D&D 5E The D&D Advantage- The Campaign

[TwoSix]

So it both had the early advantage, and it continues to have that system in place, that is harder to put into a "new" TTRPG that isn't "D&D-like." IMO.

But that's where I thought the discussion might go- how easy is it to re-create that reward system in a new, modern TTRPG that doesn't have the benefit of "grandfathering in" XP, leveling, loot, etc.

I admit I can't think of too many RPGs that don't have some kind of growth system in place, even if it isn't specifically XP-level-loot like D&D and its many clones. Although I am also entirely unfamiliar with a lot of the licensed RPGs you mentioned above, as they've never interested me.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

Another thought: thinking of Ron Edwards in that 4e thread, he has described some games as "incoherent," meaning that they not designed for a particular purpose. D&D is incoherent, at least the later editions that moved beyond strict dungeoncrawlers. That incoherence is detrimental from a design perspective, but it is beneficial from a gameplay perspective. Incoherence is why every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to use D&D for everything. I want to play D&D Game of Thrones! Here's wookies for D&D Star Wars! Can I do D&D Call of Cthulhu?

My own perspective is that D&D is terrible for all of those things. If you want anything outside of a resource management tactical skirmish game, I think you should play another system. However, the malleability of D&D to play those games (poorly) has given it longevity. No, Call of Cthulhu D&D doesn't work. It won't approximate the fiction. You can run a Lovecraft-themed D&D game, though, as long as there's some aberrations to kill.

 

[J-H]

Agreed. The "My character gets better and more powerful" reward is a big one. My players often seem to get more excited over leveling up than finding gold or a magic item - unless it's a substantial magical item. +2 bow with 1d6 damage? Cool.
+2 bow with no bonus damage but that doubles my range? AWESOME! I am now arrow sniper murder-kensei!

 

[payn]

Another thought: thinking of Ron Edwards in that 4e thread, he has described some games as "incoherent," meaning that they not designed for a particular purpose. D&D is incoherent, at least the later editions that moved beyond strict dungeoncrawlers. That incoherence is detrimental from a design perspective, but it is beneficial from a gameplay perspective. Incoherence is why every Tom, Dick, and Harry wants to use D&D for everything. I want to play D&D Game of Thrones! Here's wookies for D&D Star Wars! Can I do D&D Call of Cthulhu?

My own perspective is that D&D is terrible for all of those things. If you want anything outside of a resource management tactical skirmish game, I think you should play another system. However, the malleability of D&D to play those games (poorly) has given it longevity. No, Call of Cthulhu D&D doesn't work. It won't approximate the fiction. You can run a Lovecraft-themed D&D game, though, as long as there's some aberrations to kill.

Totally agree about D&D being a bad system for generic gaming. In the last few decades the hobby community has grown and folks are moving into more RPGs, which is great. Still, people want to smash the D&D peg into every hole because its the one game system you can always find players for. For one reason or another, players are reluctant or resistant to new systems. They want what they know. Popularity and a smallish hobby community have more to do with it than any award winning persistent character formula.

 

[clearstream]

I'd probably reframe it slightly. Leveling up and long-term campaigns were a crucial innovation that gave D&D a major advantage over competitors during its early period. But it's hard to call it a current "advantage" when the design has been so fully plundered into gaming design over the past 45-50 years. I mean, most TTRPGs and video games have some sort of persistent avatar than can continually grow during play and gather rewards.

Suppose I advance a hypothesis - D&D invests more pages (words, rules, whatever measure we favour) in character advancement than any other RPG, and that contribute materially to its success. It's a two-part hypothesis. One way to disprove the first part is simply - take another RPG that we think comes close, and count pages invested in character advancement. The second part is perhaps harder to disprove, and is perhaps what @Snarf Zagyg's OP best speaks to.

But if we can find another RPG that invests as much in character advancement as D&D, but succeeds less well, then character advancement can't be the only factor. (It isn't ruled out as a factor, nor even as the most important factor, but there it would imply there are other factors that have a material impact.)

So - Pathfinder - I think it puts about the same page count as D&D into character advancement. Why isn't it as successful as D&D? In design parlance, I think that an RPG may have what are called basic features, and performance features. Basic features are like wheels on a normal road car. Drivers just expect their road cars to have tires - they're not an optional extra. Performance features (aka excitement features) are like the Tesla Model S 1000 HP. But clearly you don't have to have 1000 HP to have a viable road car - its an optional extra.

