While I get what this article is going for, something about it doesn’t sit right.
It frames the whole hobby as if D&D and its direct offshoots are the only meaningful throughline, and everything else is just a reaction to that. It treats D&D like the center of gravity, and anything outside that orbit—OSR, indie games, narrative systems—is either left out or folded back into the D&D timeline to make the model cleaner. That might work if you’re looking at market trends, but it doesn’t hold up if you’re actually paying attention to design trends across the wider hobby.
The part that really sticks out, though, is how it talks about 4e.
It calls 4e the “peak” of fourth generation design—basically an extension of 3e’s build-focused, video game-inspired style—but that doesn’t really track. 4e wasn’t a refinement of what came before. It was a full reset. Classes were built from the ground up around clear roles. Encounter design was transparent and easy to prep. In a lot of ways, 4e was ahead of its time, doing things that people now call “fifth generation” design: prioritizing usability, supporting GMs, and structuring content for a better, more balanced experience between players and GMs at the table.
It didn’t fail because it was too much like 3e or Pathfinder. It failed because it wasn’t. It asked players to engage with D&D in a very different way, and a lot of people weren’t ready—or willing—to make that shift.
The article also suggests that “fifth generation” games are just now starting to focus on GMs and ease of play, thanks to the fallout from the OGL mess. But that’s been happening for a while. Games like Apocalypse World, Blades in the Dark, Mörk Borg, and even parts of the OSR have been designing for clarity, pacing, and accessibility for years. These games weren’t trying to “fix” D&D. They were offering something else entirely.
If there is a fifth generation forming, it’s not about returning power to the GM—it’s about respecting the time and energy of everyone at the table. It’s about making games that are easier to run, faster to learn, and clearer to play—because more people are playing now, and not everyone wants to spend hours in prep or rules lookup. That shift didn’t start in 2023. It’s been building for over a decade.
I get that this kind of generational model is meant to be a broad-strokes take, but it ends up flattening a hobby that’s actually grown in a lot of different directions. There’s more than one story here, and I think it’s worth telling all of them.
