So what exactly is the root cause of the D&D rules' staying power?

[hawkeyefan]

I agree with several of the points made about branding and being first. D&D is the brand most synonomous with the hobby in the same way that people use Q-Tips to refer to any and all cotton swabs, or Kleenex to tissues. It has this brand recognition largley because it was the first of its kind, and also because it has support from a major company like Hasbro.

But I think it’s also because of how effective many of its elements are, and how often they’re replicated. Video games have lifted just about everything from the game, and they’ve exposed so many more people to these concepts than D&D itself. And just about every other game mentioned in this thread has one or more elements taken from D&D....Hit Points, Armor Class, Character Class, Experience Points, Attributes, and so on. So much of game design still can be traced back to D&D by Gygax and Arneson.

 

[billd91]

The second was the World of Darkness games from White Wolf in the late '80s (VtM, WWtA, WtO, CtD, MtA, and others I didn't collect). It offered a strong focus on telling coherent stories filled with drama and melodrama, rules be damned: even the sample adventures and published modules threw out the rules when they would "get in the way". It had crossover with LARPing and offered a gateway for cooler kids (like goths) because vampires are always edgy and cool. Power level between the games were quite different making a diverse group of protagonists somewhat difficult. The basic rules were poor enough that a lot of groups I knew who started with a VtM or WWtA games either threw in the towel entirely or tried to used alternative game systems to support the presented world. White Wolf kept advancing their overarching meta-plot to the point where it culminated in a world-breaking event and the New World of Darkness was formed. This led to the second worst edition war I've seen on the Internet.

I'd also mention that this was hitting hardest at a time when TSR was struggling and might never have actually overtaken D&D, even for a brief period, if TSR had been in decent shape as a company and had been able to pay its printer.

 

[Morrus]

Hit Points, Armor Class, Character Class, Experience Points, Attributes, and so on.

Most if these things are not in many games. The concept of tabletop RPGs has diverged more than you think it has.

 

[Morrus]

D&D has staying power independent of the rules. The rules have been changed and modified all the time -- huge changes from THAC0 to BAB; random rolling to point buy; XP for gold vs just monsters vs per session.

D&D is successful because it allows a group to run in pretty much any fantasy world without the rules getting in the way. Even more so, it allows you to mix elements. You can play a party with a Chinese-style martial artist, a Native American plains Indian, A french troubadour, An Arthurian plate-mail knight and a gothic magician and absolutely no-one will see a problem with that. You will happily jump from fighting a Greek water-spirit to a Norse angel to a Christian demon. You will travel from 17th century London to 12th century Edo to Pirates of the Carribean overnight, and no-one will bat an eyelid. You cast vaguely medieval spells, use psionic mid-powers or use Chinese traditional medicine. No worries.

Lots of games do that. So that's not the reason, to they'd all be as popular as D&D. Clearly, the reason lies elsewhere.

The answer to this question isn't just to list various elements of D&D, as those elements are unlikely to be unique. Indeed, later editions of D&D have borrowed from other games. The answer is to find what is unique about D&D.

The answer is probably fortuitous early market penetration and continued strong branding. It is very unlikely to be something relate to the ruleset itself.

D&D allows diverse players to have fun together. More so than any other system.

That's just silly. Of course it doesn't.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Most if these things are not in many games. The concept of tabletop RPGs has diverged more than you think it has.

I would wager that the majority of tabletop RPGs have at least three of these five things, in practice if not in name. Armor Class remains a fairly unique abstraction, and character classes aren't nearly as popular as the once were, but most games have something like attributes and experience points and HP.

 

[Nagol]

I would wager that the majority of tabletop RPGs have at least three of these five things, in practice if not in name. Armor Class remains a fairly unique abstraction, and character classes aren't nearly as popular as the once were, but most games have something like attributes and experience points and HP.

Something like them, sure. But having little in common with D&D. Attributes are a measure of a character in terms of a rule set. Sometimes they aren't even numeric. Few systems offer the same base 6 attributes. Is Champions 14 attributes (Str Dex Con Body Int Ego Pre Com PD ED Rec End Spd Stun) comparable to D&D? What about Tri-Stat's Mind, Body and Soul attributes? Or FATE's "choose your own" system?

Experience in many games is awarded in 1-3 points per session to be spend as build points improving a character (Champions, GURPS, Uni-system). Is that in any way equivalent to D&D level system?

HP does have the closest match across systems, but that's because it is a simple system that predates RPGs altogether. Most systems have altered it from D&D as well -- either through simplification (in Ars Magica "all normal humans have 5 "hit points"), splitting the pool into two or more to represent the stuff that keeps a character alive and the stuff that keeps a character going (too many to enumerate), by introducing death spiral penalties in various ways, or combinations.

The games that have the same trappings as D&D tend to be fantasy heartbreakers like Chivalry and Sorcery and the OSR games.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Most if these things are not in many games. The concept of tabletop RPGs has diverged more than you think it has.

