Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 2822305" data-attributes="member: 22882">Actually, isn't the Chronicles of Narnia the best selling, taking the series as a whole?  Having more books helps. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Regardless, it's quite possible that our "D&D" would be the first, but not the most popular if it stuck to fantasy tropes.  A 1930 D&D followed by, say, a 1936 Traveler might see Traveler take top honors, since sci-fi was much bigger than fantasy pre-Tolkien.  Assuming the hobby survived the paper shortages of WW2 (which killed the pulps, pretty much), a Sci-Fi RPG would be an even more likely top seller moving into the late '40 and the '50s, with Supers entering the mix as comic books became more popular than pulps.Keep in mind, the thread doesn't postulate "D&D in an alternate history without Tolkien's Lord of the Rings," it postulates "D&D releasing before Tolkien's Lord of the Rings" - meaning the fantasy boom LotR eventually caused might well feed back into fantasy roleplaying, which had taken a back seat to SF and supers for a time.The popularity of fantasy might not even matter.  Prior to the release of the Lord of the Rings movies and Harry Potter, sci-fi and space fantasy were much more visible genres with a much more dedicated (and often shared) fan base.  The best-selling electronic RPGs are sci-fi/fantasy or space fantasy.  The health of fantasy roleplaying may have little to do with the popularity of fantasy as a literary/cinematic genre.</blockquote>

Verification