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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8552853" data-attributes="member: 19857">One problem that the market has as a whole is that there's only one company that focuses on growing the market towards non-gamers.  Realistically there's only one company that can really afford to do it and that has the size to do it and that company is the one that makes Dungeons and Dragons.  The D&D boxed sets on the shelves at stores are some of the best "intro to roleplaying" games that I've seen in my entire 4 decades in the hobby - and they're widely available at big box stores for the first time since the 80s.There's also the issue that 5e is, for all its faults, actually a really good game for introducing new players to roleplaying as a game even outside of the Starter Sets.  I don't know how much of it was intentional and how much just emerged from the final design goals for 5e, but they really leveraged their level based approach to create a game where the first few levels really do act like tutorial levels while you play the game and allow you to get used to the various mechanics of play at a decent pace and then dole out new abilities on a schedule that makes it easy to master them before you get the next one.  Add to that the Essentials Kit - which is probably the best new DM tutorial I've seen to show DMs how the game is actually played - and you get a platform that is actually really good for introducing brand new people to roleplaying.Most RPGs are just not good at this - their target audience is "people who already play RPGs" and they're trying to draw off people who have already learned how to roleplay in general.  They aren't sold at places where new players can pick them up - they tend to be sold only at hobby shops or, more recently, exclusively online because the hobby stores don't carry them. They aren't built to train new players - they usually drop all of the capabilities onto the players right from the start - and thus implicitly require the GM to teach the mechanics to the players or for the players to be immediately interested in the game enough to teach themselves the mechanics.So it's tough.  And if you're already in the market and trying to convert people who already play RPGs to your game, these days the largest pool of potential converts are 5e D&D players.  Giving them familiar mechanics means you can leverage the work that Wizards has already done to grow the player base through the big box stores, which means that you don't rely on the players to boostrap themselves into the game or having a GM teach the game to them.  It makes perfect sense even as those of us who would like to see different games supported (and are GMs who thereforce invest time in teaching their players mechanics of different games ) can be disappointed by it.</blockquote>

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