The fantasy market seems to be dominated by a very specific trend. All the most popular settings follow the same pattern: a clone of Middle Earth with a garnish of Cthulhu, Conan and Elric. Uniquely, the magic system allows wizards and clerics to trivially solve the problems of daily living and redefine warfare, eventually becoming reality warping gods among men, yet the world around them remains stuck in a medieval rut.

Settings that don't follow this trend generally don't prosper. Original settings like Spelljammer, Planescape and Eberron are limited to cult followings.

Why is the fantasy market so stagnant?

I would say for several reasons:

1. Many gamers are at least familiar with the Lord of the Rings, from either the books themselves or the films.
2. D&D (and now Pathfinder) being the most popular/first/most known in the mainstream, with its heavy "medieval fantasy w/ dash of 'murrican-isms".
3. Many (most?) gamers born after 1985 will have little to no exposure to non or pre Tolkien-esque fantasy literature (George McDonald, Lord Dunsany, Howard, Burroughs, Vance, et. al.)
4. The original gamers created their games and game worlds from the influences of what they'd read (see #3). Modern gamers frankly have no "Appendix N" of fantasy literature to get ideas from that would strongly influence them to create/play anything other than Tolkein-esque fantasy.

Put those together, add a dash of profit-motive-based game publishers and an only recently-available market for low-price, low-volume indy books, and it's not too hard to see why we're here.

Not that here is a bad place, actually.  I think the medieval fantasy is a great sandbox to play in!

Pretty much what Aaron said.

There's also the issue of "getting into" the game, rather important with half a dozen easy choices (and dozens more if we consider all possibilities).

To get people to play your game, you want them to be able to start playing easily. This is why, for example, a game set on Tekumel (see other thread) just isn't going to fly...the only way a player could appreciate the game is to first read a minimum 50 pages of backstory, just to have a crude idea of how the world is set up.

On the other hand "It's a fantasy world with elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs" tells the player right away that he's going to have a good idea about the world...so now you can get on with explain how your game works.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;918801The fantasy market seems to be dominated by a very specific trend. All the most popular settings follow the same pattern: a clone of Middle Earth with a garnish of Cthulhu, Conan and Elric.

Because writers from the 80s to 90s probably played Dungeons and Dragons and are bringing what they love to text. Those after will have perhaps played World of Warcraft.

People are resistant to change.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;918801The fantasy market seems to be dominated by a very specific trend. All the most popular settings follow the same pattern: a clone of Middle Earth with a garnish of Cthulhu, Conan and Elric. Uniquely, the magic system allows wizards and clerics to trivially solve the problems of daily living and redefine warfare, eventually becoming reality warping gods among men, yet the world around them remains stuck in a medieval rut.

Settings that don't follow this trend generally don't prosper. Original settings like Spelljammer, Planescape and Eberron are limited to cult followings.

Why is the fantasy market so stagnant?

1) Because when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeon & Dragon they not only created a new type of game in the process, they are a rare example of designers getting it right with first product. Sometime something new is pioneered but it is somebody later who turns into something iconic or widespread. For example Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile but he was the one responsible for being the first to put everything to create modern automobile industry. Before Ford, cars were treated and more importantly made as luxury items.

2) D&D was first and got it right for three main reason, playing characters in a pretend setting in a way that was challenging and not wish fulfillment, it had enough of a dose of Tolkein to feed into the widespread popularity of Lord of the Ring, and the support for campaigns focused on mazes with room filled monsters and treasure i.e. the dungeon.

The dungeon is what sealed the deal in my opinion. While D&D campaign from the get go were about more than exploring dungeon, the format of the dungeon was perfect entry point for somebody struggling to understand what this novel game was about.

Literally the instruction are that simple.
1) Draw a maze with rooms on a piece of graph paper.
2) Fill the rooms with monster and treasure leaving a few empty.
3) Place the PCs at the entrance.
4) Start the session.

Useful tools to support the above can be written in a few pages and you can immediately see what they are good for.

The game that did this, D&D, also had a particular potpourri of fantasy. So when people wanted to do this in other media, like computer games, the D&D vision of fantasy is what got ported over the most. Concurrent with this it spread into books. But it really hit popular culture like a sledgehammer when computer games got popular. Then went crazy in the early 2000s with games like World of Warcraft and the graphic intensive CRPGs.

Quote from: estar;918811The dungeon is what sealed the deal in my opinion. While D&D campaign from the get go were about more than exploring dungeon, the format of the dungeon was perfect entry point for somebody struggling to understand what this novel game was about.

