So, here's the thing. I've been roleplaying since the early 80's. I've played, and own, quite a few different systems. Although I live in a rural area of the UK I've never had trouble getting groups together, until the last couple of years which was a real dry spell.

Then, earlier this year, a new tabletop gaming shop opened in a town about an hours drive away. They have gaming tables and a Facebook group to help people arrange RPG games.

Awesome! So I posted to try and get people to join a game of Call of Cthulhu. It's a well known game, I figured, and Cthulhu is recognisable to most nerds, I'll easily be able to get a few people to have a go at least.

Nope. I think one guy was interested but couldn't actually get to the shop for some reason. Since then I've noticed a pattern on that FB group. Two or three times a week people will post looking for 5e games to join, often they are noobs, sometimes with some experience. They often don't even mention "D&D", but refer only to "5e". Occasionally someone will post looking for people to play a game that isn't 5e and they routinely get zero response.

It's like 5e is a hobby in its own right, quite distinct from roleplaying generally, and there's no crossover at all.

Even when the shop recently agreed to actively promote "alternative" system taster sessions there was no interest. None.

Why is this? Here is my theory:

1) Millennials are naturally conformist and its a conformity born from fear.
Speech codes, Twitter kangaroo courts, safe spaces are the norm to people in this age group. They only want to pursue approved methods of interpersonal engagement. The opportunity to encounter something new, and have to make up their own mind about it, scares them.

2) Millennials are brand-conscious
Younger people define their identity increasingly by what they consume. Brand loyalty is an important facet of how they see themselves and how they identify and relate to each other.

3) Millenials encounter D&D differently
When I was a kid there was no internet, smartphones or even home computers. People read books for fun. Myself and my schoolfriends got into RPGs because we were interested in mythology, history and fantasy literature. RPGs were a way to engage with those interests in an interactive way. All the people from that local store who I've spoken to got into D&D by watching Critical Role which they uniformly love. They had no pre-existing interest in D&D's cultural influences. They like it because it's played in a web show they enjoy and they want to imitate that. If Matt Mercer played Runequest, that's what they'd want to do.

4) People purchase games differently now
Again, as a youth I had to go into a physical game shop to buy my RPG stuff. And next to the TSR shelves would be shelves full of other RPGs. And because my interests were in history and mythology, games like Chivalry and Sorcery or Man, Myth and Magic, had a potential appeal. I could physically pick them up and look at them, decide it they were something I wanted to try. If you're searching "D&D Players Handbook" on Amazon you're just not going to get that same exposure to other games.

Anyway, that's my rant. Is the situation similar where you are? Is 5e a separate hobby? Is the explosion in its popularity unique to itself, or are other games getting a boost on 5e's back? My experience suggests not....

My experience is that for every 8 to 10 D&D players, you'll find 1 to 3 interested in also trying another system, and maybe 1 if you are lucky that prefers another system to D&D.  Furthermore, many that are eventually interested in other systems need a good solid run with D&D first, before they'll be all that interested in something new.  This is partly negative, partly positive.  You need time for people to learn about D&D warts, and thus get motivated to try something else.  You also need time for people to absorb what roleplaying is all about and then want to expand their horizons.  There's also a neutral aspect, in that many people have a limit on how much time and money they are willing to put into learning new game systems.

Mainly, though, people want to play with a good GM (from their perspective, whatever that is).  For your stated goals, I'd say you are moving too fast.  If you run some D&D for these players, and they like how you do it, then some of them will be open to trying something else--because you are also running it. Otherwise, you are depending upon a leap of faith that a lot of folks simply aren't going to make.

That said, I have had plenty of luck getting people to start with something else, but usually that was because they were new to the idea of roleplaying entirely.  Describe a game; it sounds fun; they try it.  The new popularity of D&D might be interfering with that dynamic right now, because many of the people that are receptive to the idea are naturally going to be interested in trying D&D 5E first.  I couldn't say for sure, since I'm perfectly happy to run 5E to get new people interested--both for its own sake and to create a (smaller) pool of people that will try other things later.

How are you defining Millenial? I'm 37 and by some counts, I'm a millenial...and you're not describing me or my experience at all.

Ive seen it in FB groups in my local area for recruiting new RPG players. Lots of noobs asking about 5th edition games. When I promote my OSR, Runequest or Sci Fi games I almost always only get responded to by experienced older gamers.

