The success of Sword World RPG in contrast with its competitors is often attributed to the economic choice of providing play materials in a cheap paperback format instead of selling them in expensive boxes - which was the traditional way of buying TRPGs at the time. So, for example, a high-schooler who wanted to play a tabletop RPG with their friends had a much better chance of going for Sword World than anything else. Small choices, such as making the game playable with only d6 dice, made it much more accessible than D&D. The fact that Shinwa, the Japanese publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, went out of business around the same time almost certainly contributed to this as it became literally impossible to find D&D materials.