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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6238238" data-attributes="member: 59082">Hmm...while I agree with much of what you're saying here, some of it seems colored by excessive negativity and assumptions that I don't entirely agree with. For instance, I don't think early sales of 4E had anything to do with the "initial complaints" about the game. I think every edition generates a ton of sales, at least at first. 4E was no different. The people who bought it, for the most part at least, bought regardless of what the negative hype was. They bought it because it was the new edition of D&D and most fans of a moderate or greater investment level will buy and transition to the new edition when it comes out.Rather than people buying 4E because of complaints, I think people bought it despite the complaints. The difference, however, from say 3E is that where the vast majority of people who bought 3E continued to play it, with 4E a large chunk bought and said "Not for me" and went back to 3.5, which in turn enabled Paizo to take over the world.Now where I think 5E may be different is that they're trying to appeal to not only the folks that will play whatever the latest edition of the game is, but those folks who aren't in love with 3.x/Pathfinder or whatever version of the game they're playing. In other words, I think there's a significant number of D&D players who have either lapsed because they didn't like 4e and are tired of 3.x, and don't want to go retro, so are in a bit of a holding pattern around D&D. They aren't trying to dent the Pathfinder dedicated core, nor the true retro grognards - both of these groups are extremely faithful (or entrenched, depending upon how you look at it). But the dedicated 4E is much smaller, so you've got a few different medium sized pools to try to draw players from:- Current or lapsed 4E players who are ready to move on- Lapsed 3.x players who don't like 4E but want something new/simpler than 3.x/Pathfinder and don't to go retro; some of these folks haven't played in years- Lapsed AD&D players who didn't come back with 3E but might be ready to now; consider this a "second wave" of returners; where the lapses Gen Xers, if they were going to return, came back with 3.x; the early Gen Yers - those that grew up on AD&D 2E - might be ready to give D&D another shotAnd of course there's the Holy Grail of new recruits, but that's an unknown quantity. I think the key here is to create a simple enough game to give an easy-ish entry (a beginner's box set), but also provide something different enough from video games to offer a novel experience for Gen Texters.I ramble, but my point is that 5E has a lot of pools to draw from and I think they're on the right track with a relatively simple and traditional core game. And of course everyone (well, almost everyone) will buy the core books - Pathfinder fans, retro-grogs, etc. The question is whether people will play it and I think many will. Why? Well, this comes to what I see as the one flaw in Paizo's otherwise excellent business plan: a core simple game. Not everyone wants Pathfinder or 4E complexity; many do, perhaps even most, but I think the tenor of late is that folks want added complexity as an option. I hope you're wrong, or if you're wrong I hope that Hasbro is willing to give up the D&D license at some point and sell it in ten years to some uber-geek who made hundreds of millions on some revolutionary app and wants to reboot the whole thing. But I don't think D&D will die, or at least if it does there's always raise dead. And of course, as long as Pathfinder is alive D&D won't be dead.</blockquote>

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