Pitch Your D&D Killers

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So I do think that "chill" rpg's like Ryuutama or Golden Sky Stories could have legs. Someone upstream mentioned Pixar like. Most "chill" RPG's tend to find their DNA in a love of Ghibli movies, which have had a very heavy influence on Pixar. I agree that you likely need to leave the 100% Anime behind and someone get that Tween, early teen market interested. The other thing is to try and target the female demographic a bit more, but still make sure it appeals to males. Guys will check out a lot of things girls are into to have something to talk about with them.

Ryuutama could especially have a chance at making inroads if it was being more actively developed. It's a great intro to RPG's with lots of methods for players and the GM to very clearly show through game mechanics what kind of game everyone wants to play. It's got a great structure for how to plan and run sessions for the GM and a lot of structure to guide play.
 
No one said anything about setting, just about the lack of pre-gen content. Don't whine when you're mistaken. We are men of action, whining does not become us.
 
Fenris-77 said:
No one said anything about setting, just about the lack of pre-gen content. Don't whine when you're mistaken. We are men of action, whining does not become us.
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I don't think they had much pre-gen content either. Ryuutama has a couple of oneshots. Jovian Chronicles only published adventures were for the Mekton not for the actual Jovian Chronicles game (they predated it being done in the Silhouette system, they published two adventures), so the actual game itself didn't have any adventures that didn't need converting (again, not newbie friendly). As far as I know none of the others he mentioned had pregenerated adventures either. The whole part about them being very specific settings so can't compete directly with D&D which is a genre in and of itself is an additional piece of information, not the main one.

Even without the point, I don't think they really count as having good support for beginner GMs, especially compared to D&D.

Also, I mentioned in both the post before I said that Anime Bullshit I think could do well, as well as the post where I clarified what I meant "which ones".

Additionally, I'm clarifying that when I say "Anime Bullshit" I don't mean "a game based on an anime" I mean a game based on "Anime Bullshit" in a more general sense. Clarification isn't whining.
 
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I think if anything kills D&D it will be D&D itself. It nearly died with 4e and that allowed Pathfinder to have it's glory days and overtake it. If 5e was a bad product that didn't attract back the old guard gamers and gain popularity through the likes of Mercer... I think we would not see any more D&D, honestly.
 
If something not a TTRPG kills D&D (some VR MMO or whatever) it will kill the hobby as well - kill in the sense of reducing it to the current following of chits and hex wargames I would say.

For something to replace D&D as the predominant RPG I think it needs to fulfill the satisfactions that D&D gives, of heroism and imagined acquisition (among others). So something that does D&D better than D&D does. IME one of the first things many new young players want to do is engineer in game riches and possessions. There is a reason why Monopoly is both one of the worst designed board games ever and one of the most popular.
 
zanshin said:
If something not a TTRPG kills D&D (some VR MMO or whatever) it will kill the hobby as well - kill in the sense of reducing it to the current following of chits and hex wargames I would say.
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This kind of happened in the late 90s. There was a brief period I recall not being able to find players (or at least struggling to find them) because all the D&D folk I knew started investing their energy into magic and losing interest in RPGs). This was also when TSR was having problems as well so the future of D&D was uncertain for other reasons.

When 4E came out and the fanbase split that was another time you had a real alternative to D&D gaining ground (but arguable that was just another version of D&D).

And Vampire of course. They gave D&D a good run for their money. For me this is the best example of what could realistically compete with D&D (a new concept, that reflects media other than fantasy, but is highly gameable in terms of you read the book and you instantly see this can function long term at a table). I don't know how you predict what genre is going to take hold like that (I think with vampire it was its ability to attract many existing RPG fans but also bring in new fans, and bring in more women).
 
BedrockBrendan said:
This kind of happened in the late 90s. There was a brief period I recall not being able to find players (or at least struggling to find them) because all the D&D folk I knew started investing their energy into magic and losing interest in RPGs). This was also when TSR was having problems as well so the future of D&D was uncertain for other reasons.

