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

Tru dat.

Next to D&D what wad the biggest splash and pretender to D&D's RPG throne? Arguably World of Darkness.

But there was a serious attempt at a vampire PC game that preceded it by a year. Being first helps, but it's not enough by itself.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681184
I discount a lot of the other factors people mention: if (for instance), levels and character classes are such an overwhelming draw, how come they're not dominant in SF or supers games?

"If an aqueous environment is good for fish, why isn't it good for koala bears."

I find the comparison particularly off in the case of supers games. Modeling supers is not particularly well served by class/level systems, but it works just fine for heroic fantasy.

Quote from: deleriad;681531And 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.
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This is true, in Britian/Europe TSR/D&D did not have things necessarily go all their way like they did in the states.

The result was that in some countries D&D was/is not number one.

The fact that D&D is now number one anyway in a number of instances has more to do with the native competitors dropping the 'game management' ball than any inherent superiority of D&D as a system.

Quote from: deleriad;681531Generally, 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."

And the reason the class/level/HP systems are so popular now is due to the fact that D&D has been around a long time combined with the OGL. So the class/level/hp system is now a triple threat...

It is Good Enough, Prolific in what remains of an RPG mass market, and Familiar to the majority of players who tend to be system conservative.

Not an objectively better system, but at this point it doesn't matter.

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Quote from: Benoist;680966Because all these so-called "problems" are not as much of an issue as some would like to believe, and because D&D has strengths, regarding play structures, with the dungeon, the wilderness, the way you create your adventure in concrete terms using your imagination on a piece of graph paper, the explorative nature of the game, the concrete rewards like gold and experience and levels, that many tried to copy or worse, to fix, but none truly ever matched.

Yep. In a word, D&D of old is accessible.

Quote from: 1989;681731Yep. In a word, D&D of old is accessible.

Let's hope it will be again, one day.

Quote from: The Ent;681757Let's hope it will be again, one day.

To a certain extent, it is.  The bar has moved.  Things like levels, hit points, classes, and AC are all common vocabulary among anybody that's done any type of gaming at all, due to their ubiquitousness in computer games as well as pen and paper.

So while the actual rules of newer version of D&D are certainly more complex, they're also being consumed primarily by people that are already fully grounded in and have fully internalized the basic concepts.

Quote from: Ravenswing;681608Lack of levels -- RQ absolutely has character advancement, just not "levels" -- certainly didn't stop Traveller from becoming the most popular SF system.  

But even Traveller didn't reach anywhere close to the mass popularity of D&D. The remarkable thing about D&D isn't that it was the most popular RPG ever; the remarkable thing is that it had an accessibility and appeal that reached far beyond the geek gamer community and into a popular phenomenon. And that wasn't a fluke.

D&D also was the first RPG to spread beyond the books, and in a way no other game did. Movies, toys, video games, colouring books etc. It really is amazing what they managed when you think back on it. We'll never see the like of that again.

Other games managed to branch out some too of course - Traveller (or rather Megatraveller) with a computer game, Vampire, even Tunnels and Trolls had a dos game out which probably sold about 3 copies but was a free hand out in the 7th edition tin box if I recall.

Runequest was (and is) a niche game (fantasy) within a niche sector (RPGs). I'll admit I only ever knew of its existence thanks to gaming mags which ran adverts  for the amazon on the front with the chainmail bikini, otherwise it wouldn't have appeared on the radar at all for me. Was that only in the UK, or spread elsewhere?



Careful, you could poke someones eye out with one of those.

I'm referring to the sword, of course...

The straightforward answer is that D&D was simply the better game.

Quote from: RPGPundit;682284The straightforward answer is that D&D was simply the better game.

According to that logic Das Schwarze Auge was a better game than D&D...

Quote from: RPGPundit;682284The straightforward answer is that D&D was simply the better game.

You just can't help yourself, can you?

D&D had, as has been mentioned throughout the thread, availability, ease of play, momentum and accessibility of settings.
But a better game? No.
I was raised on AD&D. When I thought it was the greatest thing ever, RQ didn't interest me at all. It was just a game with weird monstres and fragile heroes.
Only after I started looking for alternatives to the d20 and found Call of Cthulhu, I got into RQ. By then it was to late, Avalon Hill having pulled the plug on the game. Luckily, Stormbringer stepped in to fill the hole.

Now, RuneQuest is back. While it may not be a top contender(yet), it is actively supported and recognized as the excellent game it has always been, but which young me was to ignorant to realize.

Long live the BRP-renaissance!

Quote from: RPGPundit;682284The straightforward answer is that D&D was simply the better game.

It was more accessible.   Better at certain things.  And it introduced a whole legion of fans to the genre it pretty much created.  It's a very good, streamlined, archetype-filled game.  And much of the terminaology has therefor moved into common use.

RQ and other skill based games are more advanced and better at certain things.  But I think RQ is built for a much more specific game, and has large weaknesses even in terms of skill based games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;682284The straightforward answer is that D&D was simply the better game.

I think at the least it had a broader appeal and thus became the center of the community from which all the other games spread out in one direction or the other.  D&D has been so influential in the fields of fiction and video games that it's central position has been strongly reinforced over time to the point where expectations like paladins that heal people are entrenched across a wide spectrum of media.  Yes yes Malory had that some 600 years earlier but the average person is far more likely to know D&D than Malory and Holywood's attempts at King Arthur are generally stripped of the Christian aspects of the story.  And yes I know that the Christianization of older stories is a big part of why King Arthur's theology is a bit weird.

In my personal experiences with early RQ, I found the RQ crowd I knew to be kinda snobby about other RPGs, so that sort of turned me off it. That and I didn't like Glorantha much.
I appreciate this is just MY experience, but hey.

I did run and play Stormbringer and all it's other names an versions over the years and loved it.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;682313According to that logic Das Schwarze Auge was a better game than D&D...

And Twilight is a better book than Ulysses.