Is the US situation that bad regarding game diversity ?
I am in a very active club, and less than half of the games are D&D and clones (including pathfinder and OSR in D&D and clones), before that I was part of an active online community, and again while D&D was big it wasn’t more than half of the game ran.
And if you look at new games starting, due to D&D tendency to be relatively long campaign, it’s even hard to find a seat at a D&D game because relatively few games starts compared to other games. (And then there is a couple of indie-game one-shots GM, meaning that there is always a slot open for a less known and often weirder game)
No, actually, but general cultural awareness is really only those two, and maybe iffy on Pathfinder, and given the popularity of Stranger Things, D&D had a lot of mainstream attention, and Pathfinder is arguably a better place to start for newbies interested due to Stranger Things. As far as I understand. I’ve never actually played either D&D or Pathfinder, but I have been in Vampire the Masquerade and Serenity tabletop groups.
Well, consider that D&D spent almost two decades being the only role playing game in America, and just over a decade being the only role playing game everywhere else it got translated to. It got a massive head start. The only reason Pathfinder got so big is because WotC shot themselves in the foot with 4e by trying to get rid of the OGL and pissing off all their customers
Roll20 stats one year showed primarily 5e, but that’s also what it works best with (in my opinion), and I think general sentiment has changed for d&d generally. My group started with 5e, but we haven’t really played it much recently. My first group we never did d&d, though started and never finished multiple. So I don’t think so, but it’s one of the more popularized options.
