Fireballs and lightning bolts and vorpal swords, oh my.


In other words:

More versatile and flashy magic for players who like wizards. Only priests getting the cooler magic, which still wasn't as flashy as fireballs and polymorph other, also meant you couldn't just be a wizard, you had to pick a cult.

More cool magic weapons and armor for players who like to get stuck in and chop things to little bits.  Being able to survive getting stuck in for an extended period without losing body parts also helps.


Although you could be a more competent thief and a more realistic "cleric" in RQ. But for hack-slash-BOOM, D&D wins hands down once you get to mid and higher levels.

(First of all, hi! )

I believe it's impossible to underestimate the importance of being the first. Of course, D&D has its own advantages, but who knows - maybe if another game was first, we may see completely different state and image of the hobby.

For example, in Poland WFRP 1e was the first professionally published RPG in Polish language. To this day, dozens of different RPGs were published and supported in Poland (our own and many popular foreign ones like AD&D 2e, D&D 3e/4e, WoD, L5R, CoC and many others), but WFRP 1e/2e is still indisputable the number one in terms of popularity.

IMHO both D&D and WFRP are far from the best RPG ever made, but they are surely good enough to inspire and convince people to stay with them for a long time. All in all, the game is only a tool - the most important are people who are playing with us, our imagination and memories.

The rest is just a business.

This "advantage of being first" is bullshit.

History is littered with companies that went first, only to fail as someone took their ideas and improved on them and took over the marketplace.

In fact, that's almost more the rule than the exception.  The nation of Japan (and since then Korea and Taiwan and a few others) based an important part of their economies on this concept.  Even Edison based a large part of his business plan on improving the inventions of others rather than inventing the base product himself.

Tell Indiegogo about the advantage of going first relative to Kickstarter.  Tell MySpace about the advantage of going first (or probably third or fourth) relative to Facebook.  Heck, look around wherever you are at the things you see, and tell me how many were invented first by the company that made them?

If RuneQuest were objectively a superior game at a better price, it would have likely overtaken the market from D&D.  That's a fundamental operation of capitalism.  It doesn't always work perfectly, but as a general rule (baring some specific reason for it to fail in a particular case), that's how it works.

So no, not buying this "it was first" argument at all.  That sounds more like an excuse by fans of RuneQuest who personally think it's superior and simply can't understand why people like D&D more.

Quote from: Mistwell;681381This "advantage of being first" is bullshit.

It's only "bullshit" if you think being first is sufficient to ensure market dominance.  Only a fool would claim that. But to deny that being first is a significant advantage is to deny reality.  (A company can easily squander that advantage.)  

Quote from: Mistwell;681381If RuneQuest were objectively a superior game at a better price, it would have likely overtaken the market from D&D.  That's a fundamental operation of capitalism.

What a naive view of capitalism.  By that reasoning McDonald's hamburgers are "objectively superior" to food served at Michelin-ranked restaurants.

Economies of scale, market penetration (availability), competitive pricing, and so forth, affect the profitability of a product as much as that product's "objective" superiority/inferiority.  

Quote from: Mistwell;681381So no, not buying this "it was first" argument at all.  That sounds more like an excuse by fans of RuneQuest who personally think it's superior and simply can't understand why people like D&D more.

I'm a fan of RuneQuest and it is no mystery to me why D&D is more popular.  (Of course, it is a mistake to say that "people like D&D more", since most D&D players have never even looked at RQ, and thus cannot make an informed comparison between the two games.)

I also like D&D (well at least TSR-era D&D).  I'm glad both games are available.

Quote from: Mistwell;681381This "advantage of being first" is bullshit.

Mostly, but not entirely.  With an entrenched competitor, it raises the bar for how good you have to be to displace them - it's not enough to be "better", you have to be "better enough" for people to pay the switching cost and be willing to accept the loss of the network effect of the market leader.

If you *can* do those things, you can easily displace a market leader.  But being "as good of them" isn't enough, and being just a little bit better isn't enough either.

Quote from: Akrasia;681399What a naive view of capitalism.  By that reasoning McDonald's hamburgers are "objectively superior" to food served at Michelin-ranked restaurants.

Indeed.  Saying that anything is "superior" can really only be done in terms of its fitness to meet specific needs.

McDonald's serves different needs than a 4-star restaurant.  Neither are substitutes for the other, and both satisfy their appropriate needs very well.

The needs that McDonald's satisfies are just more common.

I really think the Basic/Advanced split was a very important part of how D&D grew and spread. Evidence shows that what happened was that Basic was usually played for several sessions, maybe even only one, while small affinity groups of kids between 10 and 13 got into the basic ideas of the game. Many - probably a majority at the height of the fad days - didn't play any more than that. But the ones who did went on to Advanced D&D, which was well aimed at teenagers. It was a modular complexity that bolted on well to basic play methods that had been learned in Basic. There were tons of rules, but you only had to deal with them a bit at a time.

