Re:D&D for the unimaginative (Score 2, Insightful)

While that is what D&D (or Chainmail, really) was originally, there is a great deal of tabletop roleplaying that is nothing of the sort. While Dungeons & Dragons basically became "tabletop World of Warcraft" with the release of fourth edition, games like Burning Wheel, Inspectres, Prime Time Adventures, and Mouse Guard have broken far away from this progress quest paradigm. D&D is, simply put, the "WoW of tabletop gaming," and just as with WoW, the savvier gamers have moved to the independent scene or to games with less mass appeal but also less grind.

The real issue is simply that, for mass appeal and mass profit, the addiction model can't be beaten. D&D polished it as much as it can be polished on a table, and WoW did the same on a screen.