Literally the instruction are that simple.
1) Draw a maze with rooms on a piece of graph paper.
2) Fill the rooms with monster and treasure leaving a few empty.
3) Place the PCs at the entrance.
4) Start the session.

Useful tools to support the above can be written in a few pages and you can immediately see what they are good for.

Not much to add to that, I strongly agree.

A couple reasons. First: I misread your question as being about the fantasy novel market instead of fantasy RPGs, but therein lies one explanation: fantasy wasn't really a separate genre until Tolkien had his runaway hit and there was a rush to fill the new demand with reprints of everything that could be found plus knockoffs of the Lord of the Rings. That's what was around when D&D was created, and D&D is the Tolkien of RPGs, only more so.

And what you are calling "Tolkienesque fantasy" isn't really much like Tolkien, it's D&D. That's not a criticism of you, but rather the second reason this genre dominates. The only thing Tolkien-ish about it is the fantasy races. That's what D&D did: it took a popular conception of "days of yore" familiar through fairy tales (a hodgepodge of medieval, renaissance, and baroque material, minus the guns) and added the most recognizable feature of the most popular fantasy novels of the time: Tolkien's elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs, the Moorcock/Anderson/Simak cosmic battle between Law and Chaos, magic from Vance and Lieber. There's little to no attempt to make it a consistent setting. That's left up to individual GMs. Because it has an easily recognizable base setting (fairy tale Europe,) it's easy to grasp and easy to customize.

And not just for gamers. The follow-up to the Tolkien knock-offs in literary fantasy were the D&D fanfic novels, and eventually video games. They were all copying D&D, or later copying the copies of D&D. These days, there are a couple other popular fantasy literature subgenres, such as urban fantasy and what I call "incompetent hero fantasy" (knockoffs of Another Fine Myth,) and experiments with non-European materials, but even these are practically just "D&D, but in a modern setting/Victorian era/the 1920s/fairy tale Europe with some non-European elements." And then newer, younger gamers play in settings like these, grow up, write their own D&D-ish fantasy novels, and the cycle repeats.

Finally, there's the distinction between broad vs. narrow. The basic D&D setting is broad. Each specific setting, RPG or literary, is built on that, then narrowed down to focus on something of specific interest to the designer or author. Some want to fix what they see as the flaws of the broad setting: more limited magic, or ditching the cosmic battle, or booting Tolkien's races. Some want to add a couple of their own ideas, or do a mashup with another genre. But a broad setting has broad popularity, while narrowing the focus also narrows the audience. If you do "D&D, but with low magic and widespread use of robots", people who want high magic or who aren't interested in robots are going to opt out. Your setting is going to necessarily be less popular than the generic setting designed to appeal to as many people as possible.

I could go on, but any other points I make would basically just be further ramifications of "it's the broadest, most widely copied and widely recognized type of setting".

"Dominate the market" is a business term. When someone who wants to create something in the fantasy genre and convince a commercial publisher to invest in it, which is the "market dominant" sort of activity, those publishers have tend to have limited attention, filters and preferences, and a lot of risk-aversion, so there is much weight given to repeating the same types of things.

Quote from: talysman;918816Finally, there's the distinction between broad vs. narrow. The basic D&D setting is broad. Each specific setting, RPG or literary, is built on that, then narrowed down to focus on something of specific interest to the designer or author. Some want to fix what they see as the flaws of the broad setting: more limited magic, or ditching the cosmic battle, or booting Tolkien's races. Some want to add a couple of their own ideas, or do a mashup with another genre. But a broad setting has broad popularity, while narrowing the focus also narrows the audience. If you do "D&D, but with low magic and widespread use of robots", people who want high magic or who aren't interested in robots are going to opt out. Your setting is going to necessarily be less popular than the generic setting designed to appeal to as many people as possible.

This right here is the thing that haunts me.

D&D sometimes feels like a straight-jacket, but I don't dare slip it off or modify it too much because I risk losing one or more players. The reality-altering powers of casters infuriate me, the way higher levels turn into superhero comics baffles me, the need for 6-8 encounters to balance the PC abilities frustrates me, and the Tolkien races bore me... but that's what everyone's comfortable with, that's the compromise that brings everyone to the table in one big jolly beer-fueled good time.

And when new people come around asking to try roleplaying for the first time, D&D is what they ask for. That's the only game they've heard of, the cultural legend that keeps getting referenced... *groan*... Who am I to disappoint them?

I sympathize, but also partially reject the premise. There has definitely been PC power inflation tied with setting erosion. The world's corehent restrictions are balked at endlessly (and were before, too) yet nowadays there has been vastly more PC design freedom than I remember. Similarly, since character restrictions are so "unpopular," setting too has received the dictum of "anything goes."

