D & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon, Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign.

With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug.

D & D is the one game I absolutely won’t run because people get attached to the characters and will argue with you. In Paranoia I will play without a campaign and kill them 4 or 5 times before they ever get to the briefing room and they will come back for more.

Gygax liked the improvisational acting aspect of the game but the rules were so Byzantine that all that got lost. The next generation games boasted simplified rules and directional bias built into the structure of the game that forces people out of the ‘accumulate stuff’ mindset they spend the rest of the week in.