The Gaming Den

Hello all,

Is DnD the most popular RPG just because it has the lowest barrier to entry?

Rules-lite games are actually pretty hard to adjudicate. Crunchier games are harder to learn. Crunchy, rules-light games don't offer enough options.

Is DnD the sweet spot of "I can hand you a character sheet and you'll generally know what to do with it," especially considering the decades of computer games that have reinforced the same tropes?

Your thoughts?

I don't think it would be easier to learn D&D than some other game if you truly had no previous knowledge and interface, but I do think that so much of what is true in D&D is reflected elsewhere, especially in computer games, that it ends up being a lot easier for people to learn the mechanics quickly.

People who want to start playing a TTRPG just have in fact run across the 6 stats or something like them, or rolling d20s against DCs, or whatever.

Yeah for a lot of people even if they've never played D&D they've played some game N generations descended from D&D

I think the biggest struggle with starting TTRPGs is "how do you even play this thing?"

It's awkward to do like a board game and just tell you exactly how to place the pieces and then follow a strict turn order with well-defined phases. So I think lots of people get pretty overwhelmed unless they've been exposed to enough of the gameplay of the RPG to feel comfortable in it.

The initial hump is definitely the hardest thing about getting any tabletop game off the ground, so anything that makes that first hump a bit smoother is probably going to get more games running. D&D, unlike the majority of tabletop games, has 40+ years of history and baggage behind it that people who are completely unfamiliar with the game can grok. You can't say the same for like, Shadowrun. Or even Pathfinder, now that I think about it - lot of people reject it simply because it's a D&D ripoff that doesn't have the brand name.
There are plenty of easier games - FATE comes to mind - but at any given point there will be some group, somewhere on the internet, discussing D&D. Lots of them. This also lowers the barrier to entry because if you're confused you can plug a question into google and get 3-5 threads of discussion on it from different forums.

I think it's just inertia, man.

D&D has the staying power in broader pop culture, having the mechanical skeleton of its rules for free online, the popularity of its OGL/DM's Guild, and Critical Role podcast being wildly popular in effective free advertising, being 'easy to pick up and play' is a large factor but only one of several.

D&D Beyond has made a tremendous difference in ease and accessibility. Players can use their abilities without doing math, all they need is to push the button for their macro. That means that the people who have busy real life schedules and can't afford the energy to learn a rules set can still play. I do not personally use it, but D&D Beyond represents a significant fundamental shift in the amount of effort required to "buy in" to playing the game.

Important: I feel that it is D&D Beyond that contributes most to ease of play, NOT the actual 5E ruleset.

I'll quote a couple users from SA's 5e thread.

My current group is all adult attorneys but they're much more "casual" in the sense that they would never play at all if it were pure paper and books; our bard is completely incapable of playing without hte support of the Beyond app (as mentioned, this past sunday, when he had to look up his werebear form stats on Beyond instead of just referencing his character sheet, he said, I quote, directly, "I don't think I have an armor class" and I had to help him find the appropriate number (the werebear page lists multiple AC's depending on the current form and it confused him. He's been playing 5e for three years now. Allegedly).

There is no way that I'd have played D&D, or have in turn convinced friends to play D&D with me, without the D&D Beyond site making creating and playing the game a million times easier. Now that my friends and I are more seasoned tabletop gamers we're thinking about moving into new systems when our current campaign wraps up, but we also all now know the rules of D&D and so learning a new system is more effort we don't really want to put in, even if the system would be ultimately more suited. We know the rules, they're well codified, we know when we can break them, and we don't have to think very hard to remember the mechanics because all you need to do is click 'attack' on a webpage and it tells you if you succeed or not.

That in my opinion is why so many people play D&D even if it's not the ultimate best system for the type of game they're playing.

EDIT: One more

I doubt simpler rules would help. They don't want to think about rules at all if they can help it. They want an MMO like experience where they just push button to do thing while they make puns with friends.

Ouch, that last one stings. Some people come to the table with that mentality.

It's popular because people are familiar enough with Tolkien-esque fantasy to know exactly what to expect. When you say 'fantasy' and your average thinks of elves, dwarves, dragons etc then they are already familiar with the setting. Let's look at DnD's science fiction counterpart, Traveller. Take the current most popular version of Classic Traveller, Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition, which arguably has an even easier set of rules to learn than 5th ed. DnD, and you'll most likely fund it harder to get people to play it, despite the many people out there saying they like science fiction.

