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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8929147" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I don't agree. 1984 was wildly different. The game was totally unknown to parents and entirely something nerds and geeks played. In 1984, the pushback against D&D was external. It was the Satanic Panic triggered by the McMartin preschool trial. It was an external group labelling all TTRPGs as "evil" because they featured magic and demons. Going to RuneQuest wasn't really an option. They had magic and demons, too!Yet, when the satanic panic subsided, people didn't go back to D&D. Why? By then they were to playing the new hotness: console and PCs video games, Vampire (or whatever White Wolf was doing), Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulu (or whatever Chaosium was doing), and Magic: The Gathering. The real issue was that the product of AD&D was bad at it's descending armor class core by the time 2e AD&D rolled out, and TSR had turned vehemently anti-customer during the rise of the Internet. It took until 3e came out for the fresh new system that actually had a consistent game design to draw people back in to it.From my memory, 3.x D&D started to "catch a cold" in 2005-2006. People were tired of LFQW and 5MWD. They were tired of two PHBs, 10+ class splatbooks, however many hundreds of prestige classes and alternative rules, etc. It was especially exhausting for new players, who were not interested in reading 3,000 pages of rules to really get into a game. The game was so heavy it was collapsing under it's own weight. And then it split into PF1e and D&D 4e, two games that were even heavier with core mechanics even if they drastically reset the amount of books you needed. (I just happened to read <a href="https://pathfinder.d20srd.org/coreRulebook/feats.html#power-attack" target="_blank">the Pathfinder 1e Power Attack </a>earlier today, and I forgot how obnoxiously intricate it was.) But the fork here was internal to the hobby. People in the hobby wanted something new. So lighter rules likes Deadlands/Savage Worlds got noticed. OSR took off when people realized they could replicate B/X. Then FATE got popular, and PbtA games, and so on. The key, though, is that it was internal. It was the hobbyists that were dissatisfied and left. The ignition was the dispute about 4e (including the GSL) and Paizo leaving to do their own thing.2023 is also an internal dispute within the hobby. It's not external cultural forces triggering people outside the hobby to prevent their children from participating in the hobby. I also don't think it started with OGL v1.1. I think lots of people have been wanting something better or looking for something better than the basic hamburger of D&D 5e. It's become very clear over the past few years that WotC is interested in appealing to the broadest market, even at the cost of the game itself. At the same time, we've heard 3PPs and YouTube creators squawking about how we need to try other games than 5e for a good solid 3 years at this point. It started prior to Pathfinder 2e, but the cultural shifts since 2014 plus games like Blades in the Dark, Mork Borg, more OSR, etc. The OGL v1.1 just lit the powderkeg that had been brewing for years. WotC missed the pulse of their own industry.</blockquote>

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