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

[amerigoV]

I go back to the OP question from my perspective.

I grew up on 1e, a bit of 2e. We tinkered with homebrew, then I came back hard into 3.x. I was exhausted by the rules at the end of the 3.x cycle. At that point, I switched to Savage Worlds. So I too am a big Savage Worlds fan. I too kinda feel the "loss" of not playing D&D. Funny thing, the POD D&D Rules Cyclopedia just hit my doorstep yesterday, yet I do not have the 5e D&D core books (but I have some of the modules).

Aside from being "first" and all that, I agree that D&D generally has had a secret sauce that is "pretty good" to great for many people. I believe that sauce is not just the rules but D&D is also a genre. We use the phrase "generic fantasy" these days likes its always been there but I think that is exactly what D&D created. Generic fantasy is the juicy casserole of the reading list of Appendix N from the AD&D DMG. You have Tolkien and Howard as the base, throw in some Vance, season with Leiber, etc all, to taste, then bake for multiple editions. I also think that is why its hard to stretch D&D to play those sources - while you can use D&D to run Hyboria, for some reason it just does not feel right. When you say "lets play D&D", things like wizards with fireballs and elves are naturally in the minds eye and its hard to just carve them out (can be done, but its always hard to just pull out the ingredients once you mix them together). Its not surprising that an IP like Middle Earth tends to have its own ruleset, the recent 5e release notwithstanding.

My group still loves generic fantasy. D&D is naturally the truly best engine to run it. But my group likes Savage Worlds as a ruleset more than the D&D rulesets, especially 3.5 and 4e. We have played a bit of 5e and its fine, but fun elements of Savage Worlds (exploding dice, bennies, getting the Joker for initiative, the elegance of the rules) just outweighs the parallel elements in D&D for the group. There are places SW really does play different in a fantasy campaign vs. D&D and my group is fine with that.

That said, the aforementioned arrival of the Rules Cyclopedia does have me dreaming of running an old school game of D&D one of these days. So yes, there is something in the sauce that keeps people coming back in some way.

 

[Blue]

At this point it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of market dominance paired with a fine game.

If you asked me what D&D-like game I'd prefer to play or run right now, it would be 13th Age which shares a similar philosophy but edges out 5e in a number of ways for me. That said, I'm teaching my kids 5e - because there are a lot more players out there, it's a lot easier to find games. (I don't know of a single 13th Age tabletop game in driving distance besides the one I run.)

So when you have a good product and it's already the defacto standard, the momentum will keep it at the top.

To me, Pathfinder wouldn't have been nearly as big if there hadn't been a fan-base schism with 4e.

 

[innerdude]

Couple more things have come to mind through this conversation---

1. The novels.

Oh dear heavens, how did I forget the novels?? I must have read Dragonlance Chronicles, Legends, and the Legend of Huma five or six times each between 1985 and 1992.

And then the Crystal Shard came out in 1988. And Homeland in 1990.

These novels are large exterior factors in the enduring of D&D's legacy. Even now just thinking about the Dragonlance novels, I feel a stirring of loyalty to "D&D--the Brand", despite the fact that I've played a d20-based game of any kind exactly twice in seven years.

2. I keep coming back to an earlier discussion I had with @Celebrim, and brought to the fore again by @amerigoV. Am I actually playing the same game when I play D&D 5e/3.x/Pathfinder vs. when I play Savage Worlds? On the whole, to an outside observer who knows nothing about the various rules sets, the overall experience would be very hard to differentiate between the two.

So is it really the same thing, at its core? At what level does the conceptual conceit of "Imagine yourself acting as an alternate personality in an alternate universe, and use game-like devices and artifacts to resolve certain actions" change, based on your willingness to abide by an agreed-upon acceptable range of probabilistic outcomes (i.e., dice rolled, modifiers, how you interpret the input to output, etc.)?

