Hobby provides a great specter of games and genres...

Hobby provides a great specter of games and genres, but for some reason most people want nothing more than to play another generic adventure in a kitchen-sink high fantasy. Sure, majority of people are playing D&D and D&D is made exclusively for such kind of games, but when people are tired of this system, they try to find a D&D-substitute instead.
Why is that the case?

In built assumptions about the medium. DnD was the first RPG, and for decades was the only one with any real clout. This has an effect on consumers and purchasing ha its and is a reason many companies rush to be first to market, even if they have to sacrifice quality.

Familiarity, I guess. GMs and players aren't going to carefully refine the setting to avoid being generic high fantasy if that's what's drilled into them; books have all the time in the world to craft an atmosphere beforehand.

I really want to play in a fantasy setting that feels like an actual fantasy in the older sense of the world, rather than going back to the old grind like it's a job.

The reason kitchen-sink has such wide appeal is because it's... well... it's kitchen sink. It has everything. Take a quick look in any "describe your party" thread. You get the most absurdly mismatched bunch of chucklefucks in most cases.

This is because people want to be special. They often play the game to be unique and set themselves apart. If you try for a more specific setting, chances are you'll scare off one of the players who was, say, really looking forward to playing a robot (and in kitchen sink settings could have played one). Now multiply that effect across all 4ish players. The odds of finding a setting that appeals to all of you is quite small.

Other systems are obscure at best, often try too hard to be different and are grognard tier resentful that dnd got to the d20 system first. So you have this mess of rules there for no reason other then "fuck dnd"

At the end of the day I'd rather deal with kitchen sink high fantasy- that everyone plays and can be picked up quickly instead of the perfect, dead game

There's no such thing as a perfect system. System is a tool that you choose for a type of narrative you want to achieve. D&D may do quite a number of things, but it's in no way universal.
Using D&D for everything is similar to gathering leaves with the shovel despite having a new shiny rake in your shed. Homebrewing D&D can bring you only so far that you'll most likely waste your time trying to transform shovel into rake only to get a horrible monstrosity that is unable to do either thing effectively.
And if D&D is REALLY the only thing you need, than it's quite sad, because it's pretty much akin to eating the same meal everyday.

This. Assuming you're not playing with randos over the Internet, there's no such thing as a dead game, just different sets of rules. DnD's rules are relatively well-known, but they're by no means the easiest to teach, the most crunch-heavy or even the most balanced. It's good to be at least a bit aware of a small range of systems you can easily slip into whatever fits your campaign and players best.

A RPG System is a tool and OP is a tool.

familiarity

>Hobby provides a great specter of games and genres, but for some reason most people want nothing more than to play another generic adventure in a kitchen-sink high fantasy.
Baby duck syndrome

>but when people are tired of this system, they try to find a D&D-substitute instead.
All RPG systems have certain baked in assumptions about character actions, roles, development paths and speed, injury and healing, moment to moment frame of experiences and such. D&D/d20 grew up around the concept of a group of adventurers going through a dungeon to gather treasure and defeat monsters in a pseudo-medieval setting.
It doesn't do much else very well.

>Hobby provides a great specter of games and genres
Did you mean "spectrum"?

Because the way you wrote it is cool too.

>Did you mean "spectrum"?
Yeah, it was a typo.

So, most people just know no better?
I would understand if it was mainly the case with people who are not that deep into tabletop, but even in relatively more contrarian places like Veeky Forums D&D and D&D related discussion is the main bulk of the community.

Comfort zones are a thing, and a kitchen sink fantasy setting takes very little explaining. Hell, Standard Fantasy is a term we have that wraps the whole thing up nicely in two words. A group of people can sit down at a table and have a good idea what the setting is going to be like without any prior knowledge.

I've had a bit of the opposite problem in my group. We actively avoid D&D systems like the black death, so I've played with some version of every other major system outside of Whitewolf stuff.

I secretly crave to be apart of a vanilla D&D fantasy game maybe even using 3.5,
I've only played 4th and 5th that slowly become an excuse for the DM to throw weirder monsters and items at us from the expanded splat books.

>inb4 wrongfun
I think D&D, in a general sense , is the best system for sword and sorcery dickery with a strong sense of level progression and defined player/party roles. It's not good at much else.