When 4E came out and the fanbase split that was another time you had a real alternative to D&D gaining ground (but arguable that was just another version of D&D).

And Vampire of course. They gave D&D a good run for their money. For me this is the best example of what could realistically compete with D&D (a new concept, that reflects media other than fantasy, but is highly gameable in terms of you read the book and you instantly see this can function long term at a table). I don't know how you predict what genre is going to take hold like that (I think with vampire it was its ability to attract many existing RPG fans but also bring in new fans, and bring in more women).
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I used to hate Magic because I thought it was intruding in the RPG hobby and taking potential players away. I later tried it out and kinda liked it, but card games weren't really my thing. I also regret not getting into Vampire (which I also kinda hated at the time, cuz it took potential players from other RPGs I was more into, and found it a bit pretentious), which was also going on at the time, cuz I got the books later on and I really liked it and other WW games, but I couldn't get a game going by that point due to work and all my old gaming group disappearing (moving to other countries, etc.), or not really being interested in RPGs anymore, and such. By this point, I'm usually stuck with current ed D&D when I get to play.
 
Okay, so here's my Rolemaster as a D&D killer pitch.

First off we're gonna license The Iron Tower Trilogy from Dennis L McKiernan. Just to spite the Tokien Estate. We're going to use the same kind of drab and horrific art that's on those covers. Since we've got an infinite budget we'll hire Ian Miller for the job.

Next up the system needs some clean-up and tweaking but we'll be using Rolemaster Standard System dialed back a little in places. Not to worry, this time we're going digital. Full on integrated character creation and combat tracking software for your cell phone or tablet and wi-fi networking. The critical hit tables will have animated images with sound that share to the player's phones and adjust for race and class. We'll have lovely leather covered cellphone cases. With Rolemaster embossed on them. The interface will be simple, intuitive, and clean just like RMSS!

The cool thing is you won't even need to be in the same room to play, though I'd advise not playing while driving.
 
The D&D juggernaut is pretty much unstoppable when it comes to RPGs.

But D&D died for me the day I started playing WFRP (1e) and Merp. I've not touched it since, and the D&D5e setting material is too kiddy, IMHO. But I do like some of the OSR interactions as I said before Like Through Sunken Lands and Beyond the Wall. But they are pretty far removed in tone from the original source material.
 
I can see how D&D and similar fantasy games benefit from the dungeon crawl model as a default mode of play. As mentioned above, a bit of graph paper, a few tables and a touch of inspiration can make preparing and running a game less daunting for even a novice GM.

Vampire, may have at one point come close to contesting D&D top spot, but does it have anything even remotely comparable to dungeon crawling?

I have very limite experience with WoD games, but it seems to me they tend to be political urban sandboxes or mission based kind of games like Cyberpunk 2020 among many others. A lot of GMs can run that sort of game without breaking a sweat, but it's a lot more complicated than graph paper and tables and I would not consider it novice GM friendly.

I am not sure I know where I am going with this, but I just thinking if one of the key strengths of top dog D&D were its highly accessible default mode of play, wouldn't one expect its closest rival to have an different, but equivalently accessible default mode of play?
 
Don't write off the possibility that the main draw of CWoD wasn't in the mission/modules/adventures, but simply Sexy Supernaturals Snarking at Each Other.

I kid, but not a lot.
 
Voros said:
But the nature of sales for MtG and GW is significantly different from ttrpgs, I'd suspect the average MtG and GW fan is spending far more as an individual than the average 5e D&D fan. How do those gross numbers translate into unique customers?

As we've all noted before most players at most may have the PHB and that's it.
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You bring up a great point. I've been trying to get my local game store folks to do more with RPGs, so I've had quite a few conversations with them about the economics from their perspective. Basically, running an RPG table generates store income only from the cost for a seat at the table. RPG folks sometimes make a big $50 book purchase or buy a $10 set of dice, but otherwise they don't spend a lot. MTG is where the store's money is at, as each MTG player will pick up a pack or two of cards each time they sit down to play, in addition to paying for a seat at the table. Two entirely different economic models -- occasional big-purchase versus continual small-purchase.

