[freshhawk]

In practice it's much harder to avoid. Especially with the new players driving all the recent growth.

The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D or they will not play. If you don't have the brand on your 3rd party product then the average number of units you will sell is around zero.

It's not really Windows, D&D is Windows+Apple+Linux and everything else is one of the BSDs.

[the_af]

> The brand is so dominant that in any group most of the players will play D&D

I cannot wrap my brain around this. For boardgames, which is a growing market and has been for years now, people are buying and learning new games every day, especially geeks who are only too eager to teach them to their gaming groups.

How come for RPGs it's too difficult for one geek to evangelize a new RPG to their group, especially if they are newbies not too invested in an ongoing RPG campaign?

D&D is a very complex system, there are far simpler, newbie-friendly rules out there. How come you cannot convince your newbie friends to try one? One other commenter was mentioning how complex D&D is, how every spell and level and weapon is interconnected in very restricting ways in order to prevent overpowered characters -- that cannot be easy to teach! I played plenty of D&D based video games, like Icewind Dale, and for the life of me I'm thankful the computer hides all the complexity; I wouldn't have played them otherwise!

[freshhawk]

I honestly don't understand it completely, but there are a lot of casual players who will not even read the rules intro in the players handbook, and will play for a long time without ever learning how their character works. They don't want to leanr anything, they just want their DM friend to take them through some games and make it fun, so learning something they aren't even vaguely familiar with sounds like a lot of work.

It's also a longstanding, odd thing that even experienced players will spend a huge amount of time homebrewing hacks to D&D to make it work as a different kind of game instead of learning a new system that works well for the kind of game they want to play. Ttrpg systems seem to have a lot more momentum/brand loyalty than you would guess.

A lot of D&D players play a fairly "adversarial DM" style and, rightly, don't want to play the more narrative focused or rules-light systems that are easy to learn, because giving players freedom will lead to them abusing it. The dynamic is players wanting a power fantasy and relying on the DM to stop them from ruining the game with their rule bending.

I'm one of those people who likes learning new ttrpg systems and trying out different systems, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask about this. It seems like it's a lot of compounding factors, including a lot of growth being driven by streamers and new players who want to play D&D, not some nerd stuff they've never heard of.