As children of the social media age, we’ve heard the term ‘network effects’ before. Network effects are the observation that, for certain goods and services, their utility (benefit to the user) increases the more people are using them. The classic example is a social network like Facebook: The more of your friends are on a social network, the more useful it is to you. Services with strong network effects are also built with strong switching costs; a network effect is only defendable if there’s a disincentive to join multiple networks at once, and if leaving one network for another is difficult. This is why extracting your data from a service like Facebook is a pain, and why these services try to prevent you from exporting your contact list at all costs. Make the service more useful by getting more people on it, but then make it hard to leave so these people stay.

What does this have to do with RPGs? There are few direct network effects or switching costs involved with the act of playing a game: You find a group of your friends who are willing to play (and maybe learn) the game, then you play it. If you want to play something else, you put it down. For better or worse, though, roleplaying games are a hobby which involves multiple points of interaction and modes of social signaling. And while the hobby may not have switching costs, it does have barriers to entry. These are both real barriers, like finding a group of people you play well with, scheduling multiple game sessions, and spending a fair amount of time prepping campaigns and characters, as well as imaginary ones, like the amount of effort it takes to learn the next new system, and the risk of playing the ‘wrong game’. It’s important to acknowledge perceived barriers to entry because that’s where network effects within the hobby begin to affect your behavior; specifically, indirect network effects are quietly encouraging you to play D&D.

It’s no controversy that Dungeons and Dragons is the most popular roleplaying game in the hobby by a large margin; even though there are markets where it doesn’t lead, the largest groups of gamers (North Americans and Brits) ensure it is completely dominant overall. This dominance comes in small part due to direct network effects: If more gamers in your life play D&D, it’ll be easier to put together a game of D&D. However, the indirect network effects at work are much more significant, thanks to D&D’s history and, arguably, a lot of unintended consequences. Although Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro came along too late in D&D’s lifecycle to influence or create most of these direct effects, they are taking advantage of them, in addition to marketing the game in a way that creates the perception of switching costs. It’s really quite ingenious, but at the end of the day neither indirect network effects nor perceived switching costs have any real impact on actually sitting down with a group and playing.

Direct and indirect network effects

Direct network effects are relatively simple. The more people using a service, the more useful it is to you. Social media is useful only when people you want to reach out to are also using the same service. In the case of roleplaying games, there shouldn’t really be significant network effects, especially not if you’re framing the question as choosing one game over another. You learn the basics from a book, then you play the game, learning more as you go. So long as you are willing to learn how to play a game (and this assumption is picked apart more in the next section) and your friends are too, it doesn’t really matter which game you choose.

The thing is, though, that D&D has been co-marketed by other forms of media which have adopted language and game mechanics from it. I’m talking about video games, here, and it’s hard to overstate the impact of having tabletop roleplaying games and video games grow up at the same time. Direct video game tie-ins like SSI’s Gold Box games certainly had some of an impact, but that’s not really what I’m talking about. If you look at the beginning of the RPG video game, virtually every game borrowed from D&D at some level. And literal mechanics aren’t necessarily the important part; Final Fantasy and Diablo played much bigger roles in normalizing D&D terminology than Baldur’s Gate did.

D&D’s role in popular culture was also helping to establish it as the RPG lingua franca. In 1979, James Dallas Egbert disappeared, a case which garnered national attention and put D&D in the crosshairs. As smart consumers of internet media we’re familiar with the Streisand Effect, so needless to say this caused the sales of D&D to explode, just prior to the release of the Red Box into toy stores and bookstores nationwide in 1981. By the time we get to 5e we have forty years of D&D hogging the pop culture spotlight, from ET to Freaks and Geeks to Stranger Things. No other game had a chance.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. While there are counterexamples, D&D’s dominance of the spotlight was helped by two things which are broadly true about the hobby: RPGs are hard to understand from the perspective of an outside observer (not Actual Play, literally just watching a normal group play), and RPGs are somewhat difficult to explain succinctly, especially if you’re resistant to using terms like ‘imagination’ and ‘pretend’. The need for a shorthand was clear, and D&D got there first.

As to the counterexamples. Vampire: the Masquerade is arguably one of the first RPGs to present itself as distinct from D&D in the public consciousness, thanks both to being different thematically but also capturing the mindshare of a different target market. Cyberpunk was another RPG of many for years, but when Cyberpunk 2077 came out the setting and game made themselves known in a way most games haven’t been able to. These counterexamples, though, are the exceptions that prove the rule, as neither of them have influenced the public understanding of RPGs the way that D&D has. And if one game is influencing that understanding, introducing the world to terms like ‘hit points’, ‘armor class’, ‘critical hit’, and ‘saving throw’, it’s going to maintain that mindshare as long as it’s still being published.

Real and perceived switching costs

Here in the 2020s, we’re in a world where D&Disms have pervaded popular culture, especially video gaming. We’re also in a world where fantasy is ruling the roost for genre fiction; between Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter it’s hard to say there’s a more strongly defining mass media genre in American culture today besides superheroes (which have never made for a truly good mass market RPG, but that’s a whole other article). So starting with D&D as your first roleplaying game is essentially taken for granted. Myself and Seamus definitely both started with D&D and I’m comfortable saying that it’s the first RPG of most gamers out there. When you look at how these games work on the ground, though, switching costs are low. Assuming you already have a gaming group, doing one or two hours of reading in anticipation of trying a new, cool game, especially one that’s been endorsed by one of the more avid reader/collectors in the group, is a light and fair tradeoff. And to be clear, I say that in part because that’s my experience: my group has run campaigns in about 20 different games and, after counting one-shots, played closer to 50. Learning new games simply isn’t that hard, and I (along with the others GMing) can generally get away with making our players read 1-3 new games a year, every year.

