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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9212637" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Six factors.<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Geek culture in general has been on the rise, and that has given D&D tons of free advertising. Stranger Things is just the most recent and dramatic. Shows like Big Bang Theory are responsible as well, and films like The Lord of the Rings are too. This is something that's been building for a while.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The rise...and then fall of World of Warcraft. As much as TTRPG folks love to crap on anything they can accuse of being an MMO, WoW, ESO, Guild Wars, and other MMOs have done more to spread the idea of cooperative adventuring than anything D&D ever did. But after WoW stumbled hard, repeatedly, and shed literally something like ten million users, people opened up to other, newer things.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Anyone who knows me knows I'm no fanboy of 5e. But, giving credit where credit is due, it's pretty easy to get started playing. The guidance is awful and the rules are full of holes, but it does actually do some stuff to make it accessible that previous editions didn't.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Concomitant with #2, the rise of the virtual tabletop. I still argue to this day that 4e was permanently crippled by the murder-suicide that destroyed its digital tools team (and then bedridden after they committed to Silverlight...only for it to immediately stop getting support from Microsoft.) Virtual tabletops made it dramatically more feasible for people to get together, fitting quite well into the slow but steady rise of "online co-op" play for small groups.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Bouncing back from the 2007 financial crisis and subsequent economic lag, only to be followed by COVID-19 lockdown right when the usual plateau would have hit. By the time jobs and the economy had gotten back to where they were pre-2007, 4e was on the way out and 5e was on the horizon. The public playtest did what it was actually meant to do--attract attention, not do any effective playtesting, it was little more than a publicity stunt.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The rise of the podcast. Tablet and smartphone adoption finally hit full saturation, and podcasts became wildly successful. A significant number of these podcasts and other related things (e.g. Acquisitions, Inc. from PennyArcade) were either specifically about TTRPGs, were actual plays of TTRPGs, or had people that loved TTRPGs and thus would talk about them. This is another chunk of absolutely huge and completely free advertising right at the moment when that free advertising blew up massively.</li> </ol>Social forces well beyond WotC's control or influence ensured monumental exposure, and other forces ensured not just sustained profits but outright growth at a time when one would normally expect at least a plateau, or even decline.I guess I just don't really understand what exactly has "adapted." They don't contradict anything in the PHB--ever. That's one of the several reasons why we're getting 5.5e (though they are too afraid to actually call it what it is, and thus insist it is "the 2024 books" or whatever.) Non-Tolkien races remain ghettoized, the "true exotics," while the Tolkienesque races are asserted to appear in every fantasy universe even when that is demonstrably untrue, especially of halflings.The only thing that's changed is that they're willing to recognize that people of varied ethnicity and gender identity exist.</blockquote>

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