Both things are true. It is a huge problem that there is just one game dominating an entire space.
It’s even worse that the game is not very good.
It’s even worse that the game, and most of the other top games, are primarily just miniatures combat games rather than actual storytelling games. It’s not only dominating a space, it’s an imposter that dominates a space it doesn’t belong in. It has warped reality so that most people can’t even separate their idea of the genre from that single game. An entire genre is just a single thing, and isn’t even a thing that really belongs in that genre.
Imagine if saying you were going to watch a sci-fi movie was the same as saying you were going to watch a Star Trek movie. People just didn’t have space in their brains for any other sci-fi, so that one thing became synonymous with the entire genre.
Now imagine if saying you were going to watch a sci-fi movie, and someone said “Oh, I love Buzz Lightyear” because sci-fi == Toy Story. That’s the D&D situation.
For how long did Buck Rogers define most people’s idea of Science Fiction?
How long did most people think Lord of the Rings when they hear Fantasy?
For that matter, how much does Star Wars/Star Trek still form the core image of what people think of when they hear Science Fiction today?
We’re looking at two companies that control over 60% of the market, and the two companies used to be one company a decade (or more) ago. It’s the same simplistic heuristic that most people have when they hear about a thing that isn’t their jam: they have one or two solid images of it, and what’s really happening is hidden by the mass of arguing just beneath the surface.
And on the surface of every niche is the people who don’t go any farther; the people for whom Science Fiction is Star (Trek/Wars), because it’s accessible and fits an easy need. Roll20 is probably a good place to go for that easy way to get a hit of an RPG without a great deal of commitment, so it skews towards the surface. The people who dip their toes in and consider it a periphery geekdom.
Look at the preferences when you get people more into RPG’s. Other systems, arguments for style, all the arguing. I know I get irked (for stupid reasons, I’ll admit) everytime you guys talk up any of the Luke Crane games, to the same degree you seem to like shit-talking D&D.
And D&D is a thinly veiled miniatures game? No shit, when you scratch deep enough it’s still an iteration on Chainmail.
To be honest I don’t see why this is a problem, in practice with DnD or in theory with SciFi. If DnD serves the purpose for most people who want to play that sort of game, and the only people who even care to argue about it are geeks like us, and being literally a game with very few IRL consequences, why is it such a big problem that the popular one is popular?
The Mona Lisa is the most popular painting, but it’s not as if other paintings get no attention. People know The Scream, Starry Night, or The Persistence of Memory.
Now imagine if the only painting anyone knew at all was The Mona Lisa to the point where the word “painting” and the words “Mona Lisa” may as well be the same thing.
You go to start a conversation about a painting you saw that wasn’t the Mona Lisa and it goes something like this:
A: I saw this great painting the other day.
B: Oh, yeah, doesn’t that woman have a great smirk on her face?
A: It was a painting of a bowl of fruit.
B: What are you talking about? You’re blowing my mind here.
Go to a forum that is nominally about RPGS: 99% of discussion is about D&D. No discussion about any others.
Go to RPG advice forums, panels, videos: all of it is D&D-specific. Most of the problems would be solved by playing not D&D, but that is inconceivable.
Ask question about someone’s RPG: question doesn’t even make sense unless the game was D&D, or very similar to it.
Try to teach someone a new RPG: How do I kill things? Where are my hitpoints and mana? Player can not conceive of anything so dissimilar from D&D.
I hate this D&D game. Too much combat not enough role playing. I’m gonna make my own D&D and fix everything. proceeds to make exactly the same game only using different dice and numbers because they can’t even conceive of anything outside the box
I have played three sessions of “The Wizard’s Grimoire” so far. The first two sessions where with FRC people.
Session 1: Bandits who bargained in good faith. Crazy old man on a mountain. Natural disasters. Failure.
Session 2: Sexy sexy times. Court intrigues.
In session 3 I played with two people who were seasoned D&D/d20 gms, and to my knowledge had litle to no experience with non-D&D RPGs. The story ended up mostly involving cultists in a dungeon. The rules and my play still saved it and exposed them to new ideas somewhat. But it’s obvious how lack of exposure to other RPGs they were somehow unable to tell a story that wasn’t a D&D story. Their minds had been trapped.
