blakebouchard

[blakebouchard]

Oh wow, this was less than a year ago. For some reason I thought it was longer.

Anyways I'm doing this, and I'm writing it myself. More to follow.

Watching a ton of Kamen Rider recently, thinking about how to capture this insane energy in a tabletop RPG

There’s Henshin and Convictor Drive, both are very cool

But it seems like a Cyberpunk narrative system and a sci-fi combat system bolted together a la ICON is the right approach

Anyways time for bed

[blakebouchard]

They keep telling me I'm entering the Danger Zone, they must have forgot I'm Him. I was born in the Danger Zone, fully formed holding a pack of Newports and a Core Battery. The Enemies of the Godhead self-Castigate when they see me, out of respect. I took a DNA test and it came back 12 Heat, 0 Stress. This shit ain't nothin to me man.

.

[blakebouchard]

I've briefly touched upon this topic before but here goes; I know you can play D&D for pretty much free because it's extremely easy to pirate, but I think we've settled by now that piracy doesn't actually hurt companies as much as they want us to think, meaning that pirating D&D isn't as big of a "stick it to WotC" move as it's often presented as. Of course if you absolutely have to play D&D (but, like, why?) you won't get any moralizing from me about piracy, like, ever.

But the point is: supporting another game either monetarily or with your valuable time is a much more direct and tangible way to stick it to the cultural monopoly of D&D than playing D&D and not paying WotC. I mean if it's another big-ish publisher I don't have a lot of faith in their working conditions being much better than WotC's, but in some cases it probably is so. As it often happens, the market leader can often afford to pay its employees worse simply due to those positions being more desirable.

But anyway who cares, there's lots of games out there where you can actually get a full game sometimes for less than the cost of a single D&D book and since those games are often built as more focused experiences than the D&D "forever game" formula you're actually more likely to get to experience all of the game instead of a lot of the content existing just as shadows on the cave wall.

[blakebouchard]

Early Daggerheart thoughts, from the Open Beta Manuscript:

This is a full game. The PDF is 377 pages, and contains seemingly everything you'd need to play a long-term campaign, though I'd expect players might want to wait for the final rules before diving into this with both feet. Still, there's a LOT here for a first offering.

Matt Mercer gets a Game Designer credit on these rules. Not a huge surprise to think that Mercer would have a pretty strong hand in the design of this game, but the fact that he is acting in a full designer capacity is interesting.

As you'd hope, this game codifies player safety tools such as Lines, Veils and the X-Card. It also suggests about an hour of shared world-building during Session Zero, which I am a big fan of.

Probably the trickiest part of running this game for people who are accustomed to Initiative-based combat (probably a lot of Daggerheart's intended audience) was going to be how to run low-structure combats. A lot of PbtAs and Forged in the Darks prefer to say that "Combat is just an extension of the narrative, have fun!" But there's actually a lot of good information about how to run initiative-less combats here.

Surprisingly, the GM rolls a different die than the players do: While players are rolling 2d12s, the GM rolls a d20 when attacking. This is also counter to the normal "PbtA" ethos where the GM never rolls dice, and the consequences arise strictly out of the players' successes and failures.

Previously, I had been under the impression that Action Tokens and Fear were the same thing, ie. the GM only gets tokens to act when players roll Fear as a consequence of an action. That turns out to be untrue, the GM gets an action token every time the players make an action roll. So the amount of "moves" the GM gets to make in combat scales linearly with the number of rolls the players make, though the GM can also cash in Action Tokens to get Fear tokens, which lets them unleash their more nasty monster abilities.

Building up the Hope reservoir as a motivating factor for the players is a very smart way to encourage them to act boldly. If the players keep playing it too safe, they don't get any Hope to spend for big moments. Unlike D&D which tops the players up with resources at the start of the day and has those resources slowly dwindle, Daggerheart instead gives players those resources as a reward for heroism. There's other ways to get it, such as "Prepare" during a Short Rest, but that's only one of four things you can do during a rest, and you can only pick two.

The thing that surprises me most here is just how complete this Beta is. There's stuff in here that I was not expecting to get, including a lot of GM-facing stuff (There's about 70 pages of GM-specific info in this PDF).