This gets me thinking that maybe a true "D&D slayer" might be a RPG with packs to buy along with the game. Perhaps the cards would be mostly healing potions or equipment or spell scrolls with the occasional magic item. "Hey, just got a +2 sword. I'm adding it to my character!" Or maybe the wizard buys card packs in order to build his collection of spells. Some items might be consumable (healing potion) while others would be character-building (magic items or spells).

Maybe we redefine the concept of the "level" and cards could represent hit points (or hit dice) and other cards could be skills or such. In that way maybe even classes don't exist but instead a player can build his own character using cards purchased. There could be some sort of guidelines about how many cards can be in your "hand" based on a number of games played, so that real-world experience and character experience might be connected.

There is a Harry Potter game kind of like this, where you play a character and then draw from a deck to acquire spells and such. In this particular game you throw all cards back into the deck and reshuffle when you move from one scenario to the next, (and there are no additional cards to buy) but I can imagine something like that in a role-playing game where you build a character through card purchase.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
And Vampire of course. They gave D&D a good run for their money. For me this is the best example of what could realistically compete with D&D (a new concept, that reflects media other than fantasy, but is highly gameable in terms of you read the book and you instantly see this can function long term at a table). I don't know how you predict what genre is going to take hold like that (I think with vampire it was its ability to attract many existing RPG fans but also bring in new fans, and bring in more women).
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Vampire I think was largely beneficial to the wider RPG market in a way that D&D isn't necessarily. It seemed that a sizeable number of its players were also willing to try other games as well.

I'm not sure a new "D&D killer" would have the same effect, especially if it's something like a Critical Role endorsed RPG. I could see to that just leading to us swapping one all consuming RPG for another.
Voros said:
But the nature of sales for MtG and GW is significantly different from ttrpgs, I'd suspect the average MtG and GW fan is spending far more as an individual than the average 5e D&D fan. How do those gross numbers translate into unique customers?

As we've all noted before most players at most may have the PHB and that's it.
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I can't find the unique customer numbers (they may not release them) but this from GW's description of their business model is telling and would seem to back up your point.

We don’t spend money on things we don’t need, like expensive offices or prime rent shopping locations or advertising that speaks to the mass market and not our small band of loyal followers.

That suggests they're very much a "true fans" business that concentrates on their core audience.
 
Black Leaf said:
Vampire I think was largely beneficial to the wider RPG market in a way that D&D isn't necessarily. It seemed that a sizeable number of its players were also willing to try other games as well.
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I am sure a lot of our experiences come down to what region we happened to be in. I always remember 90s gaming for me being about trying all kinds of different games. I didn't start on D&D though, so maybe that is part of it. Locally our groups tended to have multiple GMs, so one guy might run D&D, another might run GURPS or Vampire, and pretty much everyone was willing to try a different game once in a while (I remember playing in Dark Sword sessions, TORG sessions, Star Wars sessions, Tales from the Floating Vagabond sessions, Vampire, etc). Mostly as a GM I was the one who ran Ravenloft, and a bit of Masque of the Red Death. But I would run other games as well.

With Vampire I remember two things happening, a sense of the hobby expanding, of new people coming in (which benefited the D&D games too) and a sense that D&D was in a little bit of trouble and trying to play catch up. I didn't run vampire but my friend gave me the masquerade book when it came out to read, and I instantly understood there was this whole approach to RPing that was doable that we hadn't been doing. So I think anything that is going to come in and challenge D&D needs to provide either a solution to a longstanding problem that is an impediment to more people playing (i.e. prep time, adventure design issues) or offer something we didn't know we wanted in the first place.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
I think anything that is going to come in and challenge D&D needs to provide either a solution to a longstanding problem that is an impediment to more people playing (i.e. prep time, adventure design issues) or offer something we didn't know we wanted in the first place.
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A choke point has always been a limited supply of good GMs. A strong GMless game could avoid that. I don't know what it would look like or I would build it.
 