Everything scales well between Basic D&D and AD&D. You go from a tiny bit of customization to a wider variety of options, but basically on the same lines. You get more spells and their descriptions are more in-depth, but you only have to deal with a few spells at most in a session. Same for magic items and all the other additions that Advanced made. It also let the intro version be stripped-down but fully functional, which no game since has really achieved. And it paid off, in terms of absolutely huge sales of the Basic Set.

There was never a conduit into the hobby like Basic D&D, and that virtually guaranteed its place atop the RPG ecosystem. How could Runequest have possibly had a chance at displacing D&D when the Holmes Basic Set actually came out before RQ?

Had TSR not made the Basic Set, the logical candidate for its spot was Tunnels & Trolls. Simpler than OD&D, used only six-sided dice, cost only $5 instead of the $10 of OD&D ($43.40 in 2013 dollars) and was much more adaptable. T&T also has solo gaming going for it. Maybe RQ could've sold itself as the "advanced" sequel to T&T, but I think it wasn't in the right space.

Back in the day, I could sometimes get people to try RQ.  They sort of liked it... then The Ducks came up.  

Killed it dead. Each and every time.

Tried running stuff without Glorantha... then it still came up... "Oh No, that is that duck game."

My sample is small, but yah... other than Ducks and that the setting actually requires you to think and learn... I can't figure out why it didn't do better against D&D.

Quote from: Mistwell;681381History is littered with companies that went first, only to fail as someone took their ideas and improved on them and took over the marketplace.

....

That was RQ's problem - they didn't improve on the things that went on to make D&D popular.

Gorlantha was the first nail in the coffin: They needed a more accessible setting. And all the generic fantasy tropes that would go with it that people would actually be familiar with.

Nail # 2: It didn't get the mass market distribution. My grandma bought me my first D&D game in a bookstore in the early 80's. I've only ever seen runequest in dedicated hobby stores.

Nail# 3: It lacked classic cool & accessible entry modules like Keep on the Borderlands. That came in the box with the rules, an instant "this is what you do with this" adventure right out of the gate...  I've never even heard of a comparable runquest offering.

  Nail # 1 hamstrung the game from the start; nail # 2 ensured it would never get the mass appeal, and nail #3 was just the icing on the cake.

IMO the debate about which system is 'objectively better' is a red herring.

It didn't matter.

The only thing that mattered was that the system was 'good enough' so that it didn't hinder the things that really took D&D to market dominance.

But what the fuck do I know, I'm just random internet guy # 988760


.

Being first was a small part of it, albeit legitimate.

The key was support. You walked into a hobby shop, and you saw D&D books, D&D adventures, D&D supplements. And one box set of RQ.

Even without support and not being first, RQ also has the issue of being more complicated than old D&D. Granted, PF and 3.5 are more complicated than RQ, but at this stage, the support imbalance is uber dominating.

RQ is certainly better in some ways, but it's like that really good hamburger stand a few blocks away from my house; yeah, it's better than McD's, but nobody else in the country has access, and it doesn't do me a lot of good when I'm out of town, either.

Settings seems to be a surprisingly likely place for things to go wrong.  Iron Crown Enterprises had a similar issue in that they had a limited license with Tolkien and when they lost that it took a ton of their best materials off of the market.  

The only edition of Runequest I ever owned had fantasy Europe in it, which I remember quite liking as a setting.

Quote from: Mistwell;681381So no, not buying this "it was first" argument at all.  That sounds more like an excuse by fans of RuneQuest who personally think it's superior and simply can't understand why people like D&D more.

Being first is an advantage - as long as you don't fool yourself into thinking that is all it takes. Or thinking you are unassailable and basically do nothing really innovative after that.

D&D was the first. TSR did a good job marketing it. And they kept putting out (mostly) very good products.

At the time, the setting was sort of weird in a not so good way, and tracking hit locations, armor values, etc seemed like a lot of annoying work. But then that system became that little BRP and rolled into Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer - I got interested in it.

Quote from: Jaeger;681438That was RQ's problem - they didn't improve on the things that went on to make D&D popular.

Gorlantha was the first nail in the coffin: They needed a more accessible setting. And all the generic fantasy tropes that would go with it that people would actually be familiar with.

Nail # 2: It didn't get the mass market distribution. My grandma bought me my first D&D game in a bookstore in the early 80's. I've only ever seen runequest in dedicated hobby stores.

Nail# 3: It lacked classic cool & accessible entry modules like Keep on the Borderlands. That came in the box with the rules, an instant "this is what you do with this" adventure right out of the gate...  I've never even heard of a comparable runquest offering.

  Nail # 1 hamstrung the game from the start; nail # 2 ensured it would never get the mass appeal, and nail #3 was just the icing on the cake.

And of course, outside of the US some of this played out differently. The world is sometimes full of natural experiments. For example.

Nail #2. In the UK, RQ did get mass-market distribution by Games Workshop (I got my copy of RQ2 in a convenience store), it was priced cheaper than Basic D&D and there was plenty of support material in White Dwarf.

Nail #3. The box set comes up with Apple Lane/Rainbow Mounds as good a pair of introductory scenarios as anything produced for D&D. Speak to anyone who played RQ2 in the early 80s and they have replayed that scenario pair as often as anyone has replayed Keep on the Borderlands.