I was not expecting to be able to jump into this thing with both feet so soon. While I expect that there will be more player options in the final release, and slightly more balanced monsters, what we have now is easily enough to get going.

#daggerheart #darrington press #critical role

[blakebouchard]

[blakebouchard]

#bang brave bang bravern #yuuki bakuhatsu bang bravern #giant robots #mecha

[blakebouchard]

[blakebouchard]

stop showing me ai ill fuckin kill you

[blakebouchard]

It begins.

#daggerheart #critical role

[blakebouchard]

Unpopular opinion(?) Everyone playing DnD 5E in 2024 should be playing Fabula Ultima instead. I say this as a Paizo stan who thoroughly believes that PF2E is the current best thing in high fantasy ttrpgs. I've been playing Fabula for 6+months now, and every session I'm like "this system kicks ass and literally anyone could play it." while I have Pathfinder to sate my more tactical, wargame-y tendencies. Seriously, more folks should be playing Fabula.

[blakebouchard]

#Youtube

[blakebouchard]

7 Fantasy RPGs to fill the D&D-shaped Hole in your Life

So. It finally happened. Either Hasbro, or Wizards of the Coast, or someone else associated with Dungeons & Dragons finally did something so fucked-up that you've decided to swear it off entirely.

The problem is that for decades, there has been one obvious answer to the question of "What game with Dwarves, Longswords and Wizards in it should we play" and that was D&D, every time. Even their strongest rival in the past couple of decades was just an older version of D&D with a spit shine.

Now you find yourself adrift in a sea of possibility, with no signposts. There are names you've heard, but you have no idea which ones you'd actually be interested in, because you had always just assumed you'd be playing D&D until the heat death of the universe.

So let's take a look at a few games that want to fill that D&D-shaped hole in your gaming life, and examine what they're offering.

Disclaimer: I'm not covering the entire breadth and depth of the TTRPG industry here. I'm specifically going to be covering Fantasy RPGs that should appeal to D&D fans here. So if I didn't cover your favourite indie RPG, sorry. But there has to be a "First step" outside of the D&D bubble, and each of these games should fulfill that need.

The Other "Kitchen Sink" Game: Pathfinder

If you can't bring yourself to keep playing the corporate game, but you still want something that offers as close to that gameplay experience as you can possibly get, your best bet at the time of this writing is probably Pathfinder 2nd Edition.

I say this as someone who very much did not vibe with the original Pathfinder, or its "D&D in space" sister product Starfinder. But at this point, I'd absolutely tell a newcomer to jump into Pathfinder 2E before I recommended they buy any WotC product.

To their credit, the 2nd Edition of Pathfinder does much more to, uh, find its own path by diverging from 3.5 edition and implementing new systems that take it into uncharted territory. The "Two Actions Per Turn" paradigm is often cited by its proponents as being a meaningful improvement over the 5E way of doing things.

The "TTJRPG": Fabula Ultima

One of the biggest success stories of the early 20's was Fabula Ultima from NEED Games in Italy. It came seemingly out of nowhere to win the ENnie Gold Award for Best Game of 2023. Since then it's become notoriously difficult to find in print, though it's still freely available as a PDF.

Fabula Ultima is a "TTJRPG," modelled after Japanese fantasy video games like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Phantasy Star, Breath of Fire, etc. While it's firmly planted in the Fantasy genre, its gameplay will also very recognizable to fans of those types of games.

The major benefit of this conceit is that you can probably already picture how combat in FabUlt works in your mind: Two rows of characters take turns jumping and slashing at each other, or casting magical spells to harm, heal, or apply status conditions. There's no concept of "Spacing," but the game still manages to be mechanically intricate with lots of varied class abilities and status effects to apply.

D&D refugees looking for a game where you simply pick a class and fight some monsters, but aren't too particular about how they do that, will find a lot to love here. FabUlt leans much more heavily on storytelling mechanics than D&D does, so players who've been looking for something a bit more "Theater of the Mind" should be well taken care of here.

Final Fantasy Lancer: ICON

Like Fabula Ultima, ICON is a TTRPG that takes heavy inspiration from JRPGs, specifically tactical games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre. It's from Massif Press, who also authored the surprise indie Mech combat hit Lancer.