Stan said:
A choke point has always been a limited supply of good GMs. A strong GMless game could avoid that. I don't know what it would look like or I would build it.
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What has worked for me hear is gaming in groups where we encourage everyone to try their hand at GMing. Rotating around GMs is a great way to see other approaches. Also you need to see things from both sides of the screen (this is beneficial for players too)
 
sharps54 said:
This is true, MERP was huge when it came out. The art is still better than anything you saw in D&D at the time and since, sadly (since I have a fondness for RoleMaster) the system is what killed it.
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Did it though? We've seen two(?) different iterations that came out since with different rules, and they haven't approached it. I don't expect FL's version to do any better. Well, but not better, which is all anything that isn't D&D can really expect.
 
The Butcher said:
“Killing D&D” is bullshit. I’ve said it in the past the D&D hate is the Oedipus complex of the hobby and this post strengthens my belief.
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Did someone say "Oedipus Complex"?

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The Butcher said:
“Killing D&D” is bullshit. I’ve said it in the past the D&D hate is the Oedipus complex of the hobby and this post strengthens my belief.
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I definitely know the attitude you are talking about. But I wasn't interpreting this thread as that, so much as "what hypothetical new RPG could realistically challenge D&D's supremacy in the way say Vampire did in the 90s".

If we had a 'why is D&D supreme' thread, I think there would be a lot of valid reasons why it has remained on top. D&D just works number one. I mostly play other games (largely because I have my own publishing company that uses another system so I don't have as much time to run D&D as I used to). But when I go back to running D&D its always so easy to do because you sit down and you immediately know what you have to do to prep a session (this depends on your approach of course but there are some basic things you can always go to: making a dungeon, making a map of a region, the monster manual, etc). And the system, the way characters advance, etc all works. I never sit down to a session of D&D and have a group of people ambling about with no direction. We all know what to do (some of that is because D&D has been around and we are all familiar, but I think a lot of it is its component parts work). This is why I was saying with a game like vampire why I think it succeeded in being a challenge was because it also brought a campaign and setting concept that gelled like that. It is this hard to define 'gameability' aspect of the system and the settings.
 
I think another reason for D&D's bounce back in the 2000s was that the fantasy genre itself really took off in popularity around the time 3E came out.

The 90s were kind of a lull period for fantasy in a lot of ways -- no big movies or TV, literature being kind of stuck in the 80s style, etc. But then around 2000 you had the LOTR movies, the Harry Potter books and then films, ASOIAF taking off as a literary phenomenon, and some smaller examples as well. Fantasy became a part of the broader cultural landscape in a way it hadn't before.
 
Dyrnwyn said:
I think another reason for D&Ds bounce back in the 2000s was that the fantasy genre itself really took off in popularity around the time 3E came out.

The 90s were kind of a lull period for fantasy in a lot of ways -- no big movies or TV, literature being kind of stuck in the 80s style, etc. But then around 2000 you had the LOTR movies, the Harry Potter books and then films, ASOIAF taking off as a literary phenomenon, and some smaller examples as well. Fantasy became a part of the broader cultural landscape in a way it hadn't before.
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I think we all owe a big debt of gratitude to Dungeons and Dragons the movie (circa 2000) for helping rekindle a much neglected genre :smile:
 
DeadBob said:
Don't write off the possibility that the main draw of CWoD wasn't in the mission/modules/adventures, but simply Sexy Supernaturals Snarking at Each Other.

I kid, but not a lot.
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Which explains why I didn't get much play out of my nebbishy Ventrue antiques dealer who only fed on elderly society ladies on Sundays.
 
