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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6174965" data-attributes="member: 1879">Yes and no. Towards the end of 2nd edition D&D was starting to look like a dead property. TSR had folded or was in enough trouble to no longer be the 800lb Gorilla in the room.This was the heydey of Rifts with Palladium books flying off the shelves. FASA was going strong with Shadowrun and Earthdawn. White Wolf was bringing the angst with the World of Darkness books which brought a much need influx of hot chicks into the gaming world. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> D&D felt like the game you played before growing up and moving on to more adult games. Even if you wanted a pure fantasy game there was GURPS with their excellent supplements and of course Ars Magica, at the time being put out by a little known company called.. what was it? Oh yeah. Wizards of the Coast. Then Peter Atkinson asked Richard Garfield if he could come up with a portable game people might keep in their pockets and play while standing in line at the airport. The result was Magic the Gathering and suddenly Wizards of the Coast was not the 300lb gorilla in the room, they were freaking Godzilla. And they bought TSR and brought forth 3e and lo, It was good. Ryan Dancy's genius with the OSD meant that anyone who wanted to could play in WotCs pool and everybody did. To the extent that people would publish things under the d20 aegis in spite of having their own, sometimes quite good, systems that better suited the genre they were portraying. 5 rings and BESM spring to mind. And then they were bought by Hasbro and ... it was not so good, but not as bad as all that. As much flak as Hasbro gets they couldn't care less about D&D. WotC owned MtG and Pokemon which are a liscense to print money and that is all they truly wanted. The 3e/4e split cracked open the d20 monolith and got the creative juices flowing again, so now we have a greater wealth of alternate systems than we have seen for some time. And it too, is good.* Footnote: My little history lesson here goes back a lot more than 10 years.</blockquote>

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