D&D General What is Good for D&D ... is Good for the RPG Hobby- Thoughts?

[overgeeked]

This is the trick to me.

1. I believe the barrier to entry on a RULE SET is the number 1 problem in terms of adopting a new game.

Only if the rules are complex and expensive. If the rules are simple and free, or inexpensive, the barrier comes down to the sunk-cost fallacy.

2. Having a standard baseline (5e) via a generalized language of the rules, can break that barrier down.

But then, by definition, it's not a new rule set. It's not really that much of a new game. It's 5E modern, or 5E with spaceships, or 5E with spies. It's taking a not that great fantasy rules set and mangling it to fit genres it wasn't designed to handle. It's terrible design, generally speaking.

Its far easier to pivot to a system that uses a similar language.

If you mean generally, then yes. But then most RPGs have a similar language. Turn, round, dice, hit points, GM, player, PC, NPC, etc. If you mean language in the sense of using the 5E rules, then no. Because that's not actually pivoting at all.

Now, its not going to help for wildly different systems, but if I want (and I do) to be playing something that has a different tone, out of the box, I do that by taking a 5e base, and building on top of it, which is now more possible, than it was before.

In this way, I still think an Open 5e, is better than the alternative, of having a fractured base speaking different languages.

If that makes sense?

That assumes that 5E can handle every genre, style, and tone with a little tweaking. That's not true. It can't be all things to all people.

 

[schneeland]

E. One More Thought- What if this is a Highlander Situation?
An art school is a place that, so long as you pay your tuition, will never let you know that you have no talent.

One other thought that I've considered is that perhaps this hobby, given the social effects and the network effects and the size of the hobby and various other constraints necessarily will fall into a "market leader" situation. In other words ... There can be only one!

Put another way, it doesn't have to be "D&D," (or a D&D fantasy equivalent like PF). But maybe this is the type of market that naturally sorts itself into having a dominant market leader, and others- so if it's not D&D, it will be {something else} with everything else being the alternative.

Based on my experience with RPGs in Germany, I don't think that is necessarily true. When I started playing in the 90s, there were four major players in the market: The Dark Eye (Das Schwarze Auge/DSA), Shadowrun, D&D and Vampire/World of Darkness. Maybe Call of Cthulhu as a fifth one. And while CoC and WoD swapped places, it stayed that way for quite a while (D&D 3.x certainly shook things a bit up, but other games were not marginalized). Now the German player base is a lot smaller than the American one and just like anywhere else these days, the market gets steamrolled by D&D, but overall I consider this still a notably healthier situation than a market dominated by a single player/rule system.
To be fair: the downside is that, ever since the 80s when Schmidt Spiele pushed DSA into the market via their presence in general gaming stores, RPGs have very much remained a niche hobby for nerdy people. It is only now through the massive presence of D&D in media and social networks that a larger number of new people gets into contact with this sort of game.

 

[Oofta]

...
That assumes that 5E can handle every genre, style, and tone with a little tweaking. That's not true. It can't be all things to all people.

No system can work for every genre, but it works for more genres (or at least sub-genres) than a lot of games. Games that try to fit every genre seem to fall into the "build-you-own-game" trap.

 

[cranberry]

IMO, what's good for D&D is only good for D&D. As D&D get's bigger, it reduces the available pool of potential players for other RPGs.

Most people are going to gravitate toward the most popular thing, or at least what the majority in their peer group are doing. This gives D&D a "snowball rolling downhill" advantage over other RPGs.

 

[Jer]

To be fair: the downside is that, ever since the 80s when Schmidt Spiele pushed DSA into the market via their presence in general gaming stores, RPGs have very much remained a niche hobby for nerdy people. It is only now through the massive presence of D&D in media and social networks that a larger number of new people gets into contact with this sort of game.

This is actually true in America as well - the size of the D&D player base has grown far beyond where it was 20 years ago because of social networks and streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch.

And honestly I think the market is due for a shake up. The generation of players who started playing the game between 2015 and 2020 are at the point where they've been playing 3-8 years[*]. There's definitely going to be a cohort who, like those of us who played the game in the 80s, are restless and want to see what other games might be out there. The market for non-D&D games has never been huge outside of a period in the 90s where Vampire brought a brand new audience into RPGs and was its own phenomenon. So that cohort may be a small percentage of the people who play D&D, but a small percentage of the much larger pool of people playing the game now is going to be a large number of people.

Of course there's also far less incentive for the current cohort to find radically different systems than there was back in the ancient times when we had to dodge the dinosaurs to roll our d20s. The core of 5e is very hackable and also very solid - it's actually fairly easy for an individual DM to twist it into the shape of the game they want to play so long as their players are willing to go along with the reskinning of the game and the game they want to play is "something like D&D but in a different genre." Unlike AD&D where you could do it but oof, it was easier to just go find a game that would do what you wanted than to try to run a Star Wars game with it.

[*] Pardon me while I turn to dust and blow away.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Only if the rules are complex and expensive. If the rules are simple and free, or inexpensive, the barrier comes down to the sunk-cost fallacy.

But then, by definition, it's not a new rule set. It's not really that much of a new game. It's 5E modern, or 5E with spaceships, or 5E with spies. It's taking a not that great fantasy rules set and mangling it to fit genres it wasn't designed to handle. It's terrible design, generally speaking.

If you mean generally, then yes. But then most RPGs have a similar language. Turn, round, dice, hit points, GM, player, PC, NPC, etc. If you mean language in the sense of using the 5E rules, then no. Because that's not actually pivoting at all.

That assumes that 5E can handle every genre, style, and tone with a little tweaking. That's not true. It can't be all things to all people.

I actually think it can be all things, but probably not to all people.

 

[Yora]

A rising tide may lift all boats.

But D&D is still just a boat, not the tide.

 

[Oofta]

IMO, what's good for D&D is only good for D&D. As D&D get's bigger, it reduces the available pool of potential players for other RPGs.

Most people are going to gravitate toward the most popular thing, or at least what the majority in their peer group are doing. This gives D&D a "snowball rolling downhill" advantage over other RPGs.

Not that I'm picking on this specific post, but it ignores the fact that a lot of people just happen to like the game as well or better than alternatives they've been exposed to or learned about.

Yes, there's also the exposure, but as one example I remember discussing a co-worker's WoD campaign and ... it just wouldn't have worked for me like D&D does. If other games work for you, fantastic. I'm not going to tell you that Cthulhu is a bad game just because it doesn't work for me, I'm just going to say that the premise and style doesn't work for me.

 

[Yora]

During most of my time with RPGs from 2000 to 2015, I can say in hindsight that I really was just very much into D&D 3rd Edition and Pathfinder because I didn't really know about any other games. I knew their names and once played a Shadowrun oneshot at a birthday party, but that was it.

Though I also have to admit that I still really don't like RuneQuest or AD&D, and I am not aware of anything else in that style of fantasy that was around at that time.

 

[JAMUMU]

I'd be more pragmatic about D&D being the 800lb Owlbear in the room if it was capable of delivering a fuller, richer experience than what has become D&D-fantasy. If there's going to be one game that in-the-darkness-binds-them, it would need to be a more complete (complete, not complicated) rule set with either better settings or better world-building tools.

I'm ambivalent at best about D&D. Sure, it's the hook and line but these days I think it's also the sinker.