And really THIS is what rules sets do----they set a framework for which we, as players and GM, use to create an acceptable range of probabilistic outcomes. The tension lies between the two ends of the spectrum----probabilistic vs. acceptability of outcome.

There's something here I need to dig into more, but don't have time to do it at the moment.

 

[Celebrim]

And really THIS is what rules sets do----they set a framework for which we, as players and GM, use to create an acceptable range of probabilistic outcomes. The tension lies between the two ends of the spectrum----probabilistic vs. acceptability of outcome.

It's certainly one of the biggest things that rules do. One of my problems with Savage Worlds is I don't like how it sets up its range of results. I don't like exploding dice or convoluted dice pools or some of the other random factors that certain implementations of SW introduce to mix up the range of results (such as adding cards as randomizers/modifiers). To me that's just obfuscating the math, and my experience with systems like that is when you obfuscate the math behind a bewildering array of random factors, players and GMs lose track of what the modifiers that they are using (whether added or decreased dice pulls, or increased or decreased difficulty rankings) actually mean. The result is consensus by obfuscation, where tables agree to accept the results without really analyzing the odds of failure or success and no demand that the results fit any sort of model of how difficult the result ought to be.

D20 or BRP's d% based system makes for very straight forward math with straight forward ways to interpret modifiers compared to many other systems. D20 veers on the side of tracking too many circumstantial modifiers, but if that's a problem for you 5e seems to be a good compromise.

But does it matter? That's a much harder question to answer. It's easy to show in an extreme case that it matters. I frequently cite Celebrim's "World's Simplest RPG" as proof of various basic points about game rules. The "World Simplest RPG" has one rule (at least, one explicit rule, it turns out it has a ton of unspoken rules that define an RPG), and that is, "For any proposition, flip a coin. If the result is heads, the proposition succeeds, and if the result is tails, the proposition fails." In this case it does very much matter if the only tool you have to create an acceptable range of outcomes is a single coin flip. A simplistic d2 system with no complications and rules about acceptable proposition construction doesn't create a very functional game, because the range of results doesn't match up with anyone's imagination and doesn't really create a game that fits anyone's aesthetics of play. It's not fair. It's not balanced. It doesn't provide for character development. It doesn't make for good story. It doesn't simulate anything.

So I certainly think it is possible that you are playing a very different game but there is another level to this, and that's how you approach rules.

Every game I run is the same game regardless of the rules.

I recently opened up a CoC campaign with a bunch of first time players. None of them had access to the rules, and as usual I didn't put a priority on them knowing the rules. One of the players asked another player what the rules was in a particular situation and he responded, "You say you do something. You roll a d%. You ask [Celebrim] what happens, and he tells you."

That's fair summation of any game you play with me. I could run a CoC game with D&D rules if necessary, and indeed my house rules for D&D have insanity mechanics. For me, the core of any RPG is a proposition, fortune, resolution cycle. The only thing that usually changes with me is the exact fortune mechanics used for a given proposition. Less obvious, most games - at least, most games before the Indy era - do not actually specify what a valid proposition or valid resolution is. As a result, in any game I play I use the same metarules for how propositions are constructed. For example, in any game I'm running, any social interaction proposition is constructed first as an in character statement, and then translated if necessary into a rules construct - regardless of what the rules say or don't say about constructing social interaction propositions. That's far from the only way to regulate social interaction propositions though. Some tables may construct the mechanical representation first, and either create the conversation afterwards or neglect it entirely. Those two tables are playing a different game from me even if they are using the same fortune mechanics.

Other than providing a variety of fortune mechanics, one thing rules do that is very important is suggest how to approach or how to think about those rules.

 

[innerdude]

It's certainly one of the biggest things that rules do. One of my problems with Savage Worlds is I don't like how it sets up its range of results. I don't like exploding dice or convoluted dice pools or some of the other random factors that certain implementations of SW introduce to mix up the range of results (such as adding cards as randomizers/modifiers). To me that's just obfuscating the math, and my experience with systems like that is when you obfuscate the math behind a bewildering array of random factors, players and GMs lose track of what the modifiers that they are using (whether added or decreased dice pulls, or increased or decreased difficulty rankings) actually mean. The result is consensus by obfuscation, where tables agree to accept the results without really analyzing the odds of failure or success and no demand that the results fit any sort of model of how difficult the result ought to be.

