I visited a friend in another city recently and he bemoaned that he couldn't get anyone to play anything other than Dungeons & Dragons with him. When he suggested they play something other than D&D, the common response was "What, like Pathfinder?"

This hasn't been my gaming experience. Most everyone I've ever played with have been game for anything. Pretty sure if I said to my gaming group: "Today, we're playing potato chips trying to escape the chip bag before being eaten. I've made up a crunchy system for us to use", they'd say "Okay!"

But, this is not the first time I've heard from someone else they can't get players to broaden system perspective.

What are your experiences?

//Panjumanju

We've played several different systems, but rarely genres other than some of the more common fantasy sub genres.  For us, it's mainly that everyone in the room is interested in other things, but our particular fantasy likes are the only ones we all have in common.  We'd rather play something we all enjoy, rather than cycle through things that only most of us enjoy.  Admittedly, it also helps that none of us are particularly bored by our common interests, either.

We rotate games (and GMs) every couple months or so. Our selection of games and styles varies wildly, from railroads to sandboxes from fantasy to sci-fi from adventure parties to intraparty drama, old school and new school.

We have the Gamer ADD; someone gets all het up on a new system or someone isn't liking where the current game is going; and we end up abandoning it. Our campaigns, generally, run for roughly 3-8 months.

I'm in the grey area between "My gaming group really only plays one game, but it's not D&D" and "We change systems every few months".

I play in two gaming groups. One of them, really only plays one game [Call of Cthulhu], and that's by design. I started the group for that purpose, and I recruited players that explicitly wanted to play CoC. I've run a few variants of CoC for them (Delta Green, Cthulhu by Gaslight), but that's about it.

In the second group, I'm a player, and we have played more of a variety of Rpgs. Mostly Gurps, but some Mutant Chronicles 3e, Alternity, etc. But campaigns typically run at least a year, so we're not switching systems that frequently.

I'm not much of a D&D fan. I don't enjoy playing it anymore - regardless of edition, retroclone, whatever. It just doesn't hold any appeal for me, and when I (rarely) want to run/play a fantasy rpg, I can think of plenty of other options.

Unless I'm running the game it's D&D 90% of the time which would make you assume it's their favourite except they keep trying to get me to run games :confused:

I've been in 'Gamer ADD' groups and didn't enjoy it... playing a variety of games is fun, but not constant upheavals chasing the new hotness.
It's hard to escape D&D and its ilk around here, which is part of why playing online has been a godsend. Not that I hate D&D anything close to what I used to... but it's nice to have options/variety.

My group will play other things, but if anything my players are stuck on Savage Worlds. We just finished a D&D 5e game and have three SW games going now, so we won't be doing anything else for the foreseeable future. I have a bunch of games I'd like to play/run one day, though. By the time I finish up East Texas University, the list is going to be pretty long. Midnight, Stars Without Number, Warhammer Fantasy, Adventures in Middle-earth, Dresden Files Accelerated...

We started out playing AD&D and then transitioned into Rifts in the mid 90's and in the late 90's we transitioned to Palladium Fantasy + Rifts and in 2004 we started up with GURPS and would transition between GURPS and Palladium but in the early 2010's we moved to being mostly a GURPS group and in the last year we've started to move back towards Palladium. With Dungeon Fantasy we are jumping back into GURPS.

I'm perfectly happy running either system. When we play new games it tends to be at conventions or one-shots when we don't have a full group but still want to game. We will run DF RPG for a nice campaign but then I want to get back to being just a Palladium group after next year's open house.

Hmm, poll is missing an option...

These days I form play groups around the game I'm playing. While I currently only have one face-to-face game slot, I do run a variety of play by post games. Each PbP game has a different group of players, though there are several players who play in multiple groups.

Frank

No option for "many games that aren't D&D"?

Quote from: Dumarest;984213No option for "many ganes that aren't D&D"?

Man, there's only one Ganes. Humorously, this would be the kind of site where I might expect to meet a person who listens to Ladin-language folk music.

Oh, right, and--

Currently have one 5e D&D group, and one group doing a home-brew post-apoc system. That group has previously done Paranoia, Hero System, d20 hodge-podge, and a few more in the past decade.

Quote from: Dumarest;984213No option for "many ganes that aren't D&D"?

There's no implication in the last few options that D&D is involved in the selection, you could pick one of those.

If I could change the options for the poll now, I would have added "We generally play one system and it's not D&D".

//Panjumanju

I can't vote, because it assumes only one group. I have different groups (with some player overlap) for different games.  I mostly play various sorts of D&D, but I have a White Star game going too now. I guess White Star is D&D-based so you could say I only play D&D?
Looking at groups, I have one tabletop for 4e D&D, one tabletop & one online for 5e D&D, playing in one or two online 1e AD&D/OSRIC games, and the White Star game. One or two players from the 4e game are in the the 5e tabletop game, and similar overlap with online games.