And like Lancer, ICON is a game with two very distinct rulesets: Outside of combat, a "Fiction-first" narrative system inspired heavily by Blades in the Dark; In combat, a grid-based tactical skirmish game reminiscent of D&D 4th Edition. All backed by the gorgeous art of its author Tom Parkinson-Morgan, who also writes and illustrates the comic Kill Six Billion Demons.

ICON separates its "narrative" class system from its combat class system, giving each character two distinct character sheets that come into play at different times. Because those two systems don't have to cross over very much, each can be as intricate or as rules-light as it needs to be to promote the type of gameplay most appropriate for the situation.

The Old-School Gateway Drug: Shadowdark

If you ever took a few steps outside of the walled garden that is D&D in the past few years, you will likely have read or heard of the OSR, or "Old-School Revival/Renaissance." Proponents of the OSR are players who yearn for an older style of Dungeon Crawling Survival Horror game that hearkens back to the early days of D&D, before the players became akin to superheroes.

Shadowdark aims to be a game that bridges the gap to that style of gameplay, without being totally unfamiliar to players who only ever learned 5th Edition mechanics. It's "Old-School gaming, modernized."

Aside from simply being a modern take on a D20 fantasy game, it freshens up gameplay using a mechanic called the "Torch Timer." It turns light into a resource that dwindles in real time. This serves to elevate the tension of the game as every minute that passes is one less minute of light on your torch. And when the torches run out, well... You can probably guess what happens next.

5th Edition with the Serial Numbers Filed Off: Tales of the Valiant

Tell me if you've heard this one before: Wizards of the Coast introduces sweeping changes to its "Open" license model, leading existing 3rd-party content creators to create their own version of an older ruleset to protect the viability of their backlog. It happened in the past, but what are the chances that happens a second time? Ha!

Well... It did happen again. This time, playing the role of the "Paizo" in this scenario is Kobold Press, who loudly declared that they were "Raising the Black Flag" in response. In order to ensure that there would always be a "Core Fantasy" ruleset that would remain compatible with their content, they announced Tales of the Valiant, which would essentially duplicate the 5th Edition ruleset with a bit of a spit shine, in much the same way that Pathfinder did for 3.5 Edition.

Tales of the Valiant will be the game for the D&D player who just wanted a rules refresh of 5th Edition, but also doesn't want to keep throwing money at the corporate hegemony. It should end up being "The 5E you can feel good about supporting," and that matters right now.

Matt Colville's Big Bet: The MCDM RPG

Kobold Press was not the only publisher of third-party D&D content to have a strong reaction to the OGL fiasco. Unlike Tales of the Valiant however, Matt Colville's response was to announce a fully new Fantasy RPG system, with no expectation of backwards compatibility with any edition of D&D.

MCDM's sights are firmly set on the "Post-Kitchen-Sink" future, and to that end their game is explicitly not trying to be the one game for every possible playstyle. It's Tactical, meaning you'll need a grid to play it on, and it's Heroic, meaning characters should feel powerful, and not like they're constantly one critical hit or failed trap-sensing check away from being decapitated.

This approach might seem like a massive risk considering how insanely powerful 5th Edition became at its peak. But a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign backed by over 30,000 people shows that there is at least an appetite for something new, and that there is a like-minded community of players ready and waiting to join you.

The Critical Role Game: Daggerheart

If the Kobold Press announcement was a shot across the bow, and the MCDM crowdfunder was a bomb dropped, then Daggerheart is a full-blown asteroid, streaking straight towards Wizards of the Coast HQ.

Daggerheart is an original Fantasy RPG from Darrington Press, the publishing arm of the Critical Role media company. That by itself should mean something considering how important CR is to the D&D brand, but there's more to talk about here. Though it superficially resembles D&D in a lot of ways, it has some extremely important differences. Namely, its use of "Powered by the Apocalypse" mechanics such as "Fail Forward" dice rolling and "No Initiative" combat.

While "PbtA" has become somewhat of a loaded term in the D&D community, Critical Role has an opportunity to overcome that stigma with the sheer force of their platform. I've made this case already in the past, but if they were to use their power to do for themselves what they did for 5th Edition, it would be the most significant threat to the Hasbro Hegemony to emerge since Pathfinder. Let alone taking just a slice, Daggerheart has the long-term potential to take the whole damn pie.

