The rise and fall of D&D in Japan

The article suggests lack of oversight from TSR on the Japanese market's needs is mostly to blame. They kept making products released much later than their NA counterparts, with half-hearted support, in packages that were more expensive than the competition. In fact, by being difficult with Group SNE, they actually created a competitor(Sword World RPG). That's no way to win a market!

I believe the core of it actually comes from the different approaches to media publishing that took hold back in the 1970's: US markets became very keen on going upmarket with more expensive products and big-budget franchises: that became the strategy to get positioning at retail. Japan's pop media, on the other hand, has been nearly synonymous with manga magazines and light novels, which are centered on individual authors and offer more opportunities to showcase work in anthologized and serialized formats. TSR's competition in Japan were churning out cheap books and magazine articles that made tabletop gaming accessible to a casual fan, while D&D had the big boxed sets, the special dice, the miniatures, etc.

Dragon Quest too, for an obviously big cultural artifact.

Kui(the author of dungeon meshi) is probably not indicative of the norm since she has also been influenced by western crpgs(owlcat pathfinder, etc) rather than only the typical jrpgs(like dragon quest).

There are a huge number of fantasy anime with dungeons, dragons, elves, dwarfs, magic, etc. But I don't think they're based on D&D specifically but more influenced by video games, RPGs, etc.

Delicious in Dungeon would be almost entirely influenced by this genre of anime and not so much the video games. I guess you could argue that the video games are influenced by D&D but now we're talking many steps removed.

Delicious in dungeon!

I thought it was kid friendly, but Red Dragon episode where the two female heroes are bathing.

Umm, awkward family time…

Three options.

First, see if you can get your friends to engage with a one-shot that you DM. You can knock it out in an afternoon and they’ll get a feel for it.

Second, find a local hobby store and see if they host a group you could join. Most places that sell D&D books also host games.

Third, check out Pathfinder. It’s a different TTRPG with many similarities to D&D, but with affordances for playing with a wide variety of people instead of a single tight group. Specifically, see if there is a “Pathfinder Society” in your area — that’s the overall structure they use to organize games and track character progression across games.

more like D&D has so much cultural influence that Ultima wouldn't have existed without it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akalabeth:_World_of_Doom#Devel...

"the game continually evolved over two years under the working title DND with the help of his friends and regular Dungeons & Dragons partners who acted as play-testers"