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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8874288" data-attributes="member: 6696971">Its a question where the answer is extremely difficult to know. Here are a pile of thoughts and anecdotes for the thought experiment:* The promise of broad social fabric support, possible social cache to be earned, and relatively low buy-in is very seductive to the bulk of humanity.This passes the “D&D test.”* The best case of “impossible for monopoly to emerge” that I am aware of is plumbers. That is because the nexus of the need is endogenous to the system (everyone has plumbing), the need is overwhelming (plumbing fails at a rate x the scale of plumbing out there that the demand is overwhelming), and the expertise required to resolve the issue is intensive.The TTRPG market kinda touches that first one but not to the degree required (playing “imagination” and playing games are fundamental to the human experience). The need will likely never be overwhelming unless we hit Wall-E levels of dystopia (and I personally see extinction long before then). Yes, expertise is required for at least one participant to successfully navigate a TTRPG (best case scenario is all participants have expertise).* I’ve GMed 14 non-D&D games online in the last 2 years (Dungeon World x 2, Blades in the Dark x 5 including a hack, Stonetop x 2, Lasers & Feelings, Dogs in the Vineyard, Torchbearer, The Between, Aliens). The cohort of 13 players consists of diverse life backgrounds, diverse non-TTRPG interests, extensive D&D backgrounds but only 3 of the players in a current D&D 5e game.* I’ve had success over the last 15 years in running indie games via tapping into the Eurogaming market, the general Boardgaming market, the CRPG market, and even the MtG market (with these players having very little to no D&D exposure). D&D has tried to tap into a lot of these massive markets but they  haven’t been quite seduced by D&D’s “cornered the market/culture from the jump” advantages in my first asterisk above. They’ve got all that stuff from their own niches and they’re quite happy so its individual initiative and elbow grease to get them to try TTRPG games. And a lot of them have played an enormous amount of games so (a) learning and onboarding a new rules paradigm is second nature to them and (b) any passive stance toward playing (rather than driving the play) is utterly foreign and outright anathema to them (so the aggressive player orientation required in most indie games comes natural to them).</blockquote>

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