Personally I hate how 'swingy' the d20 system is. It makes it impossible to really feel like an expert in anything. Especially since DCs tend to be increased at higher levels to keep a 'challenge'. Even with expertise in a skill, you can still fail a check fairly often.
I'd prefer systems that reward characters having specializations with not having to worry about random chance making you seem incompetent at the thing you built your character to be good at.
I also find 5e in particular to be rather shallow. The idea of feats being optional, and then being so rare that you aren't going to be picking the flavor feats because they are only worth giving up an ASI if they provide a strong mechanical advantage. Level ups often feel boring with very few choices.
I remember trying out several other systems "Back in the Day" but unless we wanted something other than fantasy D&D was our go to. There were two systems that we used a LOT and that was Palladium and White Wolf. Macross(Robotech), Heroes, and Rifts were our go to SciFi and if we wanted to goth it up we went with Vampire or Werewolf. We dabbled in Traveller, GURPS, Amber and probably a dozen other systems, but after the novelty wore off it was almost always back to D&D. In more recent years we as a group have tried Cortex, Fate, FFG Star Wars and the newest version of Vampire. None of them held our interest so back to D&D we went. At some point the blame has to fall on the other systems for not being able to capture an audience and build a permanent fan base.
Shadowrun ended in a (literal) blast. :D After that one of the other players suggested they'd like to play something completely different, like a fantasy game. Easiest one to get everyone on board? Yup, 5e.
Dungeon Worlds ended with someone wanting some more crunch getting comfortable with the concept of RPGs... yup. 5e.
Pathfinder 1 and the german systems ended with one or more players wanting less crunch... guess to what system that lead? :D
I dropped out of some of these campaigns, the ones I am still playing in are only with close friends. It kinda sucks that everyone decided on 5e in these groups, but that's what I meant with "smallest common denominator": it's the system everyone can get somewhat along with.
Doesn't mean I have to like it. It's just the way it is. I'm still buying a lot of other RPG systems, though, in the hope that I'll one day manage to get three other people to give Coriolis, Runequest, Star Wars FFG, Forbidden Lands, Pathfinder 2, Lex Arcana or Splittermond a try... and maybe even play in one of these systems for a change. :D
Shadowrun is a good game, though, or at least was. No ability to convince those players to come back to it some time? Not played all those systems but I do have some very fond memories of Runequest. Pathfinder is essentially D&D so ...
Maybe I can convince them to go back to Shadowrun after our campaign. :) There's always hope xD
The latest Shadowrun book is a mess, sadly -_-. I have the Sixth World book, and even without any prior experience in Shadowrun at all I can tell that this book does exactly none of what Shadowrun-the-media-franchise has me wanting in a Shadowrun TTRPG campaign. Blugh. Which Shadowrun was the good one, just so's I can maybe keep an eye out for old books? q_q
The latest Shadowrun book is a mess, sadly -_-. I have the Sixth World book, and even without any prior experience in Shadowrun at all I can tell that this book does exactly none of what Shadowrun-the-media-franchise has me wanting in a Shadowrun TTRPG campaign. Blugh. Which Shadowrun was the good one, just so's I can maybe keep an eye out for old books? q_q
I ran a Shadowrun session using Fate once, it was fun!
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Hueh. I've legit considered just doing SR (or Cyberpunk, for that matter) in GURPS. I can build my own gol'-danged cyberpunk dystopia, with blackjack and hookers! ...no rly, ye need both blackjack and hookers in a cyberpunk dystopia, but at least in GURPS you can also have things like guns. Or implants. Or other staples of the genre. Friggin' Sixth World book was such a disappointment Q_Q.
But yeah. Back on topic briefly, that's generally actually mg biggest beef with 5e - its success means everybody does shit for 5e, and it crowds out other systems. Yes, apologists and white-knighters tend to crow "I GUESS THAT MEANS IT'S JUST THAT MUCH BETTER HERP DERP", but 5e's success owes almost nothing to its mechanics and almost everything to Critical Role and/or Hasbro's marketing budget. If another system had hundreds of times the marketing budget it does, maybe it'd be more successful too. I'd love to get some real campaign time in on other systems, but since I can only play online that severely curtails my ability to play in systems without digital tools. Ah well. Mebbe someday.
