Saying that D&D is popular mainly because it was first is merely wish-casting or marketing.  I'm not even sure why anyone would make the argument, anyway.  What's the purpose?  

It's rare for things that are considered the very best of the best to be popular.  Which is why "elite opinion" is a thing.  Partly, it's because developing a taste for something "rarefied" is not an option open to everyone, even if they were so inclined.  D&D has generally been willing to be not only "good enough", but expressly and unreservedly "common" about some elements (even if the patina of the esoteric was painted over the thing).  Common doesn't mean "least common denominator".  That would be our mistaken marketing effort again.  It just means aimed at what a huge chunk of people want to do.

Quote from: Jaeger;1085591But, I think we are actually talking past each other. To your larger point of "good enough' I'm in complete agreement.

It's not enough to merely mimic the design of the market leader, people have to perceive that you are offering an objectively better product, to make a switch worth the trouble.

D&D from its beginning to early 80's to the 3e era +5e was certainly "good enough".

Any potential competitor would have not only had to have a great system that matched or exceeded D&D on all 5 points. But they would have had to put out enough support, and been successful enough that they could then be around for when TSR made a misstep. (Assuming they didn't screw the pooch themselves business wise.)

In 20/20 hindsight, that is one tall fucking order. Good enough + Market Leader = No can defend.[/QUOTEI see your point and I concur that we are in agreement.

What I will add that the use of open content since 2000 has changed the rules of the industry and allow a relatively free "vote" on which version of D&D one will stick with. I hard to see how Wizards will move onto a 6th editions without shooting themselves in the foot unless it the same system but with the contents tweaked like they do with Magic the Gathering.

Quote from: estar;1085583You can use anydice to get a chart of the odds for various methods of rolling dice.
https://anydice.com/

Thanks, I'm well aware. Fantastic site. I use it all time. Everyone should check it out.

It makes it very easy to visualize how the the bigger number you put in front of the "d" the steeper the curve. It also makes it easy to see how 1d20 vs 1d20 is the same probability as 2d20 (or 2d6 vs 2d6 is the same as 4d6, etc.) You can do roll X dice and keep highest/lowest/middlest X and pretty much anything else you can think of (exploding dice, count successes, et al.)

Great resource and thanks for the reminder.

Quote from: estar;1085620I hard to see how Wizards will move onto a 6th editions without shooting themselves in the foot unless it the same system but with the contents tweaked like they do with Magic the Gathering.

I think a cleaned up 5e (whether they call it 5e, 5.5e or 6e) for the 2024 anniversary would be their best bet. New art, better index, colour-coded chapters etc. Really, if sales don't drop much between now and 2022 I suspect they should just call it a 5e reprint so as to keep 100% compatibility. They struck gold with 5e and they clearly know it; they'll want to keep the momentum going.

Quote from: estar;1085578So in your view D&D hobbyists for idiots for liking what they like, subject to corporate mind control, and it can't be because of the intrinsic merits of the system.

Rob, I have to snip you here because you're arguing against a strawman. Quite clearly so, given what I said in the quote you're responding to.

That said, it's fairly certain that brand loyalty is a significant factor to D&D's success. There are other factors, to be sure. As a game designer, I have every incentive to approach this question unbiased: if there are any success factors to D&D that can be easily replicated (unlike brand loyalty or the network effect or a vast wealth of material), I would be well advised to study those and make a conscious design choice about whether to adapt/improve on any of D&D's answers - or not.

Quote from: estar;1085578It called Pathfinder and the various OSR RPGs. The OGL prohibits the use of trademarks without another license.

No, these are not interesting to me as a game designer. What's interesting to me is which of D&D's mechanics work well without the D&D brand attached to it, even if only indirectly so (PF, OSR, SW Saga, etc). This ties in to the above issue.

Quote from: Jaeger;1085602I used to think the same way.

Me too. Your opening post here has been an eye opener to me though with regards to what D&D fans see in this game.

Quote from: Jaeger;1085602I find the D&D class/level based, zero to hero, inflating HP default play paradigm just rubs me the wrong way.

But then I started paying attention to the majority of the hobby =D&D, and started to notice some trends...

People actually Like: "...how gonzo and overwhelming all the suggested weird monsters/magic/alignments/races etc are"

They like zero to hero. They like the way the class/level system engages them.

That's when I started to realise maybe is not all those 'other people' who like D&D, "just because it came first", maybe its me.

I have definite preferences that generally push me away from D&D as game I want to play. But D&D seems to hit the nail on the head with a lot of other people.

I agree with that. I am not sure if that means D&D did things right form the get-go but that's a secondary question.
I would phrase it this way: I played Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2. I liked both, especially BG2. It's not what I'd be aiming for in my TTRPG fantasy campaigns but it was entertaining for what it was, as a CRPG. I think D&D fans like this mode of play, which is ultimately Hack & Slash. Kill monsters, take their stuff and level up. That's what D&D is built for, to this day, at its core. Doesn't mean you can't do anything else with it - evidently so, given that, for example. Critical Role has some alright role-playing scenes, repeatedly so. But ultimately it does come back to this, system-wise. And that is what, in my mind, the 5 point winning formula is about - and about transitioning into this mode of play with ease.

So for me as a designer this is useful because then I can go over the list and decide for each item how important this is for me and my game and what the ramifications are if I don't address one of these factors and if that's worth it to me. Or how to address it if I want to address it (and haven't done so yet).

