hit syndicated television show Real Stories of the Highway Patrol back around 1996 or so. It doesn't get more mainstream than that!

Vampire brought a lot of people into RPGs who wouldn't otherwise have been caught (un)dead playing D&D. Girls. I could find girls willing to play Vampire but finding one to play D&D proved fairly difficult. Even in 2000, when I worked at a hobby shop, when girls and young women came in to shop for RPGs, they bought White Wolf stuff not D&D.

 

[Theory of Games]

There was a thread (or a couple of them) a year or two back about it, where we had some Twitter posts by people who had worked for both Paizo and Wizards who denied that it did. Most of that is in the link @zedhatool posted. The one public indicator we have are the ICV2 rankings, but those are very iffy, because they're basically based on game store vibes.

There may have been short windows where Paizo products sold better than Wizards products (as in "Pathfinder outsold 4e in Q3 2013", rather than "Pathfinder outsold 4e, period"), primarily when Wizards wasn't releasing anything because they were busy working on 5e. But that's on the level of "The pen is mightier than the sword (if the pen is very sharp and the sword is very small)."

No, WotC released 4e and it bombed like The 13th Warrior, which led to Paizo taking over the #1 spot for a while there.

But back on topic: I still think Palladium needs more credit for how they produced their books. That changed the industry

 

[Leatherhead]

Sword World RPG is being criminally underrated in the scope of it's influence here.
Given that it's essentially the blueprint of the JRPG market.

 

[Staffan]

No, WotC released 4e and it bombed like The 13th Warrior, which led to Paizo taking over the #1 spot for a while there.

But back on topic: I still think Palladium needs more credit for how they produced their books. That changed the industry

I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I do implore you to read the link. Here, I'll include it again for your convenience: Pathfinder Never Outsold 4E D&D (ICYMI)

4e didn't live up to Hasbro's expectations, but compared to any other RPG it was a magnificent success in objective terms. Unless of course you believe Chris Sims, Owen K. C. Stephens, Greg Bilsland, and Trevor Kidd are all lying liars who lie.

Hasbro had this weird idea in the mid-00s that to be worth bothering with, any property would have to be making $50M per year in revenue with an eye toward hitting $100M. Anything less than that would have to essentially live off corporate scraps. D&D, at the time, was at best doing $20M or so. So in order to stay relevant, Wizards proposed a plan to drastically increase D&D's revenue with 4th edition along with a virtual tabletop and D&D Insider, with en eye toward World of Warcraft-like revenues. That, needless to say, did not happen, so in the eyes of Hasbro 4e was a failure. That doesn't mean it was losing money, it just wasn't making as much money as Hasbro wanted it to. So that's why they did a last Hail Mary pass with 5e, with an initial plan to release the core books and then farm out making supplemental material to third parties (which is why the first four adventure books were done by IIRC Kobold Press, Sasquatch Press, and Green Ronin) and basically put D&D in maintenance mode. But 5e took off beyond anything they had dreamed off, so they started pouring resources into it again, and here we are.

 

[mamba]

4e didn't live up to Hasbro's expectations, but compared to any other RPG it was a magnificent success in objective terms.

if you exclude any other D&D edition…