Nickbergquist said:
My perceptions on the fragmented nature of the D&D fanbase may be skewed from hanging out too much at enworld, rpg.net, therpgsite and other locations (Knights n Knaves, dragonsfoot.org, trolllord.com and such).
Agreed that there are only two Big Contenders visible, but the visible fan community online is divided between a couple dozen editions, variants, clones and spin offs. It's very messy by comparison....that was what I was referring to. With Runequest we have RQII/Legend, RQ6, BRP and Openquest.....all relatively simple to adapt and modify for use with related materials. For D&D...not so easy.
Anecdotally, I know of a half dozen 4E groups in my FLGS, 2 3rd edition D&D groups, no Pathfinder groups (though they do exist, as Pathfinder sells well) and a medly of "others" including a C&C group, two AD&D groups, one S&W group and some True20 players. The interesting difference between these groups is how rarely they are willing to deviate from their choice of system. In contrast, among the various BRP/RQ/Legend players I know they will all play any or all iterations of the system....there is less bias toward whatever particular edition they have chosen.
I'm not really sure that the online community is representative of the general trends of who is playing what Roleplaying game.
Certainly from my POV, I've only really started posting in RPG forums over the last few years, even tho I've been playing online games and posted in various others forums for many years.
It never really occurred to me get involved with Tabletop RPG communities online until relatively recently (maybe 3 years ago).
Of the several people I play Tabletop RPGs with, only 1 of them has much of a presence with forums.
All of them generally come from DnD 3.5 (although I run Pathfinder for them, which they like).
I had a chat with Our FLGS manager and he said by a huge margin his big money spinner for RPGs is DnD 4th Ed (which I don't play).
Although interestingly he also said if it wasn't for his Boardgame sales (like Talisman etc) and the Magic Card trading game, he'd go out of business.
However it's also my opinion local trends are not really indicative of general global trends. From the several discussions I've had about this subject on various RPG forums, different people from different areas have widely different experiences with what people are playing.
I do feel tho the spin off DnD games you mention are played by the extreme minority (and I make no negative judgement by that
)
If lots of people were playing say "Hackmaster" in such significant numbers that were comparable to say Pathfinder, shops would be stocking Hackmaster on their shelves as much as Pathfinder is .
Whatever the case, I'd much prefer to be running MRQ2/Elric, but I just can't get enough players for it (Been trying to get an Elric campaign going for a few years now).
But just a few weeks of advertising on game search sites easily got enough players to run Pathfinder.
