Is DnD the most popular because of ease?

[WalkTheDin0saur]

D&D also got to create its own Dungeon Fantasy genre. People accept its weird quirks as genre conventions.

Some of those quirks are really important for the RPG structure to work. It's hard to find an IP from other media where you have:

-An ensemble cast with no single main protagonist
-who are all on screen at the same time and participate in the same challenges
-and are all at roughly the same level of power
-and have wildly varied strengths and weaknesses that affect how they solve problems
-and pick abilities off a menu of things that aren't unique to them, so those things can have rules
-and deal primarily with external, material conflicts, so the final boss isn't one player talking to himself about how the power was inside him all along or whatever

[Harshax]

D&D is the most popular because it's been a cultural reference in the US since the satanic panic of the early 1980's. It's literally that simple. For all the hate piled on Gygax for his writing style and poor business decisions, we're still talking about the game he invented in the late 60s and still seeing references in media.

Simplicity has zero reasons to do with D&D. Traveler is the 2nd oldest RPG and its mechanics are far simpler and easier to understand. And despite the chance that you can die during character creation in the original LBB, Traveler beats D&D hands down in terms of accessibility. It uses regular 6-sided dice that you can take from Yahtzee, which sold 40 million copies a year at the time, or pick up at a corner liquor store and its mechanics are far more easier to understand. And, it's a game that has none of the trapping that inspired CRPG.

All the quirks of D&D and its own genre are a product of its popularity not the reason for it. The writers of D&D since GG have wasted reams of paper going on about the game's literally origins, but it doesn't emulate fiction at all. D&D is the 8 year old kid trying to describe a mind blowing image and just making peow! and gwah! sounds while flailing their arms around.

[Dogbert]

All the quirks of D&D and its own genre are a product of its popularity not the reason for it. The writers of D&D since GG have wasted reams of paper going on about the game's literally origins, but it doesn't emulate fiction at all. D&D is the 8 year old kid trying to describe a mind blowing image and just making peow! and gwah! sounds while flailing their arms around.

I'm totally stealing this for a comic, just letting you know.

[Chamomile]

D&D is the most popular because it's been a cultural reference in the US since the satanic panic of the early 1980's.

D&D's cultural power is absolutely dwarfed by that of Star Wars, and yet not one of 3-5 (depending on how you count them) Star Wars RPGs has ever been the most popular RPG. But D&D has been overtaken by other RPGs in the past, RPGs with no branding advantage at all. Vampire allegedly beat 2e, and those allegations are perfectly plausible because Pathfinder verifiably slaughtered 4e. Pathfinder is D&D with different branding, sure, but that means the branding wasn't what was doing the work.

And D&D almost certainly does not benefit from increased awareness of tabletop RPGs by default, because when Chapo Trap House started playing Call of Cthulhu, people were perfectly capable of noticing that it was not D&D and CoC's numbers shot up on Roll20 to become an undisputed second place, far above any competitors. Still far below D&D, of course, which benefits from not only Critical Role, but also all of its imitators. And Critical Role transitioned from Pathfinder to D&D 5e for the sake of the show. If they happened to have stuck with (a very loose interpretation of) Pathfinder, it's perfectly plausible that Pathfinder would've crushed 5e just like they did 4e.

And, it's a game that has none of the trapping that inspired CRPG.

It would be very difficult for Traveller, a game released in 1977, to have influenced pedit5, the first CRPG, written in 1975 (unless m199h was real, but it was also a 1975 "release" so it hardly matters). It would likewise be very difficult for the Satanic Panic, which began with the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, to impact 1978's CRPG releases, which included one Traveller-inspired game (Space) and at least three inspired by D&D (Beneath Apple Manor, Knight's Quest, and Dungeon Campaign). Since Akalabeth's release date isn't really nailed down past the year 1980 (the same year as Michelle Remembers), it's possible that the Satanic Panic is what led Richard Garriott to write a fantasy dungeon crawler instead of a sci-fi space explorer, but it seems unlikely considering that D&D wouldn't be dragged into the panic by name until the 1983 founding of Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons.