Vargold said:
Which explains why I didn't get much play out of my nebbishy Ventrue antiques dealer who only fed on elderly society ladies on Sundays.
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If you'd only made them a sexy, snarky nebbishy Ventrue antiques dealer who only fed on elderly society ladies on Sundays!
 
BedrockBrendan said:
I definitely know the attitude you are talking about. But I wasn't interpreting this thread as that, so much as "what hypothetical new RPG could realistically challenge D&D's supremacy in the way say Vampire did in the 90s".
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Then the answer is an approachable superhero game.

White Wolf succeded because VtM was able to operate on two-levels. First as roleplaying intensive experience of playing characters in a vampiric society with own history and culture. Just familiar and exotic enough to be approachable. Second as monsters with superpowers duking it out with other monsters which little of the moral qualm of people versus people situations. And third VtM was good enough as a system.

Of the first two Monsterous superheroes was by far the most popular. As I said figuring out a linked series of combat encounter is not particularly hard. With the rich background of World of Darkness just enough could be added so the different fights didn't seem like carbon copies of something the group has done previously.

As a result if WW is your model, then the only thing that has the same cultural zeitgeist today as what White Wolf did in the 90s is Marvel Superheroes.

The main thing holding back superheroes aside from the whole Marvel IP thing is not usable in the way monster mythology was. Another is the legacy of RPG superhero systems. The most popular systems are mechanical monstrosities with a steep learning curve. The systems that were simple rarely were executed well enough to establish a lasting legacy.

In theory a Marvel RPG with a system as detailed as 5e core could do the trick but as mentioned before it up against whole licensed RPG have a short shelf life issue. What it will take is something like Vampire to have a good enough system coupled with a compelling background that evokes Marvel but is it own thing.

No other genre other than fantasy has this at the moment.

If we were talking about this in the 40s and 50s then the way to go would be westerns. Which has a body of tropes that are straightforward to use as the basis of an RPG.

If a new sci-fi IP comes out that is a space western (think Firefly but better managed) and it catches interest in the same way Then that could be a route. But a RPG based on that would be a dead end for now.

Star Wars has the problem that one of it's major interesting points, the Jedi, are basically a bunch of loners in the most interesting time period, the Empire. And the central conflict of the other two (plucky Rebels, dastardly scoundrels) is still people versus people with all that it entails.

Not any criticism I made is about a relative degree in comparison to D&D to become the market leader. There have been a number of very good RPGs that made use of one or more of the tropes I mentioned.

Wrapping it up for this post
With the existence of open content, I think D&D is basically entrenched as far as being #1 in the hobby. There is just too much support out there compared to other genres and situations to how to run a fun campaign in the time one has for a hobby. It is not good enough to think of an alternative system or setting. You have to think up something that is just as easy to use and create as a fracking dungeon. That is more than just a linked series of combat encounters.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
I think we all owe a big debt of gratitude to Dungeons and Dragons the movie (circa 2000) for helping rekindle a much neglected genre :smile:
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We should just be the Boll-pocalypse didn't kill it.
 
DeadBob said:
Don't write off the possibility that the main draw of CWoD wasn't in the mission/modules/adventures, but simply Sexy Supernaturals Snarking at Each Other.

I kid, but not a lot.
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What I really look at as a failure is that they didn't exploit the Vampire Diaries/Sparkly Vampires movies to more of an extent than they did. Both of those were blockbusters, but I never saw them even once try to capitalize on them.
 
I think, instead of a licensed property, an rpg put out by the license holder would have a chance to have longer legs. No worries about license expiration and can piggy back directly on the main marketing. Of course, it would still have to be a good game. None of the main license holders operate this way, though. Maybe if Hasbro or another large company could secure longer term rights but they'd have to consider it worth the risk and Hasbro would likely not want a game to potentially compete with D&D.
 
I do think Marvel could overtake D&D with a good game that is fairly easy for casual play. Do people consider Icons easy to get into as a game? If so, maybe Marvel publishing their own game along the lines of an rpg like Icons but using their own Marvel IP and art.
 
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