I believe D&D designers invest great care into creating classes and sub-classes that are distinct and offer interest over a long campaign arc. I agree with the OP that character advancement was a profound innovation underpinning D&D's initial successes. I suspect (and of course, the OP doesn't rule out, by any means) that there are other factors that are having a material impact. And maybe that is really the thing with D&D: each part of the package is at a very high level of quality. It continues to offer a very good take on its own original innovation, while also having strong visual design, strong writing, thoughtful supporting products, etc.

 

[TwoSix]

So - Pathfinder - I think it puts about the same page count as D&D into character advancement. Why isn't it as successful as D&D? In design parlance, I think that an RPG may have what are called basic features, and performance features. Basic features are like wheels on a normal road car. Drivers just expect their road cars to have tires - they're not an optional extra. Performance features (aka excitement features) are like the Tesla Model S 1000 HP. But clearly you don't have to have 1000 HP to have a viable road car - its an optional extra.

I think D&D overshadows the TTRPG market to such an extent that it's difficult to use relative "success" as a metric.

I mean, I don't think it's a secret that persistent characters with power growth are hugely popular; there's a reason even video games genres like action and sports have made them big elements of their newer games. I'm not sure how much more one could really develop that idea.

A new TTRPG that uses D&D's campaign structure exactly and one that explicitly rebels against it are both going to be less popular than D&D because they aren't D&D.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

A new TTRPG that uses D&D's campaign structure exactly and one that explicitly rebels against it are both going to be less popular than D&D because they aren't D&D.

But that's .... not helpful, is it? We see other games rise and fall (clones, like PF, or different systems, like CoC and WoD).

I don't think anyone would say that D&D has been so dominating because of its stellar management over time. In most markets, you will get overtaken- someone will win out based on a superior product, or price, or something!

So the assertion that all other games will be less popular* than D&D because they aren't D&D is both trivially true based on historical fact, but also raises the question- why has that been the case for 50 years?

I think it's an interesting question, unless we want to default to George Mallory's, "Because it's there."


*And again, it's not a question of other games just being "less popular." D&D is, and other than a brief blip when it was neck-and-neck with a D&D clone, has always been overwhelmingly more popular than any other game.

 

[Mort]

This is an interesting position and I agree that "the campaign" has been a huge draw.

But other games detail campaigns - you can have a GURPS campaign after all!

SO what's the big difference?

I think there are 2:

1. D&D has SO many adventures available - and of multiple levels. Designing good adventures isn't easy and it takes time, especially if you're a novice. But with D&D, you have a ton of low level adventures to choose from, many mid level and while not as many high level they exist (plus by that time you may have gotten enough experience and play to be comfortable homebrewing). Most other systems (let's exclude Pathfinder here) don't have near the breadth of adventures available. This means people CAN do the campaign and play for a while - not just some introductory adventure at the back of the book. Most companies see adventures as low money generators so don't produce them, in favor of actual system content - and short term, they have a point - but long term? premade adventures lead to more and happier players.

2. The level up structure. This has been stated in this thread repeatedly, but it's just a big factor. People like the levels, they like 0-Hero and they like it a lot. With many systems, you get 0 to slightly bigger 0 or Hero to slightly bigger Hero, but not both - D&D has both. Plus the levels themselves make a difference. Systems where you add points etc. work well mechanically but they don't seem to be near as addictive (better term?) to keep going. Sure they have their adherents, but not to the height of the systems with levels.

I think the combination of these 2 factors is key to the big success.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I just finished the first part of Jon Peterson's new book last night. One of the things it really hammers home is both how dire the straits were for Gygax, and how unexpected the success of D&D was in the overall context of the hobby.

I think it is easy to see, now, especially with video games having aped the model, that the play model of D&D is crucial to the success. But I still think we often forget how crucial it is to the success of D&D vis-a-vis the TTRPG market. To put it in simple terms- one reason that D&D succeed, where branded TTRPGs (Dr. Who, Star Trek, etc.) do not do as well, is because of this leveling loop that is crucial to the long-term interest. As much fun as it is to be your Kirk (or Picard, or Sisko, etc.), you want that reward mechanism.

Sometimes the obvious needs to be pointed out.

(I have to admit that I feel like I can't win with certain commenters- either they pick apart a single sentence in a giant essay I write because I'm wrong wrong wrong, or they chime in to complain that I shouldn't bother writing about something so obvious. I guess they want a refund of the money they paid me? )

We are likely to disagree on most things, purely due to our widely divergent tastes, but taste had nothing to do with my response here. Saying "The D&D Advantage" communicates, to me, something special and/or unique about D&D, in particular, right now, since that's what "advantage" means. If everyone has a particular characteristic, is that characteristic still "an advantage"? "Advantage," AIUI, needs to be specially favorable, not required or merely useful. Would be like saying having an MD is "an advantage" for getting a medical license. Such degrees are (usually) explicitly required to get such licenses, not favorable for it (specially or otherwise).