But yeah. Back on topic briefly, that's generally actually mg biggest beef with 5e - its success means everybody does shit for 5e, and it crowds out other systems. Yes, apologists and white-knighters tend to crow "I GUESS THAT MEANS IT'S JUST THAT MUCH BETTER HERP DERP", but 5e's success owes almost nothing to its mechanics and almost everything to Critical Role and/or Hasbro's marketing budget. If another system had hundreds of times the marketing budget it does, maybe it'd be more successful too. I'd love to get some real campaign time in on other systems, but since I can only play online that severely curtails my ability to play in systems without digital tools. Ah well. Mebbe someday.
I don't believe that this is completely true. Before 5e and social media, D&D dominated the TTRPG market. It is more successful now due to those things, but you can't attribute that to the previous editions. There have been many TTRPG, but none of them have been able to over take D&D in past or present. The closest was Pathfinder which was/is just D&D.
The latest Shadowrun book is a mess, sadly -_-. I have the Sixth World book, and even without any prior experience in Shadowrun at all I can tell that this book does exactly none of what Shadowrun-the-media-franchise has me wanting in a Shadowrun TTRPG campaign. Blugh. Which Shadowrun was the good one, just so's I can maybe keep an eye out for old books? q_q
Shadowrun 4 is awesome. :-)
Lots of equipment and character options, with a flexible but imo easy to understand point buy character system and a super simple dice pool that makes even combat quite fast (but also fairly lethal and thereby tactical).
You have the typical fantasy races (elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs, humans) but also special options like shapeshifters, A.I.s, Nagas, mutants and even the Shadowrun equivalent of vampires, each with advantages and drawbacks and all included in the Cyberpunk-like lore (e.g. vampirism is a virus that expresses as vampire on humans, as banshee on elves, etc). Tons of cyberware or bioware to choose from for a classical street samurai, drones and vehicles for riggers, programs and exploits for hackers, spells for mages, rules for summoning and binding spirits from other planes that serve you (even outside combat), magical adepts as a magic based alternative to the Cyber-Sam.... and tons of tools & toys from Tamagotchi-like toys with integrated mood sensors that can help you in social situations to last-resort drugs that can pump your combat skills up to eleven but may leave you addicted and open an entirely new story arc to deal with these consequences. :D
Most importantly, you normally start as a professional runner. I.e. you are *good* at what you do and the mechanics make you actually feel that... when your Samurai rolls 10 dice on their sniper rifle vs the street ganger's 3 dice to dodge you can literally feel your competence. :D On the other hand when the GM breaks out the corpo elite squad and grabs a fistful of dice you know you're in over your head and should run. xD
An average run for our group was one session of legwork to gather intel in the physical, magical and matrix (internet) planes, another session to come up with a brilliant plan and one or two sessions executing that plan... usually with unintended events that screwed us halfway through the mission, but sometimes we managed to completely ghost the opposition. E.g. one time we had to free someone from jail. Using some social skills, some knockout drugs, some illusion spells and a wifi-connected law department of a corporation that owed us a favor from a previous run we just replaced the judge and jury during the inmate's second trial and declared him to be innocent based on some flaw in the first trial. :D
I don't believe that this is completely true. Before 5e and social media, D&D dominated the TTRPG market. It is more successful now due to those things, but you can't attribute that to the previous editions. There have been many TTRPG, but none of them have been able to over take D&D in past or present. The closest was Pathfinder which was/is just D&D.
Eh, things like World of Darkness and GURPS came pretty close too back in the day. D&D didn't benefit from any Anne Rice vampire booms.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I don't believe that this is completely true. Before 5e and social media, D&D dominated the TTRPG market. It is more successful now due to those things, but you can't attribute that to the previous editions. There have been many TTRPG, but none of them have been able to over take D&D in past or present. The closest was Pathfinder which was/is just D&D.
Eh, things like World of Darkness and GURPS came pretty close too back in the day. D&D didn't benefit from any Anne Rice vampire booms.
Both of those systems fell out of favor before 5e hit the scene so you still can't blame social media or Critical Role for their failure to keep or gain a significant player base.
Err, sure? I have no idea what point you're trying to make there. Thought dropping an Anne Rice reference would have made it clear I was talking about another era entirely, but I guess not.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Err, sure? I have no idea what point you're trying to make there. Thought dropping an Anne Rice reference would have made it clear I was talking about another era entirely, but I guess not.