Fantasy has an edge over science fiction because it has those common elements usually (the aforementioned elves and dwarves and dragons) that people know about already so they can hop right right in. So that's another reason for DnD's popularity, but honestly, it's because DnD entered the mainstream a long time ago and then exposure from things like Critical Role and Stranger Things pushed it even further into the public consciousness, and yes, I think if we compare 5th to 3.5 I would say yes it is also popular because it is 'easier,' as in has an easier set of rules. A more rules-intensive version like 3.5 attracts a different kind of person, a more serious gamer one could say because of the investment needed to learn the game when compared to 5th ed.

There's a huge advantage to being first. There's also a huge advantage to being available. How did you get involved with gaming? For most people, it starts with someone who's already playing a game inviting you to join. D&D achieved critical mass first - even a lot of players that decided they preferred a different game more usually had SOME experience with D&D - often their first introduction to the hobby. Since putting together a group requires finding people willing to play, a lot of people opt to start with D&D because it has the largest existing player base, then convert them to another system when they have a good group.

D&D is the existing 'universal language' of RPGs. Fantasy stories of fighting dragons is pretty approachable and while there's some D&D specific lore, it's significantly less than Warhammer 40k or Shadowrun (and it varies from campaign to campaign). Having the largest player base and being 'acceptable' to many players who prefer another system makes it an easy compromise.

It's all about consensus reality. In the real world life just marches on and you can't plead your case against gravity about whether or not you should take full fall damage. RPGs depend on consensus, however, and sometimes we want it to feel self-explanatory to people that badgers can be magical enough to talk but are almost never magical enough to defeat a dragon in single combat. For such situations it's rather helpful to be playing a nearly 50 year old game that comes prepackaged with a host of well-known cliches.

If that's the case, then an RPG in a well-established universe people actually know about, like Star Wars, should do even better than D&D, which is more vaguely reminiscent of other fantasy settings people actually know nowadays. Take orcs for example, I bet most D&D players assume they're supposed to be like Warcraft, Warhammer, or LotR orcs, and still know little about the D&D orc traits that differ from those.

Foxwarrior wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 20, 2021 6:23 pm

If that's the case, then an RPG in a well-established universe people actually know about, like Star Wars, should do even better than D&D, which is more vaguely reminiscent of other fantasy settings people actually know nowadays. Take orcs for example, I bet most D&D players assume they're supposed to be like Warcraft, Warhammer, or LotR orcs, and still know little about the D&D orc traits that differ from those.

There are a lot of reasons that this doesn't turn out to be true. While there are a lot of people who like Star Wars, and that number is surely greater than all the people who play RPGs, it still becomes a Venn diagram of overlapping interests. Most of the people who would play Star Wars the RPG would also be willing to play D&D. The type of person who would like a Star Wars RPG and ONLY a Star Wars RPG turns out to be relatively small. And for that particular person, writing Star Wars fan-fiction is probably a better scratch for the particular itch they have.

I'm sure that a highly motivated group of GMs who wanted to support the launch of a new RPG based on a popular fantasy series could do it, but by definition, they're already invested in a different RPG (because if they weren't, they wouldn't be GMs supporting the launch of a new product).

RPGs require someone to run them. People who are thinking of running a game and don't have a preference tend to weight things like 'player interest' pretty highly. If you know you have 8 players for D&D and 5 for Warhammer 40k and 3 for Shadowrun and 6 for Pathfinder (assuming there's some overlap) which one do you run?

Being popular supports remaining popular. In the case of D&D, they screwed the pooch with 4th edition. For a time, you could find a fair number of 3.x games and an increasing number of Pathfinder games - it looked like D&D would really be eclipsed. 5th edition came around at a particularly good moment - 80s nostalgia was pretty high, Stranger Things had some nods to it, and a lot of people who had some level of experience with it picked it up again.