I do find that when people have a year or so under their belts of D&D then tend to be more open to trying other games and in fact we have a couple of new regulars to our longstanding group that started with D&D but now will play pretty much anything our group proposes (WEG d6 Star Wars, Fading Suns, CoC, etc)

Millenials are hipsters who want to latch on to the latest fad thing; geek culture has been largely colonized/taken over by millennials.  This includes pop media and distribution channels - so The Goldbergs and Community and Stranger Things and Big Bang Theory and so on all show D&D as a "fun" and "quirky" thing to do.  Since D&D 5e is the one you can buy at stores it's the one they buy.  If you held up a 1e DMG to them it'd be like garlic to a vampire.

I'm 50, and my group of 7 guys are all close to my age. We've never played anything other than D&D for 20 years now.  Same goes for my other group of 6, with a brief exception for a game by Monte Cook which played remarkably similar to D&D and he was a name we knew from D&D (though that only lasted a couple months, perhaps because we didn't want to keep learning it).

This has nothing to do with age. It's just that learning a new system of rules is not something people want to do with their spare time when they could be playing a game they already know and like.

Millennials are between 24-39 years of age.

I hand pick groups from friends and run them in games I chose. Some were interested because of things like Critical Role, but they didn't particularly care about the system.

Gen Z on the other hand, I have experienced a group asking me to DM for them. When I presented the system I was going to use, they let me know they only wanted to play 5e or nothing. And they got nothing as a result. This group did lean conservative, so I wouldn't put this on politics.

I assume that for organized play I would have to play 5e.

Now what has soured "not 5e" RPGs is most people that suggest something else tend to present storygames like PbtA or FitD or Dungeon World that play nothing like a traditional RPG. I'm not surprised that most people in the hobby aren't willing to try new things if most of the time the new thing is crap.

What about Pathfinder? Is that dead these days?

I'm a Millennial and I started with D&D 3.5 and have barely played 5E at all.

But then again, I'm a self-hating Millennial who completely detests my own generation.

I'm a millennial who hates 5e (boring and same-y), AMA?

I think the actual answer is a combination of these and probably some other factors:

* Lightning in a bottle popularity spike of RPGs/D&D around when 5e was fresh
* Great distribution channels so that you can buy 5e stuff at Barnes and Noble
* "Geek culture" is "cool" and D&D toys are a thing
* Network effect from 5e everywhere/that initial critical mass
* Pushback against vague memory of Satanic Panic ("screw religion I'm playing D&D!")
* Woke marketing
* YouTube
* Sunk costs: "I'll make my next campaign 5e because I learned it already, it's Good Enough, and I'm busy and D&D is something I do not something I'm deeply invested in"

I've floated some alternate systems at largely millennial audiences with some nibbles of interest. We'll see if I have time to execute. I think part of it is packaging Other Stuff up in a digestible, tutorial kind of way. Probably YouTube would help a lot too.

Edit: This didn't address OP as well as I thought it did when I looked back. Being more specific:

Quote from: Alex K;1110158Nope. I think one guy was interested but couldn't actually get to the shop for some reason. Since then I've noticed a pattern on that FB group. Two or three times a week people will post looking for 5e games to join, often they are noobs, sometimes with some experience. They often don't even mention "D&D", but refer only to "5e". Occasionally someone will post looking for people to play a game that isn't 5e and they routinely get zero response.

It's like 5e is a hobby in its own right, quite distinct from roleplaying generally, and there's no crossover at all.

Yeah, I think that's accurate in many cases.

Quote from: Alex K;11101581) Millennials are naturally conformist and its a conformity born from fear.
Speech codes, Twitter kangaroo courts, safe spaces are the norm to people in this age group. They only want to pursue approved methods of interpersonal engagement. The opportunity to encounter something new, and have to make up their own mind about it, scares them.

Ouch. Maybe? I think -- I hope -- that this is not that big a factor. I suspect that to the extent that it it's in play, it causes some amount of artificial inflation of interest, and some amount of artificial deflation in interest in certain non-D&D games (e.g. those made by wrongthinkers). I think 5e is just an easily obtained default that is generic enough to do everything and hit just at the right time to get that cultural critical mass going.