The overall point of my original post that you quoted was that D&D has been the dominant TTRPG for a really long time and that Yurei's statement that D&D is only popular due to Critical Role and WotC marketing campaign is not completely true.
It has always been the "King of the Mountain" so to speak.
The point Golaryn is generally aiming for, Anton, is that 5e is generally held up as The Bestest Most Perfectest Flawlessest Game Ever Created With Absolutely No Mistakes, Bad Decisions, or Compromises EVER, and people who dislike anyone else criticizing 5e like to use its sales numbers and generally prolific nature as a scourge against other games. "If they were such hot shit, they'd outsell 5e!"
That's true, to an extent. But 5e's crushing over-dominance of the market only really happened when Critical Role hit. Prior to that it was dominant, but not nearly as dominant. The combination of Critical Role, DDB's ease of use, and Wizards actually making it fairly easy for people to make third-party content for 5e means it's become the default. 5e is actively terrible at handling any genre without the word "Fantasy" in its name somewhere, but people force the issue because they can piggyback on Hasbro's marketing budget by creating supplements for 5e rather than trying to create their own games, or create supplements for less well advertised systems.
The point Golaryn is generally aiming for, Anton, is that 5e is generally held up as The Bestest Most Perfectest Flawlessest Game Ever Created With Absolutely No Mistakes, Bad Decisions, or Compromises EVER, and people who dislike anyone else criticizing 5e like to use its sales numbers and generally prolific nature as a scourge against other games. "If they were such hot shit, they'd outsell 5e!"
That's true, to an extent. But 5e's crushing over-dominance of the market only really happened when Critical Role hit. Prior to that it was dominant, but not nearly as dominant. The combination of Critical Role, DDB's ease of use, and Wizards actually making it fairly easy for people to make third-party content for 5e means it's become the default. 5e is actively terrible at handling any genre without the word "Fantasy" in its name somewhere, but people force the issue because they can piggyback on Hasbro's marketing budget by creating supplements for 5e rather than trying to create their own games, or create supplements for less well advertised systems.
This is true, but I also want to point out that part of the reason that other games aren't working out is that they didn't have a strong presence to begin with. The extreme rise of 5e is almost completely bases off of Critical Role in my opinion, but that is only an impact on 5e.
Well, D&D has been the big kid on the block forever. Even without CtitRole, it was the one even non gamers could name. You could ask just about anyone what D&D is and they would have been able to at least recognize the name. Not so with any of the others.
Eh, things like World of Darkness and GURPS came pretty close too back in the day. D&D didn't benefit from any Anne Rice vampire booms.
Both of those systems fell out of favor before 5e hit the scene so you still can't blame social media or Critical Role for their failure to keep or gain a significant player base.
I don't know about GURPS, but I was playing World of Darkness well after 5E came out.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
But 5e's crushing over-dominance of the market only really happened when Critical Role hit. Prior to that it was dominant, but not nearly as dominant. The combination of Critical Role, DDB's ease of use, and Wizards actually making it fairly easy for people to make third-party content for 5e means it's become the default.
Nah.
Critical Role is a big show on YouTube, but as Sposta has said above me, D&D was the dominant RPG since the 1970s. Back when my friends and I were playing Champions in high school, the other gamers, who were all playing D&D and only D&D, were like "What?" when we named Champions. There is a reason Hero Games had to get with ICE to continue publishing, and a reason that ICE went under, and a reason that Steve Long and a bunch of fellow Champions players from California were able to buy the Hero Games license for, well, I dunno how much, but little enough that a small local group of 30-something gamers could afford it. There is a reason Rolemaster, which was demonstrably a better game than its contemporary competitor, 1e/2e AD&D, had but a fraction of the market, and could not get a foothold.
It was 30 years before Critical Role that, when one walked into a game store and went to the RPG section, there were as twice as many shelves of D&D products as there were all the other RPGs combined. There is a reason my friends and I had to mail-order stuff for games like Rolemaster directly from the publisher and wait weeks for shipping, rather than buy them over the counter, a reason why nobody stocked them.
I can see how it is easy for someone who only came to D&D in the "age of Critical Role" (i.e. the last few years) would think that Critical Role was somehow a planet-quake in the RPG world that took down all the other RPGs on behalf of D&D, but that is simply not the case. There have been hundreds of RPGs manufactured over the years that never went anywhere -- some of them manufactured by the same exact company that made D&D. Gamma World, Boot Hill, Star Frontiers. All made by TSR. They did not sell, combined, a fraction of the sales that TSR had for D&D.