I could have said "duh," but I consider such behavior extremely rude, and openly insulting. If I actually engage with your words, and demonstrate that I've actually thought about what you said (via examples of my own, frex), I show respect to you as an interlocutor. It would be incredibly disrespectful to you to just say "duh"--that's equivalent to saying that your point has so little merit, it doesn't even deserve a full sentence reply. Your point has merit, in the sense that it references real facts and the like. But, for me, it comes across as...well, a bit like saying that the advantage of the car is (not was, is) that it requires less maintenance and is more versatile than horses. While those facts may be true, horses are not used as a primary means of transportation or hauling anymore, so...those aren't "advantages," they're expected baselines now.

As a raw historical fact, sure. This thing, which was an advantage 50 years ago, was a big part of what propelled D&D to its dominant position. But just as (for example) the Internet was once a huge business advantage and now is a requirement for any large business to succeed today, any game getting into the immersive personal experience benefits highly from using these tools. As I tried to show with my B5 example, such tools are no longer exclusive to the TTRPG or even general gaming environment, but found in quite diverse entertainment media.

If what you wanted to focus on was the historical development of D&D as a thing, then...changing how you present it so that it is centered on that history, rather than repeatedly connecting the argument to present-day experiences/events/products/etc., would make your argument significantly clearer. (And, frankly, I probably would just have left no comment; I don't really have much to say about most "history of TTRPGs" threads, though there are occasional surprises.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well, I would say that it's both a crucial innovation that led to competitive advantage (path dependency), as well as a continuing advantage (Part 3 of the above).

It's not that other TTRPGs don't try to mimic the reward loop of D&D (and similar systems). It's that, for various reasons, other systems often aren't able to model the reward loop as well (for genre reasons, for rule reasons, for realism reasons, etc.).

I...personally think you're just wrong on this then.

Plenty of games assume a campaign, or at least something much longer than a one-shot. Even some legit actual board games, like Kingdom Death, straight-up expect multiple sessions of play. Call of Cthulhu, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, the various World of Darkness games, various Star Wars games, the nigh-innumerable systems Powered by the Apocalypse, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Das Schwarze Auge, I'm sure I could list more if I went out and dug them up. And plenty of these, while either listening to, inspired by, or defying D&D convetion, definitely are not D&D games.

Tons of systems, with different genres, implied settings, or perspectives pull off exactly the same reward loop as D&D. Your "(and similar systems)" sweeps under the rug easily dozens of unrelated things. D&D retains its lofty position primarily through familiarity, marketing, and having been the top dog. Much like, for example, EverQuest retained its position as top dog for several years, before its aging mechanics and antiquated (often, very specifically D&D-derived) player experience got trumped by the hot new thing, World of Warcraft, which became enough of a juggernaut that it took some pretty serious controversy and missteps before it began to fumble--and it's still not clear that it's truly lost its way yet.

So it both had the early advantage, and it continues to have that system in place, that is harder to put into a "new" TTRPG that isn't "D&D-like." IMO.

But that's where I thought the discussion might go- how easy is it to re-create that reward system in a new, modern TTRPG that doesn't have the benefit of "grandfathering in" XP, leveling, loot, etc.

Okay so...how exactly can one even do that?

You seem to be saying, essentially, "anything that uses these things is D&D-like," which makes the argument circular: nothing can use these structures without being D&D-like, and anything D&D-like doesn't count as a different system using these structures, no matter how unrelated it might be.

Like, if we applied this exact same logic to fantasy topics, you're basically saying that absolutely everything which includes elves that are human-sized and at least used to have an ancient and powerful society is 100% "Tolkien-like," and thus it's impossible to tell a fantasy story with elves in it that isn't Tolkien-like. Except...that we generally recognize that it's totally possible to have a high-fantasy story that learns from Tolkien without merely being Tolkien with a fresh coat of paint. Elves in Dragon Age, for example, are not (as OSP puts it) "gorgeous, elegant relics of a better time, ancient, wise, and more than a little alien." They're almost all either (a) slaves or at least a racially-oppressed minority within human cities ("Alienage" elves) or (b) "savage" wild folk who live in the forests and conduct guerilla campaigns against humans for current atrocities and past wickedness.

So: Is it even possible for a game to include structures like experience, levels, etc. and not be, by whatever definition you're using, "D&D-like"? Because if not, then your argument is circular as I've said. You've defined the term so that it can't happen. If, on the other hand, there is some way in which a game could use these things without being "D&D-like," then we can actually have a conversation about how such things could occur.