D&D (2024) Speculation Welcome: What's Next for D&D?

[Remathilis]

This is the difference between you and me, because I think the latter would be better overall for the TTRPG industry as a whole.

Nah. It would be a bunch of small companies trying to reinvent the wheel and each catering to a smaller and smaller niche audience. You'd eventually get to the point where you'd have a dozen incompatible PHBs all trying to be D&D and not working together.

 

[GobHag]

So? I'm not seeing much negatives there. it's like complaining that there's different Fast Foods and everything should be McDonalds, or that it'd be great if only Chrome existed.

You may see TTRPG systems as standards while I see them as individual works of creativity.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm not sure this is true. And I suspect Baby Boomers felt the same way in the 1990s, sure that everyone still cared about the Rolling Stones, Easy Rider and so on. Certainly, we had all of those 30 year old properties shoved down our throats by Madison Avenue.

But that didn't mean there wasn't plenty of youth culture happening. I remember my dad asking me if Kurt Cobain was "my John Lennon" when he died, since that was his lens for viewing pop culture.

The Gen X folks who make up, as I recall, the bulk of ENWorld posters aren't terribly likely to know what the youths are doing, because that's the whole point of youth culture. And nowadays, it's not on message boards or Facebook, where their parents and grandparents are, but in text threads and Discord, where the olds can't stick their noses in.

On the other hand, Doctor Who is 60, the X-Men are 50, Star Wars is 45, and Transformers is 40, and all of them are as culturally relevant as they were 20 years ago. We complain about the endless reboots and sequels, actors playing their beloved characters decades after they first appeared as them, and the collectable market absolutely looking like a late 90s Toys R Us. New media properties are few and far between and the current state of the media is serving up nostalgia to middle aged adults and sharing it with their children.

I'm not saying it's never going to change (geopolitical or climate catastrophe might make the latest Star Trek movie less important) but the fact that geeky things are now mainstream things and a massive part of the culture for decades isn't going away soon.

 

[Remathilis]

So? I'm not seeing much negatives there. it's like complaining that there's different Fast Foods and everything should be McDonalds, or that it'd be great if only Chrome existed.

You may see TTRPG systems as standards while I see them as individual works of creativity.

All well and good until you're trying to convince someone who bought into Pathfinder that they need to now go and buy the Tales of the Valiant books for your next campaign.

 

[GobHag]

If you really want to look at the new gen hotness, anime is where you'll find them

 

[GobHag]

All well and good until you're trying to convince someone who bought into Pathfinder that they need to now go and buy the Tales of the Valiant books for your next campaign.

And very very good if you don't like 5e!

Hell, it's not like many 5e players comprehend or buy the books anyways.

 

[Yaarel]

Short Answer:
"Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!"

Longer Answer:
Some older gamers move away to nostalgia games (OSR) or stuff promoted on old-school social media like YouTube (MCDM). Some stick to 2014 or go back to Pathfinder or 4e (like me). We introduce our players to different game systems and they don't buy into the 2024 printings - and let's be honest, they weren't the market drivers anyway.
Put this way, I GM for 11 players on a weekly basis. I purchase more content than all of them combined. Hasbro has essentially lost me as a customer - so that's 12 customers they lost. I'm not going to be running their games at conventions, game stores, programming at work, etc.

Most Longest Answer:
Nerd culture is going to retreat into the background in the next several years. No, not just because of D&D, but I think it will happen. Game of Thrones has been forgotten. Stranger Things is wrapping up this season. Superhero films have stopped rocking the box office. Comics have been dead for years. The one thing still selling is a direct competitor to D&D - and that's video games.
So we're going to see what happened during the 4e era. We're going to start losing players to Baldur's Gate and other video games just like we lost to WoW. The booming success of 5e was a fluke, and most of the players who came in are going to fade to other hobbies or adult responsibilities. Hasbro might retain 10% of the new fans they gained over the past 5 years. This will probably mean that WotC doesn't generate the income it needs to, Hasbro continues to suffer financially, and likely ends up bankrupt in the next year or so.

Heh, you are certainly living up to your namesake.

I think 5e did well because it meets a needs that is difficult to find elsewhere, especially the in-person socializing − that is also possible reach across digital when useful. While the bulk of the income is coming from the younger generation, the 5e product came from surveys that mostly the earlier generations filled out. Meaning in the aggregate, what the earlier generations enjoyed most, the younger generation also found appealing.


Re superhero movies. This is a sensitive tentative comment. The superhero movie creators made strong efforts to reach beyond the core geek audience, namely the educated white males. This outreach is excellent, important, and effective. At the same time, certain big budget movies came across as hostile to their core audience. There were movies where the presence white male actors were absent or demonized or humiliated or harmed. The question is, who are these superhero movies made for if not for their core audience and customers? I feel the earlier generations have the ethical compass correct, where the geek culture needs to be more inclusive of all identities, including the cisgender heterosexual white male identity. The other identities have a right to impatient, and even angry at times to lash out against "all" cis-het white males. But not everyone is an enemy. The best longterm plans include all of our identies. Everyone gets a seat at the round table.


Im unsure why 5e "lost you as a customer". But if you are going back to 4e, you cant go too wrong. I love 4e.

 

[GobHag]

Nerd culture has become culture. It's no longer cabals or geeky teens hanging out in robotics class and discussing the latest comics or scifi movies, it's everyday people wearing Marvel T-shirts or d20 earrings. The exact properties will ebb and flow, but barring a major shakeup in the culture, I don't expect fantasy, scifi, comics and gaming to ever go underground again.

We also live in a very unique moment where popular culture has not wildly shifted for years. Think of how many media properties are 30, 40, 50 or more years old. Kids are growing up with the media properties their parents grew up on. That's unprecedented in history. We can't predict what comes next because we've never seen decades controlled by the same properties.

The death of geek culture is less about people moving on from geeky things and more about the absorbing of "geek" into mainstream culture. The old gatekeepers losing their stranglehold on it and it will become the normal.

Western geek culture definitely, but Anime and Japanese stuff still has a decent enough 'churn'.

 

[Remathilis]

Western geek culture definitely, but Anime and Japanese stuff still has a decent enough 'churn'.

Eastern media (Anime, manga, K-Pop, etc) is the last bastion of "geek" (as in, non mainstream) culture. I assume that is due to the massive difference in culture and language (even when made for Western audiences). It is the bleeding edge of geek, but it's not immune to absorption and regurgitation (Pokemon being a good example).

 

[Retreater]

Im unsure why 5e "lost you as a customer". But if you are going back to 4e, you cant go too wrong. I love 4e.

I haven't gotten excited for an official WotC 5e product in years. This is what I've heard of each of them ...

• Spelljammer ("incomplete and inadequate")
• Deck of Many Things ("derail your campaign with a luxury box that has a 50/50 chance of arriving damaged - great for lulz")
• Tyranny of Dragons ("re-purchase the railroad site-seeing tour of the Realms")
• Wild Beyond the Witchlight ("get through the entire adventure without combat")
• Call of the Netherdeep ("play second-fiddle to Matt Mercer's NPCs - who can beat the adventure for you"
• Candlekeep and Radiant Citadel ("here's a bunch of one-shots that were written by random freelancers")
• Fizban's and Bigby's ("monster books about the literal most boring monsters in the game")
• Monsters of the Multiverse ("re-purchase the monster books you've already got")
• Planescape ("overpriced box filled with cardboard and not content")

For all my other complaints about 5e as a system, WotC's products specifically are either low quality or don't interest me (or sometimes both). And this isn't just "the last few releases" it's for the past several years.