There were many other games that ended up being stillborn or else dying in childhood. The Indian Jones RPG. FASA's attempt at a Star Trek RPG. Torg. The Amber RPG. None of these got very far, none were able to compete with D&D. Many of them came and went before some of the players on Critical Role were off their mothers' apron-strings, so to speak.
There is a very simple reason why D&D has won the day all along: Gary Gygax got there first. He beat everyone else by enough years that by the time the other games started coming out (Champions was first produced in 1980), D&D had become the default, and it has never surrendered that position through even the bad years for TSR, and the muck-ups of WOTC like 4e. The D&D popularity is not about "5e", but about the fact that D&D was there first. This gives D&D the "home field advantage."
Has this perhaps been a tad magnified by Critical Role? Yeah, sure, no doubt. But Critical Role and 5e did not invent the idea that D&D is the juggernaut, the default, the one that is bigger than all the other RPGs combined. It has always been, going back to the 1970s. It will probably always be, because it was there first, it got implanted into everyone's minds as "the default," and as newcomers join, because it is the giant, they start with D&D.
I have no doubts that there are people that still play WoD, but I doubt there is any where near as many people playing now as there was in the 90s. I still have my 2nd edition WoD books and even play from time to time, but it is normally brief campaigns and generally during the month of October.
It is still the only time I have ever been involved with LARPing of any kind.
Err, sure? I have no idea what point you're trying to make there. Thought dropping an Anne Rice reference would have made it clear I was talking about another era entirely, but I guess not.
The overall point of my original post that you quoted was that D&D has been the dominant TTRPG for a really long time and that Yurei's statement that D&D is only popular due to Critical Role and WotC marketing campaign is not completely true.
It has always been the "King of the Mountain" so to speak.
Depends on how you define "success" and "popular".
Yes, D&D has always been on top in the TTRPG market, with various challengers over the years that fell short or couldn't sustain their momentum. On a relative scale though, that success was minuscule compared to the current popularity of 5E, and that's absolutely due to factors like social media/streaming -- i.e., CritRole and WotC.
But I don't think anyone was disputing any of that, really, which is why I was confused by your post "correcting" me on something I never said.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
It has always been the "King of the Mountain" so to speak.
It was the first (it's basically the trope-namer), it got a bunch of media attention well before the others, and it's had hasbro's marketing budget for over 20 years. Recall how poorly AD&D was doing in the 90s.
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Personally I hate how 'swingy' the d20 system is. It makes it impossible to really feel like an expert in anything. Especially since DCs tend to be increased at higher levels to keep a 'challenge'. Even with expertise in a skill, you can still fail a check fairly often.
I'd prefer systems that reward characters having specializations with not having to worry about random chance making you seem incompetent at the thing you built your character to be good at.
I also find 5e in particular to be rather shallow. The idea of feats being optional, and then being so rare that you aren't going to be picking the flavor feats because they are only worth giving up an ASI if they provide a strong mechanical advantage. Level ups often feel boring with very few choices.
I remember trying out several other systems "Back in the Day" but unless we wanted something other than fantasy D&D was our go to. There were two systems that we used a LOT and that was Palladium and White Wolf. Macross(Robotech), Heroes, and Rifts were our go to SciFi and if we wanted to goth it up we went with Vampire or Werewolf. We dabbled in Traveller, GURPS, Amber and probably a dozen other systems, but after the novelty wore off it was almost always back to D&D. In more recent years we as a group have tried Cortex, Fate, FFG Star Wars and the newest version of Vampire. None of them held our interest so back to D&D we went. At some point the blame has to fall on the other systems for not being able to capture an audience and build a permanent fan base.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Maybe I can convince them to go back to Shadowrun after our campaign. :) There's always hope xD
The latest Shadowrun book is a mess, sadly -_-. I have the Sixth World book, and even without any prior experience in Shadowrun at all I can tell that this book does exactly none of what Shadowrun-the-media-franchise has me wanting in a Shadowrun TTRPG campaign. Blugh. Which Shadowrun was the good one, just so's I can maybe keep an eye out for old books? q_q
Please do not contact or message me.
I ran a Shadowrun session using Fate once, it was fun!
