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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8302233" data-attributes="member: 18">People were expecting it too soon, that's the issue.Look at the relationship between the early 1980s D&D boom and the success of other RPGs. It's not until the early 1990s that other RPGs start eating D&D's lunch.5E came out in 2014, but it didn't "go huge" until 2017 or 2018, suddenly becoming dramatically more successful than the level 3E had been at. So if we saw a similar relationship - and we might not - we wouldn't expect to see other RPGs benefitting a huge amount from D&D until, what, 2027? Maybe a little earlier or later.The ideal situations for other RPGs are essentially two-fold:1) D&D just stays where it is and keeps pumping out material, but doesn't modernize. This will it hit extremely slowly, like really slowly, but it was a big part of what cause problems for 2E. 2E really wasn't modernized compared to 1E, or not every much, and it meant that as rare people played other systems, they came back and reported that D&D wasn't so hot in comparison. This had a very slow impact.So if we see no new PHB etc., or really only a 5.5E (i.e. less than 1E/2E), and WotC don't keep up with what "the kids today" are into, this is gonna hit them.2) D&D screws up bigtime somehow. Any number of ways. If it manages to make itself unpopular, people aren't going to want to just give up on RPGs. They dodged a bullet or three on this recently (i.e. last couple of years or so). Had they not changed leadership and changed attitudes I think they'd have got clipped there.All this said, I think other RPGs are benefiting, just not in a huge-huge way. The number and scale of successful RPG Kickstarters is SKYROCKETING. The number of new and original RPGs is drastically increasing. The number of high-quality new RPGs is increasing. The daring and particular-ness of indie RPGs is increasing (I would argue, he said, looking at Spicepunk 1997 and Shadow of the Mogg on his desktop).It's even possible we're at the beginning of a massive surge for other RPGs, given the huge Kickstarter stuff, but I think it's still a few years out - if it even happens. I don't buy D&D blocks other RPGs in the sense that people won't play them because of it though - the sort of people who go back to D&D or who won't play others never would have. The only ones it might impact are RPGs with a similar crunch level and theme, but which don't have tools like DNDBeyond, and that's not a large portion of RPGs.</blockquote>

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