While the genre wouldn't really start to show promise until the mid-80s with games like Ultima III and Might and Magic, D&D's advantage in terms of inspiring CRPGs was already overwhelming by the time the Satanic Panic began, let alone by the time D&D was actually associated with it several years in. D&D got to lay the foundations for all CRPGs because some of its early adopters were college students with access to supercomputers.

The writers of D&D since GG have wasted reams of paper going on about the game's literally origins, but it doesn't emulate fiction at all.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that D&D doesn't emulate any specific work of fiction, but rather haphazardly conglomerates several of them together, that's totally fair. Early D&D is at a very fundamental level like a Conan the Barbarian story, but uses a medieval setting (as interpreted by pop history of the 70s) as its default rather than the Bronze or Iron Age, includes character classes like Magic User and Cleric because someone wanted to play as a wizard or van Helsing, begrudgingly includes the fantasy races of Lord of the Rings, and its expansions up through 2e would regularly incorporate a lot of Arthuriana, although it's hard to tell exactly where the Arthuriana ends and the botched attempts at medieval realism begin. Probably the only thing original in the mix is the basic concept of the dungeon crawl, which was a total accident: The first adventure location ever happened to be a literal dungeon beneath the ruins of a castle, and because the dungeon crawl is a mechanically sound way to deliver mostly self-contained vignette confrontations.

But if you mean to say that D&D has no obvious literary inspirations, this is very wrong. From reading early D&D, it's obvious that Gary Gygax was heavily inspired by Conan (and other stories in the genre like Michael Moorcock's Elric books), copied Dave Arneson's dungeon setting (the closest thing to an original idea early D&D had), blended in some extremely hackish attempts at medieval realism (with the medieval time period being used probably purely because the rules he happened to be using as foundation were Chainmail), and then added in new content based on audience demand, at first enthusiastically (he does not seem to have felt the need to cut the legs out from underneath the Cleric) and later begrudgingly (with level limits to passive-aggressively discourage the use of non-human LotR races), and as the project grew later authors would throw their own favorite fantasy books in (largely "more Lord of the Rings" and "assorted Arthuriana").

[hogarth]

But if you mean to say that D&D has no obvious literary inspirations, this is very wrong.

I think the point is that if you literally transcribed the events of a D&D game campaign to a novel, it would not feel like a classic fantasy novel (even if it was an entertaining game campaign). Although Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a best-seller, so obviously tastes differ.

In the same vein, Call of Cthulhu is by definition inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, but I have never played a game of CoC and thought that it would make a good H. P. Lovecraft story.

To be fair, The Hobbit has kind of a D&D-ish vibe to it, though. A party of adventurers kills a bunch of goblins and giant spiders and finds a magic sword and a magic ring.

[Thaluikhain]

To be fair, The Hobbit has kind of a D&D-ish vibe to it, though. A party of adventurers kills a bunch of goblins and giant spiders and finds a magic sword and a magic ring.

In LotR, (some of) the heroes meet up at an inn at the start of the adventure. And Gandalf is a bit ott DMPC.

[Harshax]

But if you mean to say that D&D has no obvious literary inspirations, this is very wrong.

I think the point is that if you literally transcribed the events of a D&D game campaign to a novel, it would not feel like a classic fantasy novel (even if it was an entertaining game campaign). Although Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a best-seller, so obviously tastes differ.

This is indeed what I meant and a little more. Given D&D’s origins in the war gaming community, I think its inspiration as a gaming engine is limited to the effort of reskinning tanks as dragons and artillery as wizards. Adding Avalon Hill’s hex crawl board game and evolving into what it is today took a really really long time and for the majority of it, TSR resisted until they were so disconnected with what “modern” gamers wanted at the time that a company who made CCGs bought them. Now D&D just wants to protect IP which is why we’ll never see a D&D setting without halflings. And all of that is perfectly fine. Vampire and CoC and MtG taught the industry that not everyone thinks games need to follow the same format. Heck, Elder Scrolls, probably one of the most popular IPs of all time was designed or planned by one of the earliest contributors to RuneQuest which ditched most of what would become tropes of the D&D genre for something that really could emulate fiction.