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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8425330" data-attributes="member: 6801845">Slightly more serious response.  Yes, it's the sense of accomplishment and growth that you get while playing that's a big part of D&D's success.  It's funny, I remember people having conniptions in Living Forgotten Realms (LFR, the AL/public play for 4E) because people could create a new character at higher levels to play in mods if they didn't have a PC of the appropriate level.  People were livid because they felt they were being "cheated", that people making these PCs hadn't "earned" that 8th level PC.  Never mind that it was in large part targeted at DMs who ran most of the games instead of playing or new players who wanted to join in but just hadn't been around long enough.  People felt they deserved a higher level PC because they had the opportunity to play the game when other had not.  So people feeling a sense of accomplishment for having (presumably) fun playing a game in their free time and managing to survive is definitely a big part of the secret sauce.  But I think there's more to it than that.Another aspect is the flexibility.  You can go anywhere from Gothic horror theme to sword and sandals to throwing in sci-fi fantasy into the mix and it still all kind of works okay.  Are other games that are focused on Gothic horror better at it than, say Ravenloft? Maybe, depending on personal preference. But D&D can go from Ravenloft to crashed alien spaceships to fighting a war against dragons without blinking an eye. Maybe multiple eye-stalks because how well those different genres work is in the eye of the beholder. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f914.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":unsure:" title="Unsure    :unsure:"  data-smilie="24"data-shortname=":unsure:" /> D&D is kind of like a potluck.  Perhaps not the best meal you'll ever have but it can be satisfying and please a lot of people well enough.  Not only do players grow from Grognard the street urchin to Grognard the Barbarian, Hero of the North, the DM and players also get to create unique visions of the world instead of playing in someone else's Star Trek sandbox if it's what they want.  That growth from zero to hero has big appeal in myth and story, but so does having freedom to create your own world and never having to compete with Luke or Han for heroic arcs, storytelling or setting lore.</blockquote>

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