And more!

The games I've listed here are all theoretically capable of replacing the Corpo game as your "go-to" long-term game. Not all of them are fully playable as of this writing, but they all represent one possible future for the "Sword and Sorcery" RPG genre.

There are of course a whole plethora of other games out there beyond the limited scope of "Medieval Fantasy" that are just as valid and just as viable, if you're feeling a bit more adventurous.

If you're looking for something explicitly tactical like a miniature skirmish game, but still in the RPG genre, and you're willing to expand your choice of genre beyond Euro-centric Medieval Fantasy even further beyond ICON, you might be interested in Gubat Banwa or the aforementioned Lancer.

If you want a game that promotes a slightly more streamlined, less mechanically-intricate approach to combat while still giving you tons of monsters to kick the shit out of, you might want to check out the "Illuminated by LUMEN" family of games inspired by the games LIGHT and NOVA from Gila RPGs. It might even inspire you to write your own RPG!

If you're more interested in the Old-School Renaissance, you might want to check out Forbidden Lands, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Old-School Essentials, or MÖRK BORG.

If you like the idea of "Old-School Roleplaying" but are also willing to step outside of the fantasy genre into Sci-fi territory, you might be interested in Stars Without Number, its Cyberpunk sister product Cities Without Number, or Mothership.

Finally, if you just want a game that focuses on telling the best story rather than mindlessly killing monsters and acquiring loot, you might want to check out Blades in the Dark, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Girl by Moonlight, Coyote and Crow, and many more Fiction-First games in the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark genres.

But most importantly: Just play more games! Don't just buy them, play them! The point of this whole exercise is to replace the monopoly with a plurality, for the sake of the health of the tabletop gaming industry.

Because the next time Hasbro lays off a bunch of WotC employees, there should be a much stronger, more diverse industry for them to land in feet-first. We should all want for the people who build the games we love to feel safe in their career choice. Not just for the sake of the ones who are already there, but for future prospective designers and artists who want to make their mark.

It should be viable to be a tabletop game designer outside of just making more D&D stuff forever, because as we've seen, it's not safe to assume that we can all just keep doing the same thing we've been doing and not get bit on the ass by it.

If we want that future, we have to take it into our own hands and build it ourselves. But if there's one group of people that knows about building something very big from very little, it's TTRPG players.

#ttrpg #icon rpg #icon ttrpg #mcdm #pathfinder #fabula ultima #kobold press #tales of the valiant #daggerheart

[blakebouchard]

D&D Youtube is going to get real weird in 2024

I saw a kind of interesting video from the YouTube channel Treantmonk's Temple a little while back. I want to talk about it a little bit.

Without getting too much into it, the premise of the video is thus: It doesn't make sense to boycott D&D in retaliation for the layoffs, because if people stop buying Wizards products, it will lead to more layoffs.

I've already gone into why I think this is flawed reasoning in my previous post on this topic. But what's more interesting to me here is that this highlights a conundrum that every D&D YouTuber must be dealing with right now: that a weakening D&D brand is bad news if your own brand is tied to that game.

That anxiety was spelled out almost perfectly by the "Indestructible Boy Who Cried AI." His account on Twitter is private right now thanks to his little oopsie, but a very helpful Twitter user screenshotted this take:

Indestructible Boy here is railing at Wizards to delay the release of the Revised Core Rulebooks because he's anxious that a half-baked release in 2024 might cause "another 4E situation." And thus we arrive at the heart of the issue.

There is a certain breed of Brand Loyalist who sees the possibility of D&D becoming uncool again, and will do anything to stop it. Why, they might even go so far as to accuse Wizards of cutting corners on the book by using AI art!

Wouldn't these accusations hurt D&D's brand though? Maybe, but what would hurt D&D's brand even more would be a not-so-well-received Core Rulebook refresh in 2024 giving people yet another reason to abandon the game for newer, more exciting products.

Of course, the possibility of D&D losing all of its cultural cachet from one poor release is laughably small. It's an absolute powerhouse, and likely will continue to be.