The biggest thing that D&D has going for it at this point is simple network effects. Due to the popularity of D&D it's easier to:
1. Find people who already know how to play it.
2. Find a specific version of D&D that you like. Due to the OGL we have a gazillion iterations of D&D. For example I rather like certain OSR rulesets and the 2ed version of Mongoose d20 Conan and their being based on D&D makes it easier for me to get my players up to speed since they already know the majority of the rules.
3. Find free material/play advice on the internet that I can plug into my game. The sheer wealth of free D&D shit (my favorite being the one page dungeons) is just astounding, nothing else comes close.
4. Houserule it to my tastes since I can look up people who've done similar house rules and get ideas and see how it worked for them for so many kinds of course rules, which wouldn't be possible for a more niche game.
5. An enormous library of published D&D stuff. If you apply Sturgeon's Law to it you are left with a pretty damn big 10% of cool stuff.
6. If you ask for ideas/advice online about your campaign it's vastly easier to get useful feedback if you're playing D&D.

In order to be more fun than D&D another game has to be not only as good as D&D in terms of rules but better enough to trump all of the usefulness of the network effect as well as me having to put in the effort to not only learn new rules but gain an intuititve understanding of how they work. In any case the D&D umbrella is wide enough thanks to the OGL that it covers a lot of stuff and there are published rulesets that fix a lot of things I don't like about various versions of official D&D.

Quote from: Daztur;1085896In order to be more fun than D&D another game has to be not only as good as D&D in terms of rules but better enough to trump all of the usefulness of the network effect as well as me having to put in the effort to not only learn new rules but gain an intuititve understanding of how they work. In any case the D&D umbrella is wide enough thanks to the OGL that it covers a lot of stuff and there are published rulesets that fix a lot of things I don't like about various versions of official D&D.

Not referring to you personally here but I think this lack of curiousity in some gamers is the most disappointing part to me. I mean, yes, there's not a lot of systems at this moment out there I'd like to explore myself - but that is because most systems either not cater to my preferred style (genre simulation) or they are sufficiently similar to systems I already know. How can one, and still not referring to you personally, be a role-player and not wanting to try a dicepool system? Or a narrative system? Or the GURPS toolkit approach? Or FFG's narrative dice? Or maybe even Rolemaster and its Critical Hit tables? (Or D&D, btw, to look at it from the opposite angle.)

As for branching out inside the D&D umbrella, you still have to read the rulebook of a D&D variant, it's only easier to memorize because it's more similar to what you've played before. However, when I see the new WFRP 4E, it doesn't seem to me to be significantly less work for me to learn (though I know 1E/2E plus the 40k RPGs) than another game from scratch. Even in the best case, I need to check if any rules I am familiar with are still there. In fact, I'd rather be more tempted to try out a system that does things differently from what I am familiar with, like Legends of the Wulin perhaps.

So that lack of curiousity that some gamers display raises questions in my mind. Particularly if these gamers regularly try out new boardgames, learning their rules.

Quote from: Alexander Kalinowski;1086170Not referring to you personally here but I think this lack of curiousity in some gamers is the most disappointing part to me. I mean, yes, there's not a lot of systems at this moment out there I'd like to explore myself - but that is because most systems either not cater to my preferred style (genre simulation) or they are sufficiently similar to systems I already know. How can one, and still not referring to you personally, be a role-player and not wanting to try a dicepool system? Or a narrative system? Or the GURPS toolkit approach? Or FFG's narrative dice? Or maybe even Rolemaster and its Critical Hit tables? (Or D&D, btw, to look at it from the opposite angle.)

If my group as made up of clones of me we'd try a lot more out there games. But with my actual group you only need one person who can't figure out the new game to make that system a bad choice for the group.

As for branching out inside the D&D umbrella, you still have to read the rulebook of a D&D variant, it's only easier to memorize because it's more similar to what you've played before. However, when I see the new WFRP 4E, it doesn't seem to me to be significantly less work for me to learn (though I know 1E/2E plus the 40k RPGs) than another game from scratch. Even in the best case, I need to check if any rules I am familiar with are still there. In fact, I'd rather be more tempted to try out a system that does things differently from what I am familiar with, like Legends of the Wulin perhaps.

So that lack of curiousity that some gamers display raises questions in my mind. Particularly if these gamers regularly try out new boardgames, learning their rules.

For me personally I've tried a number of other systems and while some are good it can be a bit trying to have to spend hours learning yet another way to add stat and skill and randomizer together, or worse yet trying to teach that one guy in your group who can NEVER remember rules but is a great player otherwise another ruleset. This is especially a problem with indie games, even with the good ones there's always one guy in the group who just can't wrap his head around the metagame mechanics and it drags everyone else's fun down if your friend can't figure out how to play the game.

But yeah if you care about genre emulation that's a great reason to ditch DnD. DnD is good at emulating DnD and that's about it. Often better to ditch DnD then to try to make it into a system that can handle a lot of genres.

RPGs don't emulate books and movies well, but neither do board games. Heck, most movies can barely emulate the books they're made from!

At best, a RPG system can get out of the way so the GM and players can immerse themselves in the TROPES of the genre, book, or movie they are trying to emulate.

D&D does a good job of allowing players to immerse themselves in the TROPES of the fantasy genre (and several other RPGs achieve that as well).

Quote from: Spinachcat;1086347RPGs don't emulate books and movies well, but neither do board games. Heck, most movies can barely emulate the books they're made from!

At best, a RPG system can get out of the way so the GM and players can immerse themselves in the TROPES of the genre, book, or movie they are trying to emulate.

D&D does a good job of allowing players to immerse themselves in the TROPES of the fantasy genre (and several other RPGs achieve that as well).

In the Black Panther vs Killmonger ritual fight, it goes almost blow for blow via Savage Worlds rules, so much so that Panther is defeated on the 4 wound.

D&D is terrible at emulating books and movies, that doesn't mean all RPGs are. Heck FATE is built off the idea that your characters are just Tropes.