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Just as an example of the sort of realistic scenario we could see for D&D ever being owned by a different company...Mattel and Disney have been bandied about as potentially buying or merging with Hasbro over the years. So, Disney D&D or Mattel D&D are realistic possibilities. Lateral move, at best.

Yeah, Hasbro sells off business lines, but they keep IP when they do: to "buy D&D" a company would need to buy Hasbro...which is a multi-billion proposal that is unattractive to equity by design. Hasbro has large cash reserves, when a company is bought the cash reserves need to be met, and the...

I think it is no accident that the best drawn out and most interprets in the original FR are Shadowdale and Waterdeep, considering that those are the home bases for Ed Greenwood's (still ongoing) long running home campaigns. In terms of the weight of decades of lore and NPC overload...I expect...

Yeah, I play with friends and family, none of whom are plugged into that scene. I'm sure it's great, but it is not by any means a measure of the hobby.

Nah, Conventions are not particularly representative of much: not that there is anything wrong with them or going to them, just they represent a subset of the hobby, near as I can tell a pretty thin sliver.

OK, a more direct comparison: D&D Beyond has 13 million registered members, and the UA playtests for the 2024 rules had some half a million participants. How many Con attendees are there...?

Eh, maybe. Most TTRPG players don’t go to cons, I've never been to one and I've been playing since the second Bush administration.

The quantity and variety of high rolling Kickstarters is actually a pretty good metric that there is interest and engagement with the hobby.

8 inches by 11 inches, one presumes.

I have heard of enshittification. I have also heard of hammers, that doesn't mean everything I see is a nail.

No, that's a seperate thing: thr franchise model means one executive is in charge of and communicates with all the people who D&D things, so they can handily coordinate TTRPG stuff with new movie or video games or have .merchandise that ties into thw game. WotC was doing a franchise model in...

Prime case in point: the cocaine fueled fiasco that was Gygax/Blume era TSR.

Bingo-bango.

More than that, he really only seems to mean "Ben Riggs Personal Vibes About d&D"

A "Golden Age" is a pretty tenuous concept to begin with. For whom is an age "Golden", and how can we measure that at all...? I do think the past ten years have been extremely fruitful for RPG design across the board, from WotC to small indie developers. Jt after a few years, the "OGL Crisis"...

As a trained literary critic...that's not how art works. Both are untrue statements. I can say "Atlas Shrugged is a terrible novel" or "Atlas Shrugged is an ethically heinous novel"...but it is a novel. I dislike 4E, but I wouldn't say it's isn't an RPG. Because that's just not true.

I mean...compared to messaging forums?? I don't really care for Discord, and like Forums too...but the people are at where the people are at.

Can't speak to Draw Steel, but Cosmere fandom spaces are starting to heat up, particularly as the physical books and paraphernalia arrive in the mail. Next month, the Starter Set and books will be in retail outlets, too.

Fair enough, but in these three specific cases all indications point to significant support over the long term.

Well, in these cases they are already starting to ship, and in the case of the Cosmere specifically they have 5 years if R&D funding now.