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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8623719" data-attributes="member: 42582">Because trying, gambling, winning - those are all fun! People do them all the time in all sorts of spheres of life. Why not in relation to imagined challenges that are overcome by manipulating imagined characters in accordance with rules and expectations? It's the same appeal as wargaming, but with richer fiction and more vibrant personalties!There might be more to said than my previous paragraph, but I think the previous paragraph is saying something useful.Do you mean commercial success and commercial advantages? The commercial advantage of being oriented at step-on-up via ingame challenge, with the possibility of a subtle interplay of cooperation (among players and their PCs) and competition (between players and GM, and sometimes between players and/or their PCs), is that it is an appealing package. I think lasertag and paintball would not be so commercially successful if the goal wasn't to beat opponents but only to (say) mark out a pretty picture with one's laser or one's paint pellets.I think the tropes that accompany and support the ingame/in-fiction challenge aspect of D&D are also appealing: adventure, including with a military or "special ops" flavour, is pretty popular, and the D&D tropes that support gamist play fit within that genre.One could imagine a gamist RPG set in the Ancien Regime French court, but its tropes would I think have less appeal: I remember a film around 20 years ago called Ridicule (OK, I just Googled and it's about 25 years ago), but social competition in the French court does not seem to have attained the same popularity as movies that involve guns, fisticuffs, and the risks of falling from great heights.That's something for D&D players to answer. I can only answer for myself: I ran a session of White Plume Mountain a couple of months ago, and what was valuable seemed to be working out the puzzles, and how to avoid getting paralysed by the ghouls at the other end of the heat induction tube. In the combat with the ghouls there was also the fun of dice rolls.It's a different sort of puzzle from solving a crossword, or even from an escape room.In Edwards' terms it was low competition both between players and between PCs. But there was a degree of competition between the players and the GM, insofar as I - the GM - was "channelling" the module and bound by it (in Edwards' terms, there was " a rules-set that limits GM options" - that ruleset being AD&D and the binding character of prep). The payoff was basically bragging rights within the social group, similar to the payoff for social play of (say) MtG or a competitive boardgame.</blockquote>

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