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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8842221" data-attributes="member: 7035894">Okay, so we are defining "die" as "the publisher experiences a sales contraction leading to business problems."Sure. It's inevitable. But that's a pretty weak definition of "death." The OP refers to three times this happened. I doubt any of them actually came close to literally killing the game, as even by the mid-80s, when TSR first almost went bankrupt, it had achieved a massive cultural footprint. Someone would have purchased it and kept the IP going.The other thing to remember was that D&D still had strong sales at that time, though growth had greatly declined. But Gygax and the Blumes were terrible at business.I presume the second time was when TSR went bankrupt, but again this was due to terrible mismanagement and they still were selling lots of product. If WotC hadn't bought them, someone else would have eventually.In both cases lots of us kept playing the game right through the turmoil at the publication level.I don't know what the third time was supposed to be. 4e? 4e was a failure but it didn't come close to killing D&D. If anything, it just led to the creation of a new D&D variant, Pathfinder, as well as D&D's most popular version yet, 5e.D&D has been incredibly resilient. Because it is a fantastic idea. If it was ever going to die, it would have been in the early-mid 70s when it was still largely a word of mouth phenomenon. But since the 80s it's been to big to die.</blockquote>

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