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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7168043" data-attributes="member: 996">Increment your counter Imaro! Hopefully that is vanishingly unlikely.  It's been years since 5e dropped - in contrast, the edition war started before 4e hit the shelves.And it's not the majority that's inflexible, the majority just play (&, hopefully, enjoy) the game and never post in echo chambers like this.  They follow Mike Mearls twitter or watch play podcasts or don't bother with the on-line community, at all. Is that a trick question?WotC has reached out to both new and /returning/ players, since D&D was a huge fad in the 80s, and there were a lot of folks who hadn't played it since then.  It reached out to returning players with a new version of D&D packaged in the familiar 3-volume core rule books (I'm half-surprised the covers weren't more on the nose), and, this time, had rules between the covers that were somewhat familiar in structure, function, & presentation, and most of all, evoked a similar, at least recognizable style & feel. That also happened to sacrifice anything that might have made it more appealing to the kind of much broader audience propelling video games, MMOs, and even boardgames to such vastly greater heights than TTRPGs.In addition to reaching out continuing, returning, and even new fans (where applicable), WotC has succeeded in stabilizing D&D's brand image, which is vital to eventually getting some real revenue out of it in some other medium.  They'll have another hurdle, then, making whatever it is - movie or MMO or whatever - appealing to the mainstream without so upsetting the original fans that they go off on it again and scare them off.  Same challenge comic book movies eventually overcame (well, and CGI helped). I've run AL, and it started out a bit like Encounters, but it's really increasingly free-form these days.  You can still count on the standard ruleset, of course, feats'll be OK and so forth.  On top of that, how an AL session plays out is very much on the DM, even that first 'season,' different DMs delivered very different experiences with HotDQ.  Some were able to salvage it, some saw TPKs, some gave up......some were like "what's the problem? this is AWESOME!" D&D doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to retaining new players.  It's keeping the existing fanbase happy & united that's vital, to avoid a repeat of the negativity of the edition war.  And it's bringing back the lapsed fans that's the big growth opportunity, by repeating the fad of the 80s.  Of course, there'll be those who try D&D and don't care for it, but they're always have been - and they might've clashed with the existing fanbase, anyway, we don't need that.We all just need to get along, this time.</blockquote>

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