Right now, if you're looking to find a game, you're more likely to find a 5th edition game. Right now, if you're looking for players, you're more likely to find them if you run a 5th edition game. There are all kinds of idiosyncratic reasons why an individual would prefer one game to another, but for most people it comes down to 'convenience' which isn't the same as 'ease of play'. The rules can be a catastrofuck but as long as GMs are invested and welcoming, people will play - they'll just expect the GM to handle the rules. Ease of finding/joining a game trumps ease of play - mostly because people don't even know how the rules work when they buy the fancy book.

Beyond that, Star Wars hasn't been presented primarily as an RPG setting for several decades. Once upon a time D&D was the only game in town and they had to do a lot of heavy lifting to establish themselves. But now the field has already been tilled and they've been the big fish in a very small pond for a long time and people with the rights to more popular IP have only intermittently cared about trying to oust them rather than just license things out and call it a day. The real ambitious sorts want to eclipse Azeroth, not Faerun.

Whipstitch wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 20, 2021 8:12 pm

The real ambitious sorts want to eclipse Azeroth, not Faerun.

Speaking of which, that reminds me: Utterfail taught me with COREFAILURE that quite a lot of established settings have tried to get into RPGs, and were just remarkably bad at it.

There are a few Blizzard people trying to do a project in 5E, but it doesn't have anything to do with Blizzard IP as far as I can see. Not really any kind of Warcraft port, though Blizzards memetic fondness for CORRUPTION is definitely present.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/warchief/auroboros

I thought about whether pure market share had any effect, but there are so many popular IP games I either stopped playing or never played because the rules either made my eyes glaze over or they just seemed incomplete.

Maybe it's also the approach? I mean, I don't know what a Wheel of Time RPG adventure is even supposed to look like? Or a Middle Earth adventure? Or Star Trek?

Other games seem to have some analogous form that they are aping. Shadowrun is a heist movie. Star Wars is a Western. Vampire is a superhero or horror movie.

K wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 20, 2021 11:34 pm

I thought about whether pure market share had any effect, but there are so many popular IP games I either stopped playing or never played because the rules either made my eyes glaze over or they just seemed incomplete.

Maybe it's also the approach? I mean, I don't know what a Wheel of Time RPG adventure is even supposed to look like? Or a Middle Earth adventure? Or Star Trek?

Other games seem to have some analogous form that they are aping. Shadowrun is a heist movie. Star Wars is a Western. Vampire is a superhero or horror movie.

I learned to read playing old AD&D computer games. That had a pretty significant effect on my expectations when I ended up actually playing D&D at the tabletop. D&D has a pretty long legacy of actual videogames, even if 4E kinda flopped there.

It is possible that Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 game is going to have a transformative effect on the way that people engage with 5E. So many of 5E's rules are blurry messes up to DM interpretation, after all. The interpretations Larian uses might set the "normal" for how Stealth works going forward, for instance. I am really curious to see where the meta will end up a year or two from now.

Avoraciopoctules wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 20, 2021 11:41 pm

The interpretations Larian uses might set the "normal" for how Stealth works going forward, for instance. I am really curious to see where the meta will end up a year or two from now.

I certainly hope so - BG3 Stealth is completely brokenperfectly balanced with no exploits.

I am down for the glorious reign of Sneak King to commence. Slip those buckets right over those shopkeeper's heads.

K wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 20, 2021 11:34 pm

Maybe it's also the approach? I mean, I don't know what a Wheel of Time RPG adventure is even supposed to look like? Or a Middle Earth adventure? Or Star Trek?

I think this is actually pretty close to the mark. D&D has a default structure; the dungeoncrawl. It's straight forward to design, to run, and to play. Even as D&D has grown to encompass the entire spectrum of fantasy fiction tropes, the tried and true structure of the dungeoncrawl remains a central pole of most adventures in some form.

Giving the GM a clear adventure structure to work in is probably the biggest thing that lots of games fail to do, including big IP games. When expectations on the GM are too open-ended, it's much harder to get started. When expectations are clear and the structure you are running is clear, you'll see more GMs, more tables more players. Shadowrun, Vampire, Call of Cthulhu, these are enduring favorites with strong fanbases, I think because they have a default adventure structure that more or less works.

