benlehman

Well, I'm trying to say that one of the "barriers to entry" for well-educated but not particularly "geeky" in the traditional sense folks, isn't the purely mechanical rules of D&D, GURPS, or whatever. It's the unfamiliarity of the gameworlds and situations that presents an equally high burden. There are how many races? How many continents/planets/whatever? How many schools of magic?

GR and SAJ aren't about history, really—it's just that the setting backgrounds are things people have heard of, and that are at least reasonably easy to envision, unlike, say, DragonLance.

Although on reflection, given the popularity of LotR and Harry Potter and so on and so forth in recent years, I'll concede that the notion of being in "a fantasy world" is probably not as big a deal as it would have been in the late 90's. I still maintain that the equation "roleplaying = genre fiction" is problematic, as the two don't need to have anything to do with each other.

Matt