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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 8858783" data-attributes="member: 2205">My pet theory about the evolution of the player base has to do with what happened to D&D in the early 80s when it really "hit it big." For a time, D&D as an evolution out of the wargaming hobby with a bunch of wargamers as the target audience made D&D as it was written make some sense. But when a whole host of new players came into the game who'd never played a wargame and didn't really have any particular interest in one showed up, but who had read Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander, and Robert E. Howard, and whatever else they'd read (heck, even if all they'd read was Terry Brooks or David Eddings) they just wanted something else from D&D, and were never going to want D&D to focus on what it did back in the Wisconsin regional gaming culture of the mid 70s. And, like it or not, a lot of that wave of gamers is still here, and they're still—in my opinion—one of the biggest pluralities in the gamer population. And if there's a big wave that's come in in the last—I dunno, five years or so? they will have some similarities because they came in through a vector that was even more divorced from the wargaming experience of the mid 70s Wisconsin regional gaming culture.  Playstyle preference, in my pet theory, correlates more with the vector that brought you into gaming than it does with anything else. For people who came to the game from fantasy fiction as opposed to wargaming, the dungeon was always a weird paradigm, and the classic 10-foot pole and lovingly and excruciating detail lavished on traps and descriptions of room dimensions and the traits of doors, or whatever else, was tedious and strange. One of the things that I admit irritates me a bit is the big tent approach. The One D&D launch trailer tries really hard to push this big tent approach. This time the new edition isn't really a new edition, because all D&D is the SAME (which is clearly baloney), this edition will be all things to all people; no matter what you want, One D&D is the gaming nectar of the gods that will be better than whatever you're playing before! I just don't buy that kind of hype. Big tentism to me signals that the game ISN'T likely to appeal to me, or people who enjoy what I enjoy most about the game, because since the 80s at least, my preferred style hasn't been the mainstream, at least if the biggest selling products are any guide. I know, I know, it's their business to sell D&D as much as they can, but I think that there isn't any one thing that will do that. I think the player base is too fractured in nature, and the cause of the fracturing is just different expectations and wants from the game.</blockquote>

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