Built-in opposition is a biggie, yeah. It's why I actually considered the Quantum Bears thing to be one of my smaller problems with Bear World and many other rules lite games. For all of SIlva's faffing about how themes, setting and expectations need to be clear Apocalypse World still expected you to build your campaign world by committee so while it had a home genre it could not really be said to have a home setting, default antagonists or example mission structures to help get people on the same page. It's true that much of the joy of this hobby comes from its DIY nature but one great thing about D&D is that they always offer reasonably thick books filled with shitty neighbors to do battle with for those nights you're scuffling for ideas. Such play aids still benefit from a willingness to jump the rails and improvise but when so many games fail to offer starting points at all it's still a big plus.

D&D is the most popular because it's the best RPG, by a fucking mile, for most of it's life.

Not 4e, obviously, but the rest of them, like, Pathfinder got worse the more the diverged from 3e, but while it was still basically 3e D&D it was best too.

You can argue 2nd edition AD&D was a worse game than 1e Vampire, but the 2e DMG was a god awful book in terms of advice for actually running D&D, but the game under the hood still basically worked if you ignored all the awful mother-may-I advice therein and crashed dungeons and gave out XP for gold like 1e told you to.

And 5e is ... so disappointing, but also, like, there's still rolls to hit and separate rolls to damage and ablative HPs and saving throws again and a fair stack of classes and bodies to play as, and a fuck-tonne of just-fucking-does-a-thing spells, and if you just naively throw a few PCs at the provided monsters in the provided adventures, they roll a whole bunch of dice and then they win and everyone's happy. The classes basically do what they say on the tin without needing to read a poorly indexed motorcycle repair manual the size of the complete works of Shakespeare just to get started.

Hell, in 5e, when you do silly minmax stuff on your fighter, they're still hitting things with a sword! And that works! It's how you win!

And it's got hundreds of unique monsters, ready to go, that you can mix and match for nigh-infinite variety if you've played all the bought ones. It's capable of telling an extremely large variety of stories: people do all sorts of weird shit with D&D (that's not 4e) and it still works.

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Like, have you read other RPGs?

GURPS. Fucking all of Rolemaster. I've run other RPGs, and they are almost all a constantly bad experience. Pages of bookkeeping for the most trivial shit, literal weeks of doing fucking nothing just to leave base, followed by ohho the random nothing monster rolled 00 so your head explodes, start over.

And sure there's bearworld where everyone rolls dice to help the GM do improv theatre, but instead of that, how about a fucking game where your character has actions that do things? So you have some fucking agency over your own shit.

Ultralight stuff where it's sort of, here's some combat rules, please attach to actual RPG and make up all the options you'll need along the way.

So many games with no progression. No progression! None! A whole lot where you get better much slower than the monsters so you'll lose. Actual games where the end goal is you stop playing, or your character goes mad and you can't play any more. Because fuck you for trying.

Like, that's the "popular" ones. They're shit. Bad experience after bad experience. It's a gods-damned game and the vast majority of them just suck at it.

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In fairness, RPGs are a unsolvable problem space, there will never be a really good one, but D&D (not 4e) is just vastly less bad at it than everything else.

For all the reasons people mentioned here, I think D&D constant popularity is a chicken and egg situation, where the egg is that D&D was the first big name RPG, having basically created and defined the genre; and the chicken being that D&D works well enough for the majority of people playing it, meaning that the mix of rather well defined combat rules and mind caulk for everything else allows people to have fun with their friends.

For an example of this loop being broken, look at 4E: At that time WotC tried something radically new, creating a game that was different enough from "D&D" that people in the hobby could tell newbies that if they wanted to play something "like D&D", they should try Pathfinder instead (this kills the egg). Equally damning was that 4E was essentially a boring game ^{[Citation needed]}, so many people didn't have a good time playing it (this kills the chicken).

The situation was fixed by the launch of 5E. That proved, against our predictions here, that the amount of mind caulk people are willing to put in the game is immense, as long as the PCs feel unique and the players are having fun rolling dice in combat. So the chicken and egg phenomenon is working fine again: When people find "RPGs", chance is, they're actually finding "D&D". And if they try to play D&D, chances are,

they'll have fun

and even if their first game fails, they should still see the promise of fun D&D offers and find the support online explaining why they did not have fun ("horror DM stories" and the like) and then maybe decide to try again.

For most people, they'll look no further than that, regaring RPGs.

Right now? Because of payola. That's where the money that should have gone to hiring actual devs went. 5E is the Payola Edition.