>See article about how Call of Cthulhu is more popular than Dungeons and Dragons outside the west>Comments are seething on a level i don't usually see outside of people on the spectrum>A year later the BBC does a puff piece on the same thing>Again people lose their fucking minds>Today see a youtuber talking about "Why CoC broke through in china and japan but D&d flatlined" and the comments are claiming he's paid propaganda from Chaosium.So whats the deal here? because no shit you infest god knows how much money on supplementary books, minis and all kinds of tat it can make some people get overly defensive but for some reason Call of Cthulhu being compared to Dungeons and Dragons makes people flip their shit in a way that just doesn't happen when stuff like Pathfinder or Traveller or the like get brought up.Why do you think only one game generates such a visceral reaction?
>>98214188You make some obvious exaggerations in your post that make me question whether you're asking this sincerely.>how Call of Cthulhu is more popular than Dungeons and Dragons outside the west>Why CoC broke through in china and japanIt's Japan. It's not "outside the West" or "Japan and China", it's just Japan. I can't find any BBC article on it either. And the reasons for it are pretty obvious:>D&D totally abandoned the Japanese market for years after its initial wave of popularity, leading to d6 homegrown games like Sword World taking over that niche>Japanese RPGs are in general high on scenario-based play with specific modules or even "replays" of popular game sessions, a thing which doesn't really exist outside of Japan>CoC is really well suited to these and has been popularized by anime, vtuber sessions and a big Japanese internal community market of modern-day scenariosI can't explain why D&D fans react so badly to this, as you're claiming, but if what you read online was as exaggerated as the statements you made in the OP that might contribute to it, because a lot of what you said is just misrepresentation.Personally I think CoC is a much more interesting game than D&D and it's cool there is a country in the world where it is so popular. I wish we got more scenarios translated from Japan abroad.
>>98214188When you are in 1st place your only real threat to marketshare is 2nd place.
>>982141885E people know their game is shit deep down but they've invested hundreds of hours of their lives into it so there's a sunk cost mindset. So they feel insulted by people choosing something else. It's rather like the Marvel movie retards or that guy at your work who gets mad if you haven't seen the sportsball game. Anyways, as I understand CoC players in Japan like short, modern-day scenarios. So it's sort of a party game. The percentage system seems pretty ideal for working in more casual people. Hard to imagine anyone being able to do a yearlong Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign given the work culture in East Asia. Also, TSR totally fucked up DnD's chance in Japan by not letting them publish their own Lodoss War setting for Basic DnD.
>>98214188DnDogshit is terrible and their hundreds of paid shills and bots come from underground to cry if you point it to them
>>98214188How did this impact your last game session?
>>98214414How does this thread impact yours?
>>98214188Link a single one of those things.
>>98214232CoC is also very popular in Poland and out local publisher made dozens of Chaosium approved, Poland specific scenarios and sections in sourcebooks. Cool stuff
>>98214188examples?
>>98214287>Cthulhu in Japanese is written Kuto-rufuI love the Japanese spelling stuff
>>98214188Wtf? I'm chinese now.> There is a guy who made AI(voiced) presidents play D&D and had a CoC spinoff. Never watched his D&D stuff, but commented "Call me Monika Lewinsky because I want more presidential CoC".
>>98214467I never imagined D&D would be the most popular game in Poland because of their fondness for grimdark medieval eurojank. Wasn't WHFB 2e extremely popular there?
>>98214188So you got ragebaited by an AI article in 2026 and decided to mage a thread about it
>>98215233I think it's more that they've very passionate about everything they like, and medieval reenactment/LARP is a lot more noticeable than a lot other stuff. Pretty cool guys in general. Just a shame their language is the linguistic equivalent of a ballbusting session so it's harder to join in
What was staggering to me is that the average Japanese CoC player was a woman aged 25-35 and so the playerbase is literally both more female and older than the D&D average.
>>98214188Pretty simple story, actually.>TSR tried to publish D&D in Japan, but needed a localization team to make it happen. They partnered with a Japanese publisher, and AD&D first edition was released in 1985.>CRPGs inspired by D&D (in particular, Wizardry) were hugely popular, so a videogame magazine published a replay article about a group of staff writers playing a campaign together.>It was fucking Lodoss War>The article was a hit and became a running series. It was eventually collected into books, expanded into novels, manga, the anime all the old-heads point at when talking about how isekai killed fantasy.>TSR wanted a cut of the Lodoss War IP and all its books. The writers (rightly) said fuck off. They dropped the D&D system and used Sword World instead.>Lodoss dropping D&D gave TSR a bad reputation (entirely their own Jewy fault).>Nobody else could publish Replay stories without TSR trying to collect money from them; so there was suddenly nobody advertising D&D or advocating for it.>Localizer doesn’t bother with 2nd Edition because the game went from a roaring success to completely dead in just a few years.Meanwhile>Chaosium was slowly building up steam.>Chaosium didn’t come grubbing after replay stories and third party modules>Players started doing a whole lot of funky homebrew content and settings for everything from Feudal settings to modern day and fantasy, all duct-taped and superglued into CoC’s systems.>Lovecraft is genuinely huge in Japan anyway, which helps the vanilla game thrive.Fast-forward thirty years, and Call of Chthulhu IS TRPG in Japan. TRPG is Call of Cthulhu. It’s the cultural default, because, again, TSR screwed the pooch so bad that D&D is just a dead brand. Wizards tried to revive it with Fifth Edition, and, surprise, completely fucked it up too by being greeding penny-thieving cunts.Now every D&D book is out of print in Japan and only available second-hand.
>>98215156I think Howard doing the fucking Ultraman pose is funnier than Katakana being katakana.
>>98215233>Wasn't WHFB 2e extremely popular there?The wargame not that much from what I know, but WHF RPG, yes, absolutely, both 1st and 2nd edition was probably THE most popular RPG system here for a pretty long time. 4th ed is also doing well, but sadly D&D has caught up in popularity in the last decade or soWoD was another thing that used to be massively popular in Poland (both RPGs and LARPs). Not sure how big it is nowadays, but I think it's still quite big
>>98214188Lifestyle consoomers. It happens with all high popularity media. When that one voxel game was getting some buzz a few months ago (I assume it flopped or only has a niche audience now since I no longer hear anything about it), there were openly hostile Minecraft kiddies attacking anyone who even mentioned it. There are 40k players who actively try to pull people away from alternate wargames and act like the very existence of those games is offensive. It's not just D&D, but D&D doesn't usually have anything "threatening" it.
>>98214232D20 dice were once hard to come by in Japan as well.
>>98217608They were hard to come by in America too, you used to have to special order them from school supply distributors. They were meant for geometry lessons.
>>98215631I wonder how amazed he'd be to find out that he's big in Japan.
>>98214188>Why do you think only one game generates such a visceral reaction?Because D&D players are mentally ill.