I can very much appreciate your feelings on this. I could counter by saying that the only time the "randomness" of Savage Worlds really comes to bear is in damage dice, but it probably won't make a difference. In terms of baseline task resolution, the probabilities are very, very straightforward (anydice.com was a fantastic tool for this).

But, the interesting thing is, it's the random chance of the damage dice exploding that plays into your very last paragraph.

Other than providing a variety of fortune mechanics, one thing rules do that is very important is suggest how to approach or how to think about those rules.

And this is precisely what I love about Savage Worlds. To me, Savage World's rules say this:

"Big damn heroes? Sure you are, we totally get it, but the world's an unpredictable place. Live boldly, be daring, take risks. You'll never come out on top if you don't. Is the life of an adventurer dangerous? Of course it is. There's death awaiting you around every corner. Every orc's arrow, every sword clanging against your shield has the potential to change your life, or even end it. Of course, you have a little luck and a little fortune on your side, but it's still a risk. But you're the kind of person that would take those risks anyway, so get started."

Savage Worlds quickly teaches you that you want the dice to be rolled against you as little as possible. So act boldly first to gain the upper hand.

In 5+ years playing D&D 3.5, I never once had that same sensibility. Everything's so sheltered and protected in gobs of hit points. You always play it safe ("You don't have the feat for that, so don't even try"). You always stick to your "schtick." You can't mix magic with mundane in 3.5, whereas Savage Worlds lets you mix and match to your heart's content.

D&D will never, ever, EVER let me play my ranged archer with urban survival skills mixed with a mentalist mage who specializes in precognitive abilities and sleight-of-hand.

And if you think that character concept sounds pretty bad-ass, that's exactly how it played.

 

[Celebrim]

D&D will never, ever, EVER let me play my ranged archer with urban survival skills mixed with a mentalist mage who specializes in precognitive abilities and sleight-of-hand.

Really? I have a PC in the party I run right now that is an archer with urban survival skills and specializes in mental powers and precognitive abilities.

I don't want to fight about this. You might even be right of 3.5 RAW (the core of what makes the character work comes down to two homebrew feats) though I'd be a bit surprised if you were as 3.5 RAW just has so much breadth a system master can find a way to support just about anything. They point is that how a game plays depends a lot on what you want to do with the system, not just in tweaks like my homebrew rules, but in how you approach the rules.

When you say something like, "Savage Worlds quickly teaches you that you want the dice to be rolled against you as little as possible.", you are describing maybe the operative rule of strong AD&D play that I've seen in use for the last 30+ years homebrewed or not. If the enemy doesn't get to act, you can't die. Never get yourself in a situation where you have to make a saving throw. Stack the odds in your favor and win quickly. If you can accomplish something without a test, you can't fail. As the long time AD&D thief in the party, my general philosophy of playing the thief was 'Check for traps is a saving throw'. You tried to find the trap and neutralize it without knowing whether it was there. You did that by setting off traps from a distance in ways that made it likely you'd escape the effects. You had to do that because the odds of successfully finding and disarming a trap by the rules were so low.

And maybe not surprisingly, I run a 3.X game a lot like it was 1e AD&D with a more uniform and comprehensive set of rules.

 

[Shasarak]

When you say something like, "Savage Worlds quickly teaches you that you want the dice to be rolled against you as little as possible.", you are describing maybe the operative rule of strong AD&D play that I've seen in use for the last 30+ years homebrewed or not. If the enemy doesn't get to act, you can't die. Never get yourself in a situation where you have to make a saving throw. Stack the odds in your favor and win quickly. If you can accomplish something without a test, you can't fail. As the long time AD&D thief in the party, my general philosophy of playing the thief was 'Check for traps is a saving throw'. You tried to find the trap and neutralize it without knowing whether it was there. You did that by setting off traps from a distance in ways that made it likely you'd escape the effects. You had to do that because the odds of successfully finding and disarming a trap by the rules were so low.