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Hueh. I've legit considered just doing SR (or Cyberpunk, for that matter) in GURPS. I can build my own gol'-danged cyberpunk dystopia, with blackjack and hookers! ...no rly, ye need both blackjack and hookers in a cyberpunk dystopia, but at least in GURPS you can also have things like guns. Or implants. Or other staples of the genre. Friggin' Sixth World book was such a disappointment Q_Q.
But yeah. Back on topic briefly, that's generally actually mg biggest beef with 5e - its success means everybody does shit for 5e, and it crowds out other systems. Yes, apologists and white-knighters tend to crow "I GUESS THAT MEANS IT'S JUST THAT MUCH BETTER HERP DERP", but 5e's success owes almost nothing to its mechanics and almost everything to Critical Role and/or Hasbro's marketing budget. If another system had hundreds of times the marketing budget it does, maybe it'd be more successful too. I'd love to get some real campaign time in on other systems, but since I can only play online that severely curtails my ability to play in systems without digital tools. Ah well. Mebbe someday.
Please do not contact or message me.
I don't believe that this is completely true. Before 5e and social media, D&D dominated the TTRPG market. It is more successful now due to those things, but you can't attribute that to the previous editions. There have been many TTRPG, but none of them have been able to over take D&D in past or present. The closest was Pathfinder which was/is just D&D.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Shadowrun 4 is awesome. :-)
Lots of equipment and character options, with a flexible but imo easy to understand point buy character system and a super simple dice pool that makes even combat quite fast (but also fairly lethal and thereby tactical).
You have the typical fantasy races (elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs, humans) but also special options like shapeshifters, A.I.s, Nagas, mutants and even the Shadowrun equivalent of vampires, each with advantages and drawbacks and all included in the Cyberpunk-like lore (e.g. vampirism is a virus that expresses as vampire on humans, as banshee on elves, etc). Tons of cyberware or bioware to choose from for a classical street samurai, drones and vehicles for riggers, programs and exploits for hackers, spells for mages, rules for summoning and binding spirits from other planes that serve you (even outside combat), magical adepts as a magic based alternative to the Cyber-Sam.... and tons of tools & toys from Tamagotchi-like toys with integrated mood sensors that can help you in social situations to last-resort drugs that can pump your combat skills up to eleven but may leave you addicted and open an entirely new story arc to deal with these consequences. :D
Most importantly, you normally start as a professional runner. I.e. you are *good* at what you do and the mechanics make you actually feel that... when your Samurai rolls 10 dice on their sniper rifle vs the street ganger's 3 dice to dodge you can literally feel your competence. :D On the other hand when the GM breaks out the corpo elite squad and grabs a fistful of dice you know you're in over your head and should run. xD
An average run for our group was one session of legwork to gather intel in the physical, magical and matrix (internet) planes, another session to come up with a brilliant plan and one or two sessions executing that plan... usually with unintended events that screwed us halfway through the mission, but sometimes we managed to completely ghost the opposition. E.g. one time we had to free someone from jail. Using some social skills, some knockout drugs, some illusion spells and a wifi-connected law department of a corporation that owed us a favor from a previous run we just replaced the judge and jury during the inmate's second trial and declared him to be innocent based on some flaw in the first trial. :D
Eh, things like World of Darkness and GURPS came pretty close too back in the day. D&D didn't benefit from any Anne Rice vampire booms.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Both of those systems fell out of favor before 5e hit the scene so you still can't blame social media or Critical Role for their failure to keep or gain a significant player base.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Err, sure? I have no idea what point you're trying to make there. Thought dropping an Anne Rice reference would have made it clear I was talking about another era entirely, but I guess not.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
The overall point of my original post that you quoted was that D&D has been the dominant TTRPG for a really long time and that Yurei's statement that D&D is only popular due to Critical Role and WotC marketing campaign is not completely true.
It has always been the "King of the Mountain" so to speak.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
The point Golaryn is generally aiming for, Anton, is that 5e is generally held up as The Bestest Most Perfectest Flawlessest Game Ever Created With Absolutely No Mistakes, Bad Decisions, or Compromises EVER, and people who dislike anyone else criticizing 5e like to use its sales numbers and generally prolific nature as a scourge against other games. "If they were such hot shit, they'd outsell 5e!"