The distance between my experience of learning new games (fun, maybe an hour or two of time) with the perception of learning new games (multiple hours, your character will suck unless you pore over all the options and learn the ‘math’ of the game) is in part due to Wizards of the Coast. The basics of Dungeons and Dragons are very easy to learn: You have six stats and a proficiency bonus. Depending on what you want to do, add your stat bonus and, if applicable, your proficiency bonus. Is there more to it? Kind of! Can you get through an entire session with the two sentences above? Yeah, actually! Assuming you made your own character (20-30 minutes), there’s not all that much else you must know before it comes up. Admittedly if you didn’t already know that, the D&D Player’s Handbook isn’t helping you figure it out. The amount of text and number of steps is way more than strictly necessary, and the book is structured in a way that you end up reading through descriptions of all the stats and all the races and the classes. If WotC wanted to, the entire character creation process could fit in a flowchart, including all options, that would take up at most four pages (two spreads).

They don’t want to. Forcing you to read and flip and read and flip helps condition you to believe you’re doing work, and puzzling things out. It sets you up to believe that all roleplaying games take this much work and this much parsing to learn how to play, which in turn cultivates a resistance to learning new games. Which in turn keeps you a D&D customer.

This resistance does play into real switching costs, both the money necessary to buy a new game and the ability to play said new game with your same group. In both cases, Hasbro is aiming to inflate the perceived switching costs as much as possible. This is why character creation and encounter design are an utter bear (and always will be), this is why D&D costs more than virtually any other RPG in publication (excepting Collector’s Edition Kickstarter rewards and Invisible Sun), and this is why Wizards aimed to maintain the design decisions they made via the OGL.

Despite all these perceptions, though, you can still learn to play most games in 15 minutes, and pick them up for twenty bucks. This shouldn’t still be an issue. It is, though, and the rest of the RPG hobby isn’t exactly helping.

The network dis-effects of the broader RPG hobby

Imagine for a moment that one of your board game friends has brought over a copy of the game Agricola. You haven’t played the game before, so in order to pitch it to you your friend describes it as a ‘worker placement game’. This is a fair description of Agricola, where you place workers on your farm to collect resources and victory points. At no point during this do you dismiss the game and say “I can’t understand how you enjoy games with ‘placement-ist’ design thinking.”

Now, it’s entirely possible that there is in fact a flame war somewhere on the internet about worker placement games all being garbage and my hyperbole has missed the mark. Even so, when it comes to most board game nerds I know, there is generally some degree of ability to express likes and dislikes for different types of games without ragging on an entire class of game’s existence. We’re, uh, still working on that in the RPG world. There is a huge amount of negativity in the RPG hobby, and it serves as one of the strongest network dis-effects we have. What’s a network dis-effect? Well, a network dis-effect is an effect whereby the more gamers you know, the less you want to play. And as someone whose Reddit cake day is back in the 2000s (ugh, I know), it do be like that sometimes.

The content of the debates and the arguments over whose fault it is are all largely irrelevant; there is a huge blind spot around roleplayers when it comes to understanding the breadth of the hobby and the fact that there are people (gasp) having fun in a different way than you. I don’t particularly blame any one game for this, or any one design movement, or any of that at all; as you’ve seen in my reviews of RPG histories, this goes all the way back to 1974 (and before, honestly). If I had to point my finger at a root cause, it would be the desire to legitimize roleplaying. Our hobby is, at its core, playing pretend. We are working through a massive cultural taboo around adults playing pretend, and the way the roleplaying hobby puts up walls to defend itself from that taboo is through rules and structure (for the hobby as well as the games themselves). And let me be clear, none of that ever worked; this wouldn’t have been considered such a nerdy hobby if it did. Still, that need for legitimization has been a throughline in the hobby since its beginning, and one of the easiest (not most effective, only easiest) ways to reinforce the legitimacy of your choices is to delegitimize others. And, in a way, all the delegitimizing worked; the only game seen as ‘legitimate’ to the broader public looking in is D&D.

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Once you have a gaming group that’s willing to read and try new games, the state of play with the rest of the hobby doesn’t particularly matter. This is why traditional views of network effects don’t seem to have much to say about roleplaying games, either explaining how popular games stay popular or which new games get there. Still, the indirect legacy of D&D makes it the easiest onramp into the hobby, simply because you’re going to open that Player’s Handbook for the first time and partly understand what’s going on. That was true when I did it, back with AD&D Second Edition, and it’s still true now.

As for keeping gamers in D&D after they start, I don’t think Hasbro’s marketing tricks are solely responsible for that, though they help. The rest of the RPG hobby sometimes seems like warring tribes, with preferences mistaken for assessments and arguments over entire subgenres being considered “roleplaying games” at all. If you consider the probability that the first answer a gamer will get about the game that looks interesting to them will be mockery or derision…it’s kind of surprising that the broader hobby ever gets new players coming in from D&D. 

I’m sure this sounds like a cry for everyone to ‘come together’ and yeah, I think the hobby would be better if the name calling stopped. But my real issue with it is much simpler…the arguments are really dumb. We are all playing pretend here, and we developed preferences about how our brains want to interface with our imaginary worlds. Talking about how to do that can be fascinating, game design truly is fascinating. But if you honestly think your developed preferences for playing pretend have any innate superiority…I have an ioun stone to sell you.

Hasbro has a leg up on building network effects, owning the oldest and largest piece of RPG IP as well as having, in technical terms, a buttload of money. In terms of the rest of the hobby though, the condition of RPG discourse is such that even if it doesn’t scare away new players from the sheer volume of assholes, it will still lead them into believing that finding a game they can have fun with is a lot harder than it actually is. And ultimately, through network effects and dis-effects, that ends up meaning that many, many people are just going to stick with D&D.

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