However. What Indestructible Boy actually said was another 4E situation. A situation where, despite industry insiders agreeing that 4th Edition sold more books, it was Pathfinder that is widely agreed to have "won" that generation.

The Horror Scenario for D&D YouTubers

The thing I advocated for before was that the D&D community should redirect their spending toward rival products. This would spur competition in the TTRPG industry, create jobs for recently laid-off Wizards employees to fall back on, and give people more of an excuse to see what they've been missing in the broader TTRPG landscape. Plus, it incentivizes Hasbro to increase their investment in the D&D print team to repair their market position.

But if you're a D&D YouTuber, that scenario is an absolute nightmare. D&D might never slip to #2 in the polls, but it's also extremely possible that it loses its status as the "Majority game" if its rivals manage to grab a significant chunk of its player-base.

If the Revised Core Rulebooks turn out to be underwhelming, as the Indestructible Boy seems to fear it might, then D&D risks once again becoming uncool. And that is the apocalypse scenario that the D&D Brand Warriors would rather avoid.

The YouTuber's Dilemma

So now, if you're an online personality who has primarily covered D&D 5th Edition up until this point, you have to make a choice. Do you:

Continue to be a primarily D&D-based channel and hope that your commitment to the brand pays off in the long run?

Pivot to producing more genre-agnostic content, before you know where the chips are going to fall?

Use your platform to subtly bury D&D's burgeoning competition?

I don't actually know what the answer is here, honestly. Using your platform to promote games that your channel is not traditionally known for might be risky. But at the same time, if it turns out that the era of the "D&D Hegemony" is coming to a close, then handcuffing yourself to the railing might backfire if the ship starts going down.

And speaking of #3...

They Protec, But they also Attac

This is another video that I find utterly fascinating because it also presupposes the idea that if Daggerheart can't outsell D&D, then it's doomed to fail.

There's a term for this: Fantasy or D&D Heartbreaker. It's the idea that if your RPG doesn't have a shot at being #1, it shouldn't even bother trying. It assumes that the fans will always choose the market leader when it comes time to decide where to spend their gaming dollars and their time. The "losers," aka the "Heartbreakers" just end up collecting dust on the "unloved games shelf" at the local hobby store.

But the idea that your game is a failure if it can't "beat" D&D also reinforces the "One Game to Rule Them All" paradigm that many D&D YouTubers benefit greatly from. And this is where we see that there is a massive conflict of interest.

Here's another video from the Roll For Combat channel featuring Baron de Ropp where he spells it out much more plainly:

At about the 1:45 mark in the video, Baron says this: "In order to prevent the hobby itself from imploding, there has to be that one central pillar that everybody kind of gravitates to. Because otherwise, if you don't have that, the only thing that sticks around are the hardcores."

I don't want to seem like I'm dunking on Baron specifically, but he definitely seems to care a lot about that "Central Pillar" existing.

I have taken to calling this the "Election model" of TTRPGs, where even if there are more than a couple of candidates for the role of "President," only one of them can win. Whichever RPG is the "President" is the one that will receive the vast majority of coverage, and also the "Default" choice whenever the question of "What game are we playing next" comes up.

The "4E Situation" but Worse

I don't think the real fear is that D&D suddenly loses all of its brand awareness because of a couple of scandals. It's that D&D goes back to being "Just another game" like it was during the 90s. It used to be just as likely that your table was running something like Shadowrun, or Rifts, or Vampire: The Masquerade, or any number of other games.

In that "Fractured Landscape" scenario, it becomes very difficult for a YouTuber to make videos that appeal to the majority of the TTRPG audience, if you can't make assumptions about their playing habits. The safest bet continues to be D&D, since it will always have a thumb on the scale thanks to its cultural awareness.

But if the "4E situation" happens, it also means that D&D is no longer the default game that everyone is assumed to be playing. Your content is increasingly targeted towards beginners and casual fans, while the "Hardcores" have split off and are playing other games. The D&D-playing audience is divided, and that's the audience that these YouTubers depend on.

"Reasoned Criticism"

I don't know what the solution is here. What I do believe is that there will increasingly be a conflict of interest between Youtubers covering new upcoming games, and their need to protect the D&D brand which their own online presence depends on.