That's true, to an extent. But 5e's crushing over-dominance of the market only really happened when Critical Role hit. Prior to that it was dominant, but not nearly as dominant. The combination of Critical Role, DDB's ease of use, and Wizards actually making it fairly easy for people to make third-party content for 5e means it's become the default. 5e is actively terrible at handling any genre without the word "Fantasy" in its name somewhere, but people force the issue because they can piggyback on Hasbro's marketing budget by creating supplements for 5e rather than trying to create their own games, or create supplements for less well advertised systems.
Please do not contact or message me.
This is true, but I also want to point out that part of the reason that other games aren't working out is that they didn't have a strong presence to begin with. The extreme rise of 5e is almost completely bases off of Critical Role in my opinion, but that is only an impact on 5e.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Well, D&D has been the big kid on the block forever. Even without CtitRole, it was the one even non gamers could name. You could ask just about anyone what D&D is and they would have been able to at least recognize the name. Not so with any of the others.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I don't know about GURPS, but I was playing World of Darkness well after 5E came out.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Nah.
Critical Role is a big show on YouTube, but as Sposta has said above me, D&D was the dominant RPG since the 1970s. Back when my friends and I were playing Champions in high school, the other gamers, who were all playing D&D and only D&D, were like "What?" when we named Champions. There is a reason Hero Games had to get with ICE to continue publishing, and a reason that ICE went under, and a reason that Steve Long and a bunch of fellow Champions players from California were able to buy the Hero Games license for, well, I dunno how much, but little enough that a small local group of 30-something gamers could afford it. There is a reason Rolemaster, which was demonstrably a better game than its contemporary competitor, 1e/2e AD&D, had but a fraction of the market, and could not get a foothold.
It was 30 years before Critical Role that, when one walked into a game store and went to the RPG section, there were as twice as many shelves of D&D products as there were all the other RPGs combined. There is a reason my friends and I had to mail-order stuff for games like Rolemaster directly from the publisher and wait weeks for shipping, rather than buy them over the counter, a reason why nobody stocked them.
I can see how it is easy for someone who only came to D&D in the "age of Critical Role" (i.e. the last few years) would think that Critical Role was somehow a planet-quake in the RPG world that took down all the other RPGs on behalf of D&D, but that is simply not the case. There have been hundreds of RPGs manufactured over the years that never went anywhere -- some of them manufactured by the same exact company that made D&D. Gamma World, Boot Hill, Star Frontiers. All made by TSR. They did not sell, combined, a fraction of the sales that TSR had for D&D.
There were many other games that ended up being stillborn or else dying in childhood. The Indian Jones RPG. FASA's attempt at a Star Trek RPG. Torg. The Amber RPG. None of these got very far, none were able to compete with D&D. Many of them came and went before some of the players on Critical Role were off their mothers' apron-strings, so to speak.
There is a very simple reason why D&D has won the day all along: Gary Gygax got there first. He beat everyone else by enough years that by the time the other games started coming out (Champions was first produced in 1980), D&D had become the default, and it has never surrendered that position through even the bad years for TSR, and the muck-ups of WOTC like 4e. The D&D popularity is not about "5e", but about the fact that D&D was there first. This gives D&D the "home field advantage."
Has this perhaps been a tad magnified by Critical Role? Yeah, sure, no doubt. But Critical Role and 5e did not invent the idea that D&D is the juggernaut, the default, the one that is bigger than all the other RPGs combined. It has always been, going back to the 1970s. It will probably always be, because it was there first, it got implanted into everyone's minds as "the default," and as newcomers join, because it is the giant, they start with D&D.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I have no doubts that there are people that still play WoD, but I doubt there is any where near as many people playing now as there was in the 90s. I still have my 2nd edition WoD books and even play from time to time, but it is normally brief campaigns and generally during the month of October.
It is still the only time I have ever been involved with LARPing of any kind.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Depends on how you define "success" and "popular".
Yes, D&D has always been on top in the TTRPG market, with various challengers over the years that fell short or couldn't sustain their momentum. On a relative scale though, that success was minuscule compared to the current popularity of 5E, and that's absolutely due to factors like social media/streaming -- i.e., CritRole and WotC.
But I don't think anyone was disputing any of that, really, which is why I was confused by your post "correcting" me on something I never said.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
It was the first (it's basically the trope-namer), it got a bunch of media attention well before the others, and it's had hasbro's marketing budget for over 20 years. Recall how poorly AD&D was doing in the 90s.