The Business: The Only Alternative To D&D IS D&D

I'm seeing a lot of videos (etc.) like this circulating.

To which I have said: "WASTE OF TIME! You all know why, so allow me to link to the explaination and be done with it."

You all know what I linked to.

And yes, your life is driven by them. Cope.

In practical terms, the only viable alternative to Current Edition is Past Edition- either straight up TSR editions (i.e. AD&D1e) or the (very, very best) knockoffs (i.e. ACKS) because only those options are proper turnkey products that require no Endless Product Slop to be viable games.

I have, over a score of times over the decades, been told to my face "I don't want to learn another game" when playing something other than D&D comes up. I have, more times than I can count, played D&D only because it was the only game everyone would agree to play. I have, more times than I can count, not been able to even get people to perk up until I said "D&D".

This is despite being intimately familiar with Palladium Books' entire product line, all of R. Talsorian's products, every edition of Star Wars published, TORG, Feng Shui, Legend of the Five Rings, HERO, Gamma World, and GURPS among other Not-D&Ds.

It's been this way for a very long time. From Dragon #67:

Just as TSR sells far more D&D games than are sold of all other competing fantasy role-playing products combined, DRAGON Magazine has a circulation which is over twice that of all of its competitors. To claim that any other FRP game system has the acceptance of D&D gaming is absolutely contraverted by hard facts. When AD&D gaming is included in the totals, there is no contest — it is a slaugher. Similarly, DRAGON Magazine dominates the field, but even with its relatively large circulation, it reaches less than 25% of the total D&D/AD&D game audience. Now we have some perspective.

All these D&DTubers trying so hard to shill for these suck options are either willfully ignoring what Ryan Dancey explained as if everyone was five years old in 1999 (because it was the basis for the Open Game License) or are delusional in thinking that all of them together can do jack against Wizards of the Coast. They won't; their predecessors didn't, and that includes Pathfinder- which benefitted from a unique circumstance that won't happen again, and fell off hard as soon as Current Edition arrived over a decade ago.

Your only option, if you are serious about supplanting WOTC, is to do as I explained previously- which is to do what World of Warcraft did to dethrone EverQuest as Master of the MMORPGs: find the most valuable users in the network, find out what WOTC is not doing for them that they want done with the game, make that and sell it to them, and then make it piss-easy for everyone to defect to the rival network.

That not even Paizo, uniquely positioned to pull this off, failed to do so tells you how incompetent most wanna-bees are in Tabletop's commercial sphere.

Right now, outside of Past Editions, the only other product that could possibly pull it off is Adventurer, Conqueror, King but that requires Macris to be far more savage and ruthless than he's been to date. Of all the would-bees out there, his is the only product that is actually a complete turnkey product that has all required rules and procedures in place- it is a Real Hobby game, not a lobotomized incomplete product (which, sadly, is the norm in this hobby).

Could someone else do it? Sure, but at this time the only possible competitor would be Games Workshop and they have neither the will nor the capacity to do so despite having a ready-made property that has successfully bloodied D&D's nose before- that is a failure of GW's management first and foremost. No one else is even in close, not by an order of magnitude, and even worse no one else is trying at all- including Paizo and Palladium.

There is no alternative to D&D but D&D. Cope, seethe, mald, but it is reality all the same. I'll be over here using Method 3 to see if I finally have a man that can make a successful run for Bard (AD&D1e version, which is a super-powerful class if you can get into it) after 40 years of trying.

Or trying to unfuck something that should work, but doesn't.