Is D&D the reason why Tabletop RPG is such a niche?

Is D&D the reason why Tabletop RPG is such a niche?

No, it's just cultural. Same reason poetry and ballet are for fags and hunting and sports are for real men. Playing pretend and making decisions about imaginary situations by using tables of numbers is only acceptable in fantasy football.

D&D was the reason they became popular in the first place. The amount of D&D swag out for a while was absolutely silly. It was never fully mainstream, but it was bigger than "geek culture" in its time.

Tabletop RPGs are a niche because they require a lot of investment relative to other entertainment media.

A lot of the most popular media today requires zero investment- You sit down, put on a movie or a series on netflix, and you will be entertained for a substantial period of time.

Video games require a greater degree of investment, depending on how complex and demanding the game is, but they still do a lot of the work for you under the hood and you can generally pick and choose games that work best for the experience you want.

Tabletop games though, particularly RPGs? You need to put in a lot of work to actually get the enjoyment out of it. Learning the rules, making a character, if you're the GM then working on story and setting elements and so on. While some ultra-light systems are bucking the trend, most RPGs require hours of work before you can even start the first session. And then it might take multiple sessions to resolve a particular story arc in a meaningful and satisfying way.

I love RPGs, because I think the investment is entirely worth it. The amount of fun I have from playing them is more than any other kind of media because of how it allows me to express my creativity and work with a group of other people to tell stories and create experiences that are unique to us, and the medium supports and enables that.

But most people don't want to invest hours or days or weeks of creative effort into something. They might not have the time or the inclination or the aptitude, and that's fine. TTRPG's will always be a niche, and it's not a bug or the fault of any particular game, it's a feature of the medium itself.

No, it's the reason it became as popular as it was in the 80s in the first place, you shitposting mongolid.
I don't like D&D, but that fact is undeniable.

I think it's disingenuous to keep thinking of our hobby as if it's a super-secret boy's club. Fantasy fiction and games, which include tabletop RP, are becoming increasingly mainstream.

We have a growing list of celebrities who have played dnd and other TRPGs. There's also widespread popularity of fantasy works like LotR, GoT, and others that have helped people into it. The success of TRPG podcasts and shows also demonstrates burgeoning interest.

The most widely-known tabletop games do have needlessly-complex rules that can turn away a good number of people, and it's easy for someone to get turned off by an unpleasant gaming group.

If it's niche, it's not because of DnD.

More likely reasons it's niche:
>Perceived large barrier of entry
>Complex rules in rather large manuals, sometimes spanning myriad volumes
>Not knowing where to start or thinking you don't know anyone who plays which makes creating a group difficult
>Negative stereotypes of those who play tabletops
>If someone created a ratio of time in entertainment out, PnP would probably come out really high in comparison to video games or movies. Single sessions last hours, scenarios can last weeks, campaigns can go for months or even years

DnD itself is pretty vanilla in terms of fantasy world. Nobody with an introductory knowledge of fantasy is going to have trouble sliding into DnD's world. Shadowrun might be a bit more difficult. If, say, Nechronica was The RPG, then PnP would be very niche.

No, it's niche because we have to resort to massive amounts of gatekeeping to keep normies out.

it's just niche due to the difficulty of it being a group activity that requires coordinating large groups and devoting large amounts of time, not aided by the fact that some facets of the tabletop community can be turbo-autists that who go into breathing fits whenever they perceive normal people to be invading their 'sacred' hobby, and act like turbo-autists, making them unwanting to get into it for fear of meeting them

>himehorns
I miss Dan. What happened of him anyway?

How many people are able to get five adult friends together for anything other than sitting around in a bar and gossiping about TV, or their friends who aren't there?

Last I heard, he had a breakdown and his anxieties got even worse than they already were. He's still doing shit, but his mental health issues and growing perfectionism means he's cranking out his serious work at a snail's crawl.

its niche because even a giant manchild like me who invests time and money into it rarely gets to play thanks to everyone's work related scheduling conflicts

I know that most of the time people repeating this stuff is just bullshit, but the fact that there are people in a hobby mostly built about gaming in social groups who aggressively oppose and get upset and scared over the idea of having more people to play with is just so fucking pathetic.

Because they do it WRONG. I do not want to play DnD with people who think Harry Potter is good, let alone that it's how magic works.

Having more people in the hobby in general means having a greater variety of people to play with, which means you'll have more chances to find people you enjoy playing with.

So what if there are individuals you won't enjoy playing with? There are already individuals you won't enjoy playing with, and the hobby expanding is unlikely to change the proportion.

And most people don't want to play with an elitist that can't handle people having different opinions than him.

Well good, then lets keep it that way.

>Is D&D the reason why Tabletop RPG is such a niche?
IT became popular because of it.

D&D is why it was ever close to becoming mainstream

>built about gaming in social groups
You only need two to roleplay.

And if you think mythic solo dm is good, you only need one.

I would love if gurps was the first rpg ever made and the first rpg (in this case, gurps) became as famou as 0d&d was.
I am curious to see what rpg would become at this situation

And I dont even play gurps

>You only need two to roleplay.
Players are way better than AI

What the fuck are you talking about? D&D is the reason tabletop RPGs exist at all. It was the first one. Before that was just wargaming, which you might notice is even less easy to get into.

If you're brooding and looking for an excuse for why you can't find a group to play your favorite obscure RPG, consider that if may be your own fault.

Yes or nope.
D&D, both as a real system AND inacurrate projections about it clearly draws certain demographic into TTRPGs while scaring away others, that could get into RPGs if they were aware there is much more to it than D&D.

If it generates net gain or loss of interest in TTRPGs is matter of speculation and neither option can be really proven. That is, in term of sheer numbers. And that's what the thread is about.

If it generates net gain of loss in terms of playerbase quality, though... that's something else. I'd sell 10 d&d players for 1 player of a different, decent system. Even if it would mean that the overall popularity of RPGs would fall sharply, only useless scum would be lost and population of actually decent players would increase[/spoiler[

What this user said.