Henry said:
Here's the big question: Why did you, and so many of us, keep going back to D&D? If you can have the same thing (Interesting plot lines and good GM'ing) with Shadowrun, or Savage Worlds, or Vampire, why does D&D never fall by the wayside for good?
Someone once referred to D&D as the Rasputin of gaming, and it's pretty apt: It mesmerizes us, draws us back to pick it up, and it would take a heck of a lot to kill it.
1. The tremendous amount of support; most particularly the variety of the support. I think most campaigns die when the GM runs out of ideas and can't come up with something to save his life three, four weeks running. We all hit it at one point or another. With D&D, you can open up a module, get one off the net, use an old advenure and change things, or pick from hundreds of
Dungeon adventures. If you don't find an adventure you like, look some more. It's out there. Kill Stuff/Take Loot, Romance, Adventuring for the common good, Mercenary ops, explorations, explorations, all there laid out for you so that you can get over that two week hump and continue on.
2. Even though it could be simpler, it has apparently has
balance of simplicity and complexity that appeals to a lot of people. Some say 'people don't like learning that big chunk of rules' but we also see research that claims exactly the opposite: many of the early people attracted to D&D loved solving complex rules and gaining mastery over them. I personally think that most people that come into the hobby are brought in by others, so those people perpetuate that mindset among the vast majority of D&D players. It's not so complex that people give up in tears, but it's complex
enough that people struggle with it a little and want to learn more.
I've watched a new player to our campaign go through this very set of phases. She's bright and eager to learn new stuff, she has her own PHB and now she's one of the first to dive in there and look up a spell description to find out if it works in this situation ("Can you Run when you're using Spider Climb?" "I'll see!"). She bought Arcana Unearthed when we did that and made sure she knew all the stuff about her race, her class, and her spell list even though she didn't study in depth the rest of the book. Now she's boning up on Mutants and Masterminds, and she started thinking of ways she could enhance her Possession ability and the like.
3. The class structure still make sense for making things simple. When we'd level M&M characters, we'd spend a long time thinking about what we wanted to get. When we level in D&D, we sometimes do that in the middle of an adventure and it just takes as long as a soda break to advance the PC and dive back into play. It simplifies a lot of decisions that the majority of players don't want to bother with or that would take up a lot of time.
4. It sounds a little silly but I think there is a something gained by D&D
being the biggest RPG name; people like big names because it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling that there will always be adventures and support and new cool things to do.
5. Speaking of that: there's always something new and cool to do that you can't experience unless you have another character because of the class and race system. How many people have played all the races and classes even in the three core books? I haven't, not in 25 years. There's still something new in there for me to do. I certainly haven't even scratched the surface of prestige classes. There is always a new horizon and that is something that leads people. With, say, GURPS one character could quickly become very like another. SOmeone who started as a wizard type could spend points and somewhat later on down the road be as good a warrior as the warrior is if he wanted. Can't do that well in d20; the seperation of classes always means there is something the other guy can do that you can't, which means a tiny part of you if already thinking about doing that class.. in the next campaign.
6. It's something almost everyone can agree on. Many times, D&D has not been
anyone's favorite RPG but it's been
everyone's second or third choice. It's something most people can agree on to play. I love the Empire of the Petal Throne world. I have all the novels, even. But no-one else here does. I didn't even guy the new rules book because it would just sit on the shelf and rot like so many other things I have. D&D never sits there and rots, even when we go play something else we always come back to it.