Kitchen-sink high fantasy is well established and easy to understand. Think about it - even just switching to a system where there aren't obvious classes with obvious roles can be confusing, or at least requires more effort to understand and make good use of.

The problem gets even worse when you go beyond fantasy, where you stop really having 'the strong melee guy' or 'the magical dude' anymore - all the characters have guns, the tone or the setting is completely different than a sort of 'well anything's allowed' sort of sandboxy world.

This is if spend too much too time on being different. from for DnD. Remember people want to have fun, guns and magic shouldn't affect that.

Fun can also be affected by how easily you can pick up a game and play. D&D is more or less very easy to understand - you can tell what a fighter will do from what it says on the tin. But what do you do with a game with a more complex skill system, or that doesn't have classes at all? It's not impossible, and may even be more fun and allow more creativity, but it's not as easy to bring people into and may not be as easy as the D&D cheeseburger.

I can barely find people to play D&D, when ever i learn a new game it feels like a waste of time because nobody will ever play that with me.

It's not knowing no better, familiarity is actually what most people crave. It's not just tabletop games, look at the most popular books, movies, music and vidya and you'll see the same thing, shit everyone's seen a thousand times before. The masses are scared and confused by new concepts and ideas.

This mainly DnD has been around the longest not because of it the easiest. Smaller systems would need to talked about by its player base every few months to attract new players.

problem is most people starting don't know anything but D&D or maybe PF, so they start with that, and people dont like to change things too radically once they've got a groove going.
I've dealt with it before, cause whenever my friends get tired of a system, I try to recommend things like Shadowrun or CoC, but they never go for it cause it's "too much to learn all over again"

Have you ever considered the reason why people like generic fantasy is because some or all of its elements appeal to them more then your "realistic" grimderp bronze age historically accurate wank material?

D&D is super easy, in it's own way. It's just not simple. Race, class and alignment come together to give you a fully roleplayable character by the end of chargen even if you didn't put any thought into it. Class advancement is tightly controlled. There's rules for everything, and if the GM is stuck you can just throw a combat encounter at the players. The system has tons of training wheels built into it. Lighter systems are less restrictive and faster to learn, but require a lot more thought and initiative to run well. "Normies" and novices like D&D because you can always default to what the book tell you to do.

This, pretty much. If you can't think of a plot for the next adventure you can just have the players do a dungeon crawl and they'll still have fun.

Because sometimes you don't want steak, lobster, and fine wine for dinner, sometimes you just want a fucking burger, fries, and coke.

>for some reason most people want nothing more than to play another generic adventure in a kitchen-sink high fantasy
So what?

What else do you want them to do? Play YOUR game specifically?

This is why I'm so eager to play MM 3e tomorrow, I've played so much D&D 3.5 and D20 variants I'm ready for literally anything else.

Okay, I can get behind that.

>This is why I'm so eager to play MM 3e tomorrow, I've played so much D&D 3.5 and D20 variants I'm ready for literally anything else.
Mutants and Masterminds? Isn't it d20?

>What else do you want them to do?
Try other games and playstyles.

>Play YOUR game specifically?
I have no problem with playing things I'm interested in. My IRL party is eager to try new systems.

>I think D&D, in a general sense , is the best system for sword and sorcery
D&D was doing sword and sorcery only in early editions. Now it's more like a cape game disguised as an epic fantasy. I would advise either playing early editions, trying OSR stuff or using straight S&S games like Barbarians of Lemuria.

Wrong file.

It is easier to run and play in kitchen sink and 99% of all players and dms are lazy shits.

This compounds with the majority of homebrew settings being god awful and players thinking gimmick of the week makes them clever.

>Try other games and playstyles.
Why?

Most people, even within the bounds of our interest group, do not get a great deal of exposure to fantasy of any sort compared to the amount of time and effort spent on their real lives.

So, depending on the way you look at it, the answer is either that they simply don't mind the lack of specificity (and thus, depth of concept), or that they don't have the time or energy to devote to developing a specialized character design, which incentivizes a very straightforward form of fantasy.

Because if majority is fixated on only one thing, environment in hobby starts to be unhealthy and stagnant.