What I absolutely do not want to see are videos like the one I posted above, where people with primarily D&D-oriented content take a little sidebar to bury the competition. If you have a channel whose bread and butter is videos like "The Top 5 Multiclass options for Lizardfolk Druids," I don't want to see a video called "Why Fabula Ultima is mid, actually!" with a stock photo of some generically attractive person giving a big shrug.

Even if you're not paid directly by Hasbro to promote D&D, you benefit from doing it just the same, thanks to SEO and Algorithm placement on Youtube. So you don't have to disclose that you're being paid (because you're not) but you absolutely are making money off of the D&D brand, and that makes any talk about other RPGs, especially negative talk, a conflict of interest.

Well, anyways

The question of whether to stay committed to D&D as a brand, or diversify, is a legitimately difficult question that I don't think anyone has a real solid answer to.

A lot depends on how well the Revised Core Rulebooks are received in 2024. There are going to be big questions to answer with regards to what system to choose going forward: Stay on 5E? Switch to 5.5? And what about Tales of the Valiant? Then there's upcoming public playtests from both Daggerheart and the MCDM RPG.

How players choose to spend their money will significantly affect the D&D YouTube landscape. Those personalities will have to choose whether to dig their heels in on D&D, or diversify. Neither option seems safe at this point.

However, what we should absolutely not tolerate is any attempt by D&D personalities to "nudge" the TTRPG industry back into the loving arms of their chosen brand, away from its upcoming competitors.

If you are a person who's handcuffed your brand to the ship called "Dungeons & Dragons," you cannot be trusted to be objective about the TTRPG industry as a whole. Not until you have made the effort to talk about games outside of the D20 Fantasy sphere without the intention of dismissing them outright.

#Youtube #dungeons and dragons #dnd #dnd5e #kobold press #daggerheart

[blakebouchard]

I JUST figured out how to find your Tumblr drafts on this site, so I'm probably going to write long-form stuff here, rather than on Medium. Easier that way, and I've gotten way better engagement on this site than I have literally anywhere else. Barely anyone ever saw the Lancer article I wrote until I linked it here! Plus I doubt I'm ever going to monetize my writing, so I'd much rather benefit from the broader visibility.

As far as my brain-dump/journalling goes, that will probably be moved over to my Mastodon account: Blake Bouchard (@[email protected]) - Mastodon

[blakebouchard]

Happy holidays everyone https://link.tubi.tv/w7cu1UxzMFb

#rifftrax #Mexican Santa Claus #santa claus vs the devil

[blakebouchard]

Mental Crop Rotation

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.

[blakebouchard]

While Hasbro continues to shoot themselves in the dick, the MCDM crowdfunder continues to climb.

In less than two weeks, they've already hit ~$3.3M in total funds and are steadily approaching the 20k backer mark. The current average spend is little over $170 per backer.

It's tempting to make grand, sweeping proclamations about what all of this means for the tabletop RPG industry. I don't know what ends up happening here.

But to me, what that number represents is a healthier, stronger Tabletop ecosystem for the laid-off D&D team members to land in. Those 19k backers and counting represent a population that's sorely needed in tabletop right now: People who are willing to make a big bet on something new, not just the big-money corporate product.

There needs to be more of that, and not just for the MCDM game. Those 19k backers? That's a good start, but that's just one company.

What needs to happen for the tabletop industry to be healthy is to prop up more independent and third-party creators, so that they can create jobs and make the industry a safer bet for people to land in.

A boycott of D&D is not the answer. That doesn't send the message we want to send. What we need, for Hasbro to choose to invest in D&D in the way they did before, is to gas up their competition.

And they have legitimate competitors. Aside from what's coming down the pipe, there's already Fabula Ultima, Blades in the Dark, Lancer, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu. All of these games have proven their own viability, and clearly show that you don't have to be the product of a massive corporation to make a fully-realized tabletop RPG.

Pathfinder in particular is a really interesting case. According to industry insiders, Pathfinder never actually beat 4th Edition in total sales. But that didn't matter for its overall perception. Even if Pathfinder never outsold 4th Edition, it created the perception that it was the "winner" of that generation.

That should go to show you that even though D&D sold a lot of books this generation and seems to be continuously running up the scoreboard with huge