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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3280845" data-attributes="member: 18549">At risk of sounding gloomy, I am not optimistic that there is a future for tabletop RPGs, at least in the current environment.  I think that the DDM gravy train will eventually run dry, and WotC will dwindle and collapse like Apple would without the iPod.  The market for new books is getting tougher, and so we're seeing more new rules and new ideas appearing in the books.  There's a lot of good work being done, but eventually we'll hit the limit for rules bloat and just stop caring that the new Complete Backscratcher has a really amazing and brilliant system for modelling exfoliation using the Escape Artist skill as its basis.  There are only so many things you can write into a roleplaying game that don't involve a story.A new edition is probably not going to solve this problem, because it's going to be hard to convince people that the next edition is so much freaking better than 3.5 that they'll want to invest thousands of dollars and years of time into it, since they just got finished doing that with 3.5 and now have a bit of a hangover.  The 3.5 fans will stick with 3.5, and the people who aren't really in love with the system will probably find something else to do.  Some will go to other systems that offer a different style of game, perhaps things like Castles and Crusades or Burning Wheel, but many will just drift away from roleplaying altogether.Dragon and Dungeon will chug forward, supporting 3.5 as long as they are allowed to, since their subscription base is probably composed mostly of diehard D&D fans.  But if they are forced to switch to a new edition, they'll probably go down with it.  I predict that a new edition will cause a small boost in interest, but nothing like the effect of 3rd edition, and the boost will die back quickly.  Hasbro will probably pull the plug as soon as DDM loses its charm and ceases to be profitable anyway, so we might not even see WotC wind down so much as disappear overnight.Anyway, that's the way I see it happening.  I hope D&D is around for a long time, but I just can't figure out a scenario in which it manages to survive, unless 4E is really, really freakin' good.  As in, "can draw players in like MMORPGs can," good.</blockquote>

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