Nail #1. In RQ2, Glorantha occupies 2 whole pages. There are also a couple of maps. If you look at Apple Lane/Rainbow mounds, there is one whole duck and he is mentioned only in passing and there is no artwork. The "weirdness" of Glorantha is hardly an issue and, specifically in the UK where it was hard to get any RQ stuff except that Games Workshop reprinted, the focus was all on Brit-style vanilla fantasy.

Result - RQ2 outsold D&D.

So what went wrong? The licence went to Avalon Hill, Games Workshop stopped publishing it and started with Warhammer, there was no new material for 18 months just as D&D kicked into gear and the rpg market boomed. Result, RQ imploded.

And another natural experiment. Games Workshop also published CoC under licence at the same price point. CoC was the first of its type despite having a "weird" game world (Lovecraft was not mainstream in 1980), did not have any player rewards in levels and expanding HPs etc, and wasn't paused for 18 months at the height of the rpg boom. Result, it's still the #1 selling rpg in its genre and has spawned as many offshoots and variations as D&D.

Generally, I think the different experiences outside of the US in the early 80s show that if you're first, "good enough" and keep the product live and accessible in the mass market, that it's really hard to overtake you. Of course if you implode (aka Blackberry) anyone can fill the gap. All the product needs to be is "good enough."

Quote from: Lynn;681507At the time, the setting was sort of weird in a not so good way, and tracking hit locations, armor values, etc seemed like a lot of annoying work. But then that system became that little BRP and rolled into Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer - I got interested in it.

Agreed (well CoC and Elric! in my case but Elric! = Stormbringer right?).

CoC and Elric! are both way easier to game, I'd say, than classic RQ. Skills are handled in a more streamlined way, magic is cooler, combat is simpler (and more cinematic in Elric!, but obviously not in CoC)...it's a very good ruleset for these games and would probably be a good ruleset for a bunch of other classic fantasy & related genre classics too. I could see it work for LotR, frex, and Conan, and many others. The only stuff I couldn't quite see it work for is completely OTT high-powered crazyness like Malazan Book of the Fallen (yes I know that "OTT high-powered crazyness" is rather front and center in the Elric tales...the system still works perfectly for Elric though!).

One problem with RQ (I got 3rd ed) is that it seems to be more like Elric! but your starting character is more like a CoC starting character...I mean I remember creating some RQ characters back in the day to check out the system (the random character creation stuff looks really cool - like most random cc it's got its fun stuff and its "fun" stuff, though, as I found out).

What I got (basically a party):
1) A dude with fantastic stats, giving mainly fantastic skills...background: civilized peasant. He was great at his skills, sure, just a pity most of them weren't relevant, and his one weapon was, of course, garbage.
2) A civilized noble...with horrible loser stats. The opposite of the above. Cool skills, but sucks at them. Good fighting equipment, but sucks at using them...there's a Marxist moral to be got here, I guess
3) a civilized thief...whose only high stats were Power and Size *headdesk*

Argh.

I could go on I guess. Said trio would likely have worked for a comedy game, mind.

Edit to add: it's not that these characters were horrible (the peasant in particular had promise, I'd probably have played him myself), well excepting the thief possibly. It's just the particular ways they sucked, like the game system had it in for them.

Quote from: Haffrung;681244Exactly. The advantage of being first is way overstated. If Runequest comes out in 1975 it stays nothing more than a fringe game. It just wasn't going to make a mass market splash the way D&D did. The weird setting, fiddly system, lack of dungeons, lack of obvious rewards. It's missing about 4 out of the 5 things that made D&D so accessible and appealing.

Well, to the D&D Dungeon Fantasy crowd, in 20:20 hindsight, at least.

For my part, I haven't done "dungeons" since the 70s, and neither I nor a couple hundred players of mine have missed them a single jot.  As a setting, Glorantha isn't one jot weirder than any other fantasy setting, Forgotten Worlds included.  Lack of levels -- RQ absolutely has character advancement, just not "levels" -- certainly didn't stop Traveller from becoming the most popular SF system.  And the degree to which OD&D was a great system is measured by the thousands of GMs who promptly tore the sucker apart and houseruled it to death, about fifteen minutes in.

There really are lots of reasons and for everyone who ended up playing D&D instead of RQ, the reasons are different.

For me, without having read it, RQ seemed like a joke game from the advertisements.  Ducks, Walktapus, Dragon Newts (kickass race made cutesie by name)even look at the intro modules "Apple Lane" and "Rainbow Mounds" not "In Search of the Unknown" or "Keep on the Borderlands".

Reading more about it, without a GM to give me the player rundown it was "Too weird to live".  Cube floating in a sea, God-Learners, Heroquests, Wyrm Friends.

System was never an issue, I mean I played RM and Shadowrun 1e. What killed RQ for me was Glorantha, more specifically the way it was advertised and presented.  With a good GM where I could focus on my character and explore the setting organically it probably would have worked.