NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 5762881" data-attributes="member: 40522">On a personal level?I'd shrug and keep playing Pathfinder. I might grab a few 4E books from  the local used bookstores with the idea of reselling them on eBay (I bet  the prices would spike), but it otherwise wouldn't affect me much.When the classic World of Darkness games went out of print, I kept  playing and running them. I'll still run the classic FASA version of Star Trek for  interested parties, I've played 1E (not a retroclone) as recently as  2010, and I know two groups currently running 1E games and another  running 2E. Current support isn't a dealbreaker for me, the only thing  that constrains me from playing other games and other editions is my  available time.For the hobby?There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The internet  will burn for months with "I told you so's" and various degrees of  accusations and blame mixed with a healthy dose of snark, pessimism, and  plain old stupidity.People will fall upon remaining inventories of D&D material like  locusts, prices on the secondary market will be artificially inflated  for a while.Some groups will continue with business as usual. The end of official  support for D&D won't have much of an affect on them. Other groups  won't be as fortunate.Many surviving pockets of gamers will become even more insular than they  are now--groups will use isolation from one another as a defense  mechanism against the edition war to end all edition wars. Such groups  will become institutions in and of themselves, much like surviving  BECMI, 1E, 2E, and 3E groups are now.Others will become evangelists, trying to start online petitions or form  their own businesses to "save" D&D. They will speak boldly of a  glorious new golden age of D&D that's right around the corner if  enough people buy into their party line, but most people won't take them  seriously.Perhaps most interestingly, we'll get to see what happens when Dungeons  & Dragons Insider goes dark. But that's a big enough thing for an  entirely different thread.For the industry?Honestly... I think that the industry reaction won't be as wild as we  suppose. If D&D gets shelved, people that work on D&D at WotC  will see the writing on the wall before we do. They'll do what they can  to get into other positions within the company or within others. Various  websites, podcasters, bloggers, and other sources will scrabble for  interviews with the final batch of the D&D staff. It'll be discussed  for a long time.Other effects through the industry will simply be an extension of what  we're currently seeing now: a variety of companies will put out  competing products claiming to hearken back to classic versions of the  game, each proclaiming itself as the "true" inheritor to "real" D&D.  As Pathfinder is arguably the most successful of such games at the present, it will likely be the de facto  leader in the tabletop RPG category. Paizo will make further efforts to  increase the players base of its games and will become the "gateway  game" to the entire hobby, directly or indirectly....for the rest of the world?I think that the end of official D&D would get a soft news story on  NPR or some outlet that covers pop culture or geek-related issues. At  best... Steven Colbert may say something about it on the Colbert Report,  and many viewers would likely be surprised that D&D was still in  print up until then.Honestly... I think that most of the rest of the world already  thinks of D&D as a kitschy bit of '80s retro nostalgia, right up  there with legwarmers and the Walkman. Several of the people that I  played 3E with (circa 2002-2003) thought that D&D had went out of print at some point. When I tell people that I play role-playing games, they don't even think that  I mean something other than video games. Hell, as far back as the 2E  days of the mid-'90s, people that work at big retail stores think that I  want video game guides or comic books when I ask about D&D. My wife started with tabletop gaming in 2001... With 1E. That's what the  group she was with played and that's what they introduced her to. She  got her copy of the 1E Player's Handbook in a used bookstore and  it never occurred to her that there were different versions of the game  at all until we started dating in 2004.When I was living in California in the late '90s, the vast majority of 2E players I met started tabletop RPGs with Vampire: the Masquerade.  They branched out into various versions of D&D when they were  introduced by older players that started with D&D and played Vampire too. I met a small handful of people who started in the same way with Call of Cthulhu and the West End Games version of the Star Wars RPG. It was actually more common to find people there that started with games other than D&D.Some people know of Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms as a novel line, but  in my experience, tabletop RPGs are still just as "obscure and fringe"  as they have ever been. I just can't imagine that they'd suffer more in  that respect with a lack of official support.I think that finding new players will be just as easy or difficult as it is now.</blockquote>

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