No, I know there are plenty of games that eschew a lot of these “standardized” elements. Classless systems and so on. But even such attempts seem so focused on being different that the influemce of D&D is still there. And then there are plenty of systems that have those elements but use other labels...Careers or Archetypes in place of Class, and the like.

But you’re right that there are games without these elements. I was speaking generally and also in the context of how ubiquitous these elements are because of video games, as well.

I mean...my wife knew about XP and Levels because of that Facebook game Farmville that was popular a few years back.

 

[billd91]

The answer is probably fortuitous early market penetration and continued strong branding. It is very unlikely to be something relate to the ruleset itself.

The answer is probably not solely early market penetration and continued strong branding, either. I'd say that there is definitely something to the ruleset that enables it to continue to stay in that position, hold it through multiple generations, and regain it when it stumbles. Notice how its single largest revolution in rules (rather than evolution) severely threatened its primacy despite its early market penetration and strong branding.

The rules may not drive D&D's primacy, but I'd sure say that the wrong ruleset can sure threaten it.

 

[Celebrim]

So what, then, do we make of the short historical period when D&D wasn't the undisputed king of the RPG market---the mid/late 90s White Wolf incursion?

Was it actually the case? Were more people actually entering the hobby through Vampire: The Masquerade than through 1e/2e? I'll admit, I was completely out of the RPG scene around this time, other than playing Baldur's Gate for PC, so I'm asking for outside perspective.

In the late 90's, D&D probably slipped to third. My impression of the RPG scene at the time was not only was Storyteller system far and away the more popular game bringing the most players into gaming, but Deadlands also had more tables going than D&D during that period.

As for the success of VtM, I think it's best to tell a story to explain that. So, sometime during my college career I went to the book store and made a b line to the RPG books (as usual). To my surprise, someone was already there. There were two high school girls, cute ones, sitting on the floor in front of the RPG books. This wasn't anything I'd ever seen before. So I pulled some book off the shelf to browse and eaves dropped from a little ways away. They didn't notice me. They had in front of them on the floor 'LA by Night', and they had it open to a page on one of the NPCs, and the conversation I overheard went something like this:

Girl #1: "He sleeps on top of elevators at night."
Girl #2: "OMG He's so sexy"
Girl #1: "Yeah, I know. When I get in an elevator I imagine he's sleeping over my head."
Girl #2: "So hot."
Girl #1: "Every time I think about him, I think some going to swoon."
Girl #2: "tee hee hee"
Girl #1: "tee hee hee"

And so it went. For me, that was a completely new experience of what it meant to be a gamer and what might attract someone into gaming. So was VtM bigger than D&D during most of the 90's? I'd say, "Yes, absolutely." Certainly it was tapping into markets that D&D had never really touched.

Story teller is an absolutely cruddy system in retrospect, and VtM was the first game I encountered that played nothing like it was described (though it would be years before I actually played it). The game it described was about desperately clinging on to your humanity and fighting back the darkness before you succumbed completely. But because of the rewards structure and the fact that that introspective game in the examples of play could really only be played as a 1 on 1, the game as it was really played was half black wearing caped super-heroes, and half high school clique politics.

So what was going on? Was it really just an odd confluence of cultural incidences that came together at just the right moment and White Wolf capitalized on it?

Yes, and no. The timing definitely had something to do with it, but it also was definitely the first RPG that deliberately set out to be sexy and edgy and actually tapped into a market significantly larger than the nerd crowd. I found the book horrifying at some level because it felt like it was glorifying monsters, but in actual play it was usually more silly than monstrous (there were a few exceptions). Ultimately it killed itself because there is only so much you can sell yourself on shock value before you end up as schlock. It kept trying to one up itself, and it didn't help that half the production staff was stoned more than half the time.

 

[prosfilaes]

Adaptability: D&D highly driftable (though effectiveness varies) vs. Vampire = I can't think of a system where a game company tried to drift Storyteller. In fact, didn't White Wolf wave the white flag at one point and adapt World of Darkness to OGL?

I wouldn't say offering a D20 version of a game "waving the white flag"; Deadlands and Traveller, for example, had their own D20 versions. A lot of that simply seemed to be advertising; there was no good reason for those games to exist, besides D20 sold. And it wasn't "World of Darkness D20", it was "Monte Cook's World of Darkness", and I certainly found the title misleading. Monte Cook's D20 Modern Horror was more like it. There just wasn't anything interesting left of the World of Darkness for me, and I think White Wolf didn't care about it; it was a one-off Monte Cook interpretation, not something they were going to build on.

Storyteller had versions for a dozen different core games, so I find it hard to say it can't be adapted. A lot of D&D's driftability seems to be jamming square pegs in round holes; you can have any fantasy you want, as long as it has this small bunch of races and these small bunch of classes. D&D 4 had eladrins, so every D&D setting had eladrins. To the extent it works with, say, Dark Sun, is because Dark Sun started with D&D, and at least with 2E, they gave the rules people some leeway to tinker.