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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2989409" data-attributes="member: 32740">D&D was first and remained unassailably superior and more popular in the fantasy genre for the better part of two decades.  It stuck.  D&D is practically a brand name become generic term.  Its creation formed the hobby in the first place and it having no credible competition in that hobby for popularity for so long it is inseperably linked as BEING the hobby first and foremost with all others being hangers-on and pale imitations.  Other RPG's may arguably have superior rules but they get played less because they AREN'T D&D.I assume you mean, "If D&D were to cease being published in any form," rather than "If D&D materials wer to magically disappear from shelves and hard drives all over the world leaving only the human memory as proof of its former existence," and in that case the industry would simply carry on and if a new edition of D&D were not created/recreated then SOME other RPG would take the lead, albeit not a lead of such insanely commanding supremacy as D&D has/had.Certainly so long as the OGL and SRD are not "rescinded" then I don't see how the industry would do more than skip a few heartbeats as publishers drool over thoughts of becoming the new 800 lb. gorilla.  Short of the utter removal of the open gaming model and related data then D&D CANNOT be killed except by an equally inexplicable sudden and total neglect by gamers.No.  Someone else would simply have bought the rights to the game rather than the entire company.  If it should be suggested that this might have only occurred after many years of legal wrangling then in the interim some other game would have taken advantage of the delay and either recreated a thinly-veiled direct replacement for D&D or someone would have simply created what eventually became 3rd Edition by tearing down and rebuilding D&D from scratch, and when D&D itself emerged from the lawsuits it would finally have lost the market to a superior competitor by virtue of simply having not been present to actively compete.At least that's essentially what I was predicting back in 96 before WotC DID purchase TSR and produce 3E and hindsight hasn't changed that view.</blockquote>

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