I started to play ttrpgs explicitly because I wanted to experience high fantasy. I only decided to try out different settings after years of the hobby. I assume this is the case for a lot of people.

It is but I feel everything is a little less rigid with MM. I think my problem is the class systems that D&D and Starwars D20 use. I dunno, maybe I'm filled with unjustified hope at this potential change.

a lot of people just want to engage with roleplaying in a familiar way that demands low effort. You know, the same way most people engage with literally all media.
instead of bitching that normies don't like the same things you like, just find friends who like the things you do and then run games for them.

I'm an OSR guy, but back in the day we used to play all sorts of games. Back in the eighties, we used to play AD&D, Traveller (sci-fi), Chill and Call of Cthullhu (Horror), Shadowrun, Earthdawn, anything.

Now, all I see is people begging for 5E, it's saddening.

>I started to play ttrpgs explicitly because I wanted to experience high fantasy. I only decided to try out different settings after years of the hobby. I assume this is the case for a lot of people.
I'll go one further by saying rpg players seem to have this general arc of starting with the gamist staples like D&D, doing that until boredom when they either quit , or move to more simulationist games, and then come either round back to OSR or narrativist games.

That is if they didn't come from the social aspect where they'll Start with World of Darkness and then branch out to narrativist games and bad poetry.

5e isn't even that special, it's just got D&D on it so people think that it's good for some reason.
I swear I could run a B/X game for that crowd and they'd scantly notice the difference if they hadn't already played 5e.

>using GNR at all
yeah, no, opininon discarded

>D&D is made exclusively for such kind of games
Homebrewing exists.

We've played D&D in low magic, human only settings. We're currently playing it in a 40K themed grimdark guns and guts campaign.

You can use D&D for whatever you like. A good DM can take the D&D system and use it for any kind of setting he likes. It could be historically accurate Napoleonic campaign or Bosnia from the view of a Serbian Mi-24 Hind if he wants it to be. Some settings will need no homebrewing at all, while others will need some alterations, add guns, vehicles, etc.

We've been playing RPGs weekly for about 10 years and haven't High fantasy in about 8, everything else has either been low magic, sci fi (Traveller) or gritty realism.

>You can use D&D for whatever you like.

but why tho, playing other systems makes it way easier, in fact, if you are so lazy that you don't want to learn other ones, at least learn a generic one like hero or fuck, even gurps.

Our group knows D&D well and that way we can focus on roleplaying and not worry too much about having to learn a new system every time we start a new campaign. We get all the bonuses of a fresh new setting without any drawbacks of not knowing how a new system works.

We did learn Traveller and thoroughly enjoyed it, playing a campaign lasting for a couple years so we're not incapable of learning other systems, we just stick with what we like.

>implying a good GM can't do that with any system he's familiar with
You really don't get this 'roleplaying' thing do you?

Cue the accusations of brain damage.

>Actually likes roleplaying
>Has learned Traveller
Brain damage is looking down on these things

I actually prefer d100 systems way more. Having percent chances of success feels more intuitive.

I mean, thats ok but you didnt answer me about why not pick a generic system that can do all that without heavy tweaking

GNR is like D&D, no better system has gained any traction, or wider recognition.

Keep sitting in the corner, bleb.

Fate is not without its own share of faults and weaknesses, brah.

>implying a good GM can't do that with any system he's familiar with
GM can, but:
A) It's a waste of time
B) Most likely there are systems that do the required thing much better
C) Every system (Be it generic or specific) has its own traits and characteristics that create a certain type of narrative
Good GM should be able to recognize what system to choose for his campaign.
Even the simplest things like the type of dice or task resolution make big difference, and game systems have a ton of moving parts. You can play free-form as well if you're able to use the same system for completely different campaigns with different narratives.

Don't you known that anyone who chooses D&D over any other system is suffering brain damage because they play D&D user?

>I can't read because D&D gave you brain damage because you like it

fate is also not the only generic system, amd no system is perfect.

user, it's called false precision and it's disgusting.

I've seen a lot of people starting DnD, going to deeper, crunchier games, then rounding back to OSR and story games. It's probably the most likely outcome.

Unless they get stuck in sunk cost fallacy after learning the GURPS rules, that is.

>appeal to popularity
>Keep sitting in the corner, bleb.
Nice lure. Have a (You)