And maybe not surprisingly, I run a 3.X game a lot like it was 1e AD&D with a more uniform and comprehensive set of rules.

Yeah, that is my impression of ADnD as well. Why bother with that 10% chance to spot traps when you can just send a captured Goblin ahead to scout for you? Or my favourite a pig equipped with oil flask bandoleers.

 

[Aldarc]

You might even be right of 3.5 RAW (the core of what makes the character work comes down to two homebrew feats) though I'd be a bit surprised if you were as 3.5 RAW just has so much breadth a system master can find a way to support just about anything.

Based upon my novitiate impression of Savage Worlds, I would say that in comparison with 3.5 D&D (RAW, at least), players have an easier time of customizing a character concept right out the gate at character creation, though not necessarily with all the edges/feats that you would necessarily want.

They point is that how a game plays depends a lot on what you want to do with the system, not just in tweaks like my homebrew rules, but in how you approach the rules.

Sure, but shouldn't that principle also apply to game systems you are averse to, such as Savage Worlds and Fate?

 

[Celebrim]

Based upon my novitiate impression of Savage Worlds, I would say that in comparison with 3.5 D&D (RAW, at least), players have an easier time of customizing a character concept right out the gate at character creation, though not necessarily with all the edges/feats that you would necessarily want.

I'd agree with that. Savage Worlds encourages play in a narrower range of power levels. Your starting character is not quite as narrow or shallow in their power as a first level character, and will never be quite as potent as a high level D&D character. While I being honest about the fact that a player in my game is basically playing an archer with telepathic, telekinetic and precognitive powers, it's also true that the concept really doesn't get to where the player intends it to be (what [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] describes as "bad-ass") until like 4th level or so owing to the need to multiclass and acquire the right feats. In that sense, SW is trying to force play into the span that a lot of players consider D&D's sweet spot. And to a large extent, I'm OK with that. It's other areas of the rules that I find less satisfying.

Sure, but shouldn't that principle also apply to game systems you are averse to, such as Savage Worlds and Fate?

Absolutely. My problems with SW are largely in its fortune system which I find manages to be both unnecessarily complex and too limiting at the same time. But could you play a game that is basically D&D with SW? Sure. Heck, with the right GM I'd probably enjoy SW. I just don't want to run it, and don't feel it adds anything I couldn't already do with a D20 game.

FATE on the other hand has a ton of issues for me. Again, I find its dice pools hit a bad spot that is both unnecessarily complex and too limiting at the same time, but I also feel the game has a ton of other facets that just aren't to my taste. I'm fairly sure based on what I've read in the rules and what I've seen of how the game is played, that I could not enjoy a game of FATE at all. Exactly why requires a really long essay and video review I don't have the time to compose at the moment, but suffice to say for now that FATE explicitly describes the social contract that it wants the game to take place under and weaves that social contract into its mechanics and that social contract contradicts the social contract that I make with my players or expect my GM when I am a player to maintain. This happens because the creators of FATE where cognizant of the things I'm talking about in a way that prior RPG creators probably couldn't verbalize as well, and made decisions about what sort of game people ought to play that may suit themselves but don't necessarily suit everyone. (I actually even question whether the game that they made meets their own goals, but that's an even more difficult matter to resolve. Certainly FATE is going to have its defenders, though for the life of me I don't know why.)

 

[Ancalagon]

But a lot of systems are also tied to specific lores (like CoC or Warhammer) that don't interest me as much.

I am pleased to inform you that 2nd ed Warhammer frpg works quite well as a system when separated from the lore. I have 3-4 year campaign that proved it.