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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8426528" data-attributes="member: 71699">Civilisation (the videogame) and Minecraft have in a way similar stories. The developers recognised (or at least, adopted) the crucial innovations in a design that predated them (Francis Tresham's Civilisation boardgame, and Zach Barth's Infiniminer, respectively) and were able to supply a level of quality that made them more broadly appealing.A big factor is always accessibility. Riot's Team Fight Tactics solved the inaccessibility of DOTA Autochess, making it now one of the more successful strategy games. D&D design teams have on the whole resisted going for too much complexity. They've found ways to make the core mechanics easier to grasp and use. Another is polish. D&D has always presented a reasonable level of artwork (for the time!) in its published versions. It's easy to compare D&D products in each epoch and see them as very competitive on polish. Another is market presence - the ability to distribute and promote. Electronic Arts secured a very early advantage by owning distribution and buying shelf space for its titles, it also put more effort into localisation than other companies. These success factors can form a virtuous cycle. Commercial success provides money to pay for more design effort and stronger visuals, the brand-recognition of the more polished product makes retailers happier to give it shelf-space, and the scale makes promotion efficient.However, there is a design concept sometimes called brand-pillars. Success is more likely when a company can recognise and make the most of its brand pillars. That is where I believe character advancement mattered, and still matters today to D&D. Because it is a brand-pillar. A number of popular archetypes, each with an extended advancement-arc is going to be on offer. Consider how the prestige-class experiment in 3rd edition has evolved to the 5th edition subclasses, and then how those allow interest to be engineered back into classes via splatbooks like XGE and TCoE. There is a neat bit of design in 5th edition that gives each class 'handles' for snapping in a new subclass. When you analyse the mechanics and meta-mechanics, the capabilities and power-curve for each class is well mapped out. (I might write something more on that down the line, if time permits me.)Thus responsive to [USER=6790260]@EzekielRaiden[/USER]'s critique of the OP, I believe it isn't a past advantage simply playing out as a kind of market or audience inertia. It is a live brand-pillar, recognised by the designers and actively wielded to appeal to players. I'd agree that the innovation was salient to the initial success, and without the initial success there'd be no D&D today. I don't agree that it is just a fact about the past.[EDIT And I think UA in a fashion forms proof of this conclusion. The constant searching and testing of design space for character advancement. Races. Feats. Sub-classes. Classes. Look at the recent Strixhaven cross-class sub-classes. These experiments are evidence that the designers are as focused on their character classes - and their advancement-arcs - as ever!]</blockquote>

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