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Message: <blockquote data-quote="77IM" data-source="post: 7029884" data-attributes="member: 12377">We're all burnt out from edition churn, but let's ask the reverse question: When will 5.0 have worn out its welcome? For how long did the popular editions maintain their popularity?Here is my fuzzy recollection:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I think AD&D was, like, '77 or so, and AD&D 2nd Edition was '89, so that's around 12 years (I may be off by a couple of years here). That's a pretty good run, but I also think 2E was well overdue when it appeared. I was pretty young during this time period and mainly screwed around with BECMI. (Well, BEC; I never got to MI.)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">BECMI started in, I think, '83, and sold well for a good number of years. The Rules Cyclopedia came out in the early '90s, and was, in my mind, the "last hurrah" of that edition. Like, I had stopped playing BECMI long before that; my impression is that its popularity was waning, and Rules Cyclopedia was a nice attempt to wrap up the product into a more economical, evergreen format, so that people could keep playing without much more support from TSR. So that feels like around 10ish years, maybe 12.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">2E came out in '89 and did pretty well -- the novel lines were going incredibly strong at that time, and this fed the setting explosion. But the 2E rules, despite being an overhaul of 1E, still felt pretty dated to me. By the time 3E came along, most people I knew had stopped playing 2E. (Part of this was demographic, since most people I knew were in college, and college students tend not to play nearly as much D&D.) So we can call that 10ish years.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">3.0 and 3.5 are similar enough that if we're looking for examples of longevity we can consider 3.5 a minor revision trying to fix 3.0 and keep people playing some sort of 3E. But then 4E came out about 8 years after 3E. Can we consider 3E, as a whole, to have an 8-year run? Pathfinder's success may be an argument that 3E deserves credit for a 15-year run (since 5E didn't start to overtake PF in many statistics until 2015). However, the release of 4E, and its drastic differences from 3E, means that Wizards felt that 3E's run was over after only 8 years. And I've honestly got no idea how PF sales and player figures compares to that of 3E in the early 2000s. If 3E's appeal lasted somewhere between 8 and 15 years, that's somewhat consistent with the earlier editions, which lasted 10-12 years.</li> </ul>Conclusion: Let's predict that 5E is going to last 13 years -- longer than the average edition, because of the new marketing strategy, the demographic shift (I think older people don't tire of editions as quickly), and a slight slowdown in the development and adoption of new RPG mechanics (5E does not feel as "dated" as earlier editions despite its relatively conservative game mechanics). That would put the end of its life about 10 years from now. That feels about right to me. Think about all the things that have changed in the past 10 years, and about where your favorite RPGs were 10 years ago. So I think it's entirely reasonable to expect 6E in around 2027. My hope is that it more closely resembles a 5.5 than a true 6.0 -- more like the 3.5 transition or PF transition, than the 4E transition.It should be clear by now that I haven't researched any of this very deeply, so if anybody has a better theory let's hear it.</blockquote>

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