Quote from: Alex K;11101582) Millennials are brand-conscious
Younger people define their identity increasingly by what they consume. Brand loyalty is an important facet of how they see themselves and how they identify and relate to each other.

Yeah, definitely.

Quote from: Alex K;11101583) Millenials encounter D&D differently
When I was a kid there was no internet, smartphones or even home computers. People read books for fun. Myself and my schoolfriends got into RPGs because we were interested in mythology, history and fantasy literature. RPGs were a way to engage with those interests in an interactive way. All the people from that local store who I've spoken to got into D&D by watching Critical Role which they uniformly love. They had no pre-existing interest in D&D's cultural influences. They like it because it's played in a web show they enjoy and they want to imitate that. If Matt Mercer played Runequest, that's what they'd want to do.

Yeah, sort of. I think nerds still read books for fun and always will. The TV show/YouTube/cast of characters to follow aspect is big. If you're not a capital-G Gamer, people's social natures and interest in other people helps to be a "hook" into interest into the hobby, I think.

Quote from: Alex K;11101584) People purchase games differently now
Again, as a youth I had to go into a physical game shop to buy my RPG stuff. And next to the TSR shelves would be shelves full of other RPGs. And because my interests were in history and mythology, games like Chivalry and Sorcery or Man, Myth and Magic, had a potential appeal. I could physically pick them up and look at them, decide it they were something I wanted to try. If you're searching "D&D Players Handbook" on Amazon you're just not going to get that same exposure to other games.

I think people who are into games because they deeply love games continue to be interested in this way. I think D&D's omnipresence including in brick and mortar regular bookstores helps to keep D&D synonymous with "playing RPGs", so even if you're not actively interested enough in games (or with enough free time) to pursue them for their own sake, D&D 5e is on the periphery of your vision quite a bit if you're looking for an offline, social, fun thing to do once a week with relatively low startup investment. (Groups are readily available, quickstart rules, YouTube videos, whatever thing you feel like doing is supported.)

Put another way, not to trip on any 3rd rails or anything, but I think this is the distinction between "gamer" and "person who casually plays games". Not in a gatekeep-y way, just in a nature-of-interest way.

D&D is the most popular RPG (again) and the latest edition is the most popular edition. That's nothing new.

My entire Old School gaming group -- other than myself -- are millennials .  I think it has more to do with the fact that you're recruiting through your local gaming store than it does the age of the players. It seems to me that a commercial locale for gaming is most likely to attract commercially-minded players, and of course 5e is the most prominent commercial product out there right now.

Word of mouth is what important. Thanks to the internet they are bombarded with a thousand pitches every day on a variety of topics and to deal with it they filter shit a lot.

For example I had zero issues with getting some member of the boy scout troop I was involved with to try out Swords & Wizardry but they knew me and respected my opinions. But I been unable to get traction at one local hobby store because I don't go there enough for the regulars to get comfortable with my ideas. But at yet another hobby stores I was able too because I went there often enough and the game store owner knew what I wrote and was a fan.

It has nothing to do with being a hipster, that stuff exists like it does in every generation. The barrage of information from the internet is the new thing in this era. My advice if you get resistance is to ask is how well do they know you?

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1110193D&D is the most popular RPG (again) and the latest edition is the most popular edition. That's nothing new.

^^Exactly this. Don't overthink it, it's not rocket science. Popularity and availability are why 5e groups are more common. It has nothing to do with age. You can walk into any Target in America and grab a 5e D&D box. When all your friends are playing 5e, then 5e it is.

Also, 5e is a very user-friendly game and the basic rules are totally FREE! Don't overlook the brilliant move Hasbro made by making the basic game 100% free of charge. That strategy alone will get noobs involved in gaming that wouldn't otherwise. Older editions cost money with no guarantees of any gaming returns or even simple participation.

I believe I qualify as a millenial, and I haven't played or run D&D in around a decade or so. I would imagine that it's true most groups around here play exclusively 5e, but I think that's been true of every D&D edition too. As estar said, I think it's primarily the propagation of ideas and suggestions. If you live exclusively in your own little microcosm of RPG play then yeah, that will breed homogeneity. Fortunately I haven't found an issue with playing or running different games for people (though to be fair, these days I *do* pretty much just run one game system; not for lack of players to choose from, more just because I've found my personal "sweet spot").