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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5653094" data-attributes="member: 59082">Glad I amuse you. BTW, I'm not claiming what I said is "inarguable fact" but that arguing its veracity is not the point of the thread. I'm happy to be convinced otherwise that there are more newbies coming into the hobby and, more importantly, shifting from casual to dedicated status, than there are leaving, aging, "growing up."I'm also curious as to your notion of Actual Fact. What is Actual Fact that I am premising counter to? Yeah, I hear you. I think that game stores and the print version Dragon Magazine have one thing in common: they're not coming back, not unless there is a massive explosion of interest in the hobby, and I just don't see that happening.In a way I have a feeling of nostalgia for something I never experienced: the formative years of roleplaying games, what I would call the Golden Age - most of the 70s, or at least 1973-74 up until when AD&D became super popular (1980ish). It must have been a wonderful thing to be part of the rise of RPGs. The "glory days" of the 80s, what I would call the Silver Age, wasn't quite as wonderful in that while RPGs were at their height, they weren't as new and there wasn't the same sense of growth and becoming.Sort of like how the best part of the weekend is Friday, both the last hour or two of work before you actually get off and the first few hours of being off. Saturday is wonderful, but doesn't have the same sense of excitement. Then Sunday is shadowed by the inevitability of Monday. Or, perhaps more accurately, the time just before a band really "makes it" and the early part of "making it." In some sense I think this points to the necessity of the cycle of life and death in RPGs, that everything goes through phases of growth, maturity, decay, and death, with a rebirth into a new cycle. Edition cycles are one way in which this occurs, but I also think new games that open up new territory can bring about a new era. We could say that the first "mega-cycle" of RPGs was from the early 70s until the late 80s; the second cycle hit its stride with the White Wolf games and the proliferation of the "Indie" movement in the late 80s and 90s and ended around the turn of the millennium; the third cycle started with 3E and the OGL (and Exalted, really) and is in the process of ending right now. We're still waiting for that new cycle; one could say that 4E D&D was the beginning of that new cycle, but I feel that it was really the dissolution phase of the older one. Or maybe it is a transitional smaller cycle between 3E and 5E (of course I'm mixing up RPGs in general and D&D, but I'm just writing stream of consciousness...rambling, in other words <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=";)" />.</blockquote>

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