NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8175535" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Yeah it would, because as the prior poster put it it had no competition.  It was conceptual wildfire, and its substandard mechanical structure couldn't hurt that.A lot of really objectively poor products can get by and even flourish when they have no competition.  By the time there was any real competition, at least modestly better mechanically versions of the system were in play, and the general structure had set expectations so any problems there were only going to be pursued by a subset of users.It'd be far from the only product to ever do well even though there were better versions of them when they moved into a market first and fast.  Its really hard to dislodge a product that fills a market unless its not just mediocre but really is missing components for the majority of its market, and that's not even accounting for the intrinsic benefit an RPG has in usage and networking over products that are used individually.  And for all its problems, later, but still early versions of the game like the B/X line and AD&D did at least supply a structure with less massive holes than OD&D had.  Though I doubt there's any way to prove it, I'd be willing to put money that by 1978 the people playing OD&D were a minuscule part of the RPG playing populace; the vast majority had moved to AD&D, B/X or one of its kin, or out of D&D entirely.All OD&D had to be was good enough to expand like crazy for the first year or two to fill the niche, and then its successor games could take advantage of that while still only leaving a limited amount of room for the various other games emerging at that time.</blockquote>

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