Years ago I did and it blew my hippy noodle. It never occurred to me that there even were sodas that weren’t in the coke/pepsi umbrella. You could make coffee soda, or cucumber sarsaparilla etc etc etc. Many many moon ago because shipping was more expensive, different regional areas had their own sodas or candy or whatever because it didn’t make sense to ship them far out because the cost of shipping would raise their prices to not worth it.
The fact that I can’t go to Rochester and try their colas and their chocolate bars that I can’t get here is sad to me. No matter where I go it’s coke, pepsi, hersey and, mars.
Then along comes you. You say, “I don’t know what your beef is with coke and pepsi, they’re great and it’s totally fine that they dominate the pop space”.
You also make me sad. You make me realize I’m never getting my Boston Birch Beer.
Oh, the same conversation about DnD popularity we had literally last week? I’ll be back when the thread says twenty unread posts and start again from there.
At the peak of WoW and other MMORPGs, it did. I’m pretty confident in saying more people were playing MMOs than were actually playing D&D.
Even so, MMORPGs still fall short of D&D in many ways. The biggest ones are probably:
In person socialization is significantly different than Internet socialization. Not to discount the Internet socialization. I mean, look at this forum. Look at WoW guilds and such. It’s just not the same when you can’t yell to the kitchen and ask for more chips.
Tabletop RPGs always have new content. MMOs you have to wait for an expansion. Then you play it out. Then you beat everything with a different class. Then with every class and race. Then what?
Tabletop RPGs, even D&D, incorporate the freedom of human judgement. You can still try to do anything. In an MMORPG does it even let you shoot a fireball in the tavern? If you can, does it destroy the tavern and everyone in it? In D&D you sure can. Think there’s a trap in a dungeon? Try triggering it by harvesting limbs from the corpses of the orcs you just slaughtered and throw them down the hallway to see if any arrows or shit come out of the walls.
For all the flaws of D&D itself all tabletop RPGs get that human judgement factor for free.
I will reveal more of bias and say actually I think it would be objectively better if those D&D players were burning wheel and dungeon world players instead of D&D players. You still have the same issue of a similar system dominating but both of those systems teach players to lens things through narrative and have mechanical cores that translate better to playing a wide range of other kinds of RPGs.
Remember when boardgames in america were essentially Risk, Monopoly, clue, candyland etc.? Somebody might have an older slightly more involved boardgame from parker bros. from the 80s or the exoticism of a mille borne deck, but that was it for the majority of american’s experiencing boardgames outside of crazy train simulation boardgames for a LONG time. I remember when Euros broke in finally in a real way and it was cool, but trying to explain to people what a euro was and how boardgames could be innovative experiences was exactly like Scott’s example. I still meet people like this for whom monopoly and risk = boardgames. The entire medium is judged and summed up in those two experiences.
I know where you’re going with this, but “objectively better” is bullshit. Better at what? The little hard data there is about rpgs is in sales and streaming statistics.
People play what they want to play, and that’s usually what they were introduced to, whether taught by a GM or learning from watching streamers or diving into the weird world of rpg books.
Sometimes people want to kill things in a dungeon.
Not everyone wants to play Burning Wheel. Hell, I don’t even want to play Burning Wheel all the time, and it’s my favorite rpg.
An RPG is “Let’s pretend” with a referee/narrator and a resolution mechanic.
The problem is people are getting stuck on “Tolkien-inspired High Fantasy, Dungeoneering” as the default genre. That’s partly because Wizards of the coast is promoting the hell of out of the brand. More so than any other company right now.
Also, the rules of D&D mostly only come into play if you pretend to use violence. Otherwise, you are mostly just playing pretend on your own, and arguably not playing the game.
I always say, I can role play like a mofo during a game of Monopoly. That role playing is not considered part of the game, and us doing it doesn’t make Monopoly an RPG.
If you are not engaging with the rules and systems of a game, you aren’t playing it.
Skill checks are quite common, and important thing in D&D and happen a lot outside of combat, they might lack granuality or elegance, but to say they aren’t there is to just outright lie. Or to talk shit without knowing what you are talking about, which is your preferred method, I’d say.
Not to mention a good chunk of non combat spells or racial features, lie detector is rarely needed in fight, nor a living tape-recorder, but they are still part of D&D’s ruleset.