And when "anything goes," eventually you need to be more and more ostentacious to be seen. And thus "anything goes" turns into "nothing really went." It's power fantasy improv with a cast of divas.

I don't remember it being this socially ingrained. Like, people are overwhelmed by the least little "No." And yet there are so many new bloods who are so excited to play and try something more liberating than the rank familiarity of movies and video games. The best I can guess is "thus bore the fruits of media training," even as they rebel the conditioning resists...

I am guessing a generation of passive media consumption and structured organized play (play dates and helicopt3r parents) has caused a rift in shared communal expectations. DIY seems wonderfully new and exotic to the youth, and what we oldies take for granted (unstructured creative play, and the socialization that comes from that) might actually be novel to them.

Ack, typing from phone, cannae take no more! Me thumbs!

A friend of mine is an organizational psych consultant (think Meyers-Briggs, but it's far from the only typology).

One of the most useful things he ever told me was the breakdown of certain types of personalities in the general population: about 50% of people fall into a type that wants things to stay the same.  They dislike change and want the familiar over and over again.  This explains most mass media.

Quote from: daniel_ream;918835They dislike change and want the familiar over and over again.  This explains most mass media.

I'm tempted to agree with this... given the number of people I know who just flat out refuse to try new things... new food, new movies (including old movies they've never seen before), new places, new people.

But I'm also skeptical that those personality types are as stable and consistent as folks like to think. People place value on different aspects of their life and the things they do. So it kind of matters why someone is playing games and what they get out of them.
If they're just doing it to relax then it's not surprising they don't want anything that challenges them.
For a lot of the people I've played with RPGs are a very minor part of their life. They don't hang out online talking about them or read up on what new and great 'innovations' are hot on the market. They play as a casual thing to do on a Saturday afternoon, as an escape from other pressures, and they're not looking to be 'blown away' by some new hotness. That doesn't mean they are stuck in a rut in all aspects of their lives... they might be very adventurous in other ways... but games are just not where that zen for the new expresses itself.

The familiar is comfortable and if games aren't all that important to you why would you seek out the less comfortable corners it has to offer?

None of that explains why settings which expanded generic fantasy were not successful.

Eberron is D&D with steampunk and pulp added.
Planescape is D&D with infinite planes of wonder and horror added.
Spelljammer is D&D in space.

Within the straightjacket, how popular are activities other than playing a band of murder hobos? Does anyone bother with politics, sailing, or anything else?

I see game systems something akin to the difference between playing an Xbox vs a Wii vs a Playstation. Some players pick one and dislike the others, some will play on all of them. Campaigns are akin to an individual game disk. Each game system requires an investment in time and money. Some players pick one system and stick with it due to limited resources.

Of course chronologically that's reversed, but it's a difficult comparison to make in reverse.

As far as Tolkenesque fantasy, it's like Super Mario Brothers, or Halo. When someone has played one of these series of games and enjoyed them, they are very likely to pick up and play another. Again, investment in earlier iterations of a series make it easier to invest further in that series.

There's an investment cost to branching off. There's a bigger investment cost to doing something new. If you already knew about Tolkien, D&D is easier to imagine because the books lower your investment cost to pick up the game.

Interestingly, Star Wars has a pretty big footprint in RPGs. I ascribe that to the movies giving people a start in the world and lowering the investment of playing the games. d6 was a really good starter because it was simple and made Star Wars games easy to pick up.

Star Trek and Dr. Who traditionally haven't done as well and I think it's because the games either started off too complicated (for brand new players) or (and?) they didn't deliver the kind of story in the media of the proper feel. I think these media franchises need a very different system than traditional combat centric games and need to make weird puzzles easy for the GM to make and interpersonal interactions instinctive.

There are some interesting exceptions. Cyberpunk didn't have a big tie to it's media inspiration (Blade Runner). Never the less, it's culture fit into the perception of punk culture at the time and so people had something to hold onto.

Shadowrun probably couldn't have launched into popularity if Cyberpunk 2013 hadn't come a year before it. Again the investment to pick up the game was lowered by being familiar with Cyberpunk and D&D. Although the game is well known among RPG enthusiasts, most people would know nothing about it unless they played one of the video games but by just saying Cyberpunk and D&D, they'd have a pretty good idea of what it's about (as long as they knew what cyberpunk means).

So in short, a game is likely to be successful if it's story already has a purchase in the public conscious because it lowers the difficulty of playing to a manageable level. Being too different is a good way of never seeing play at a table because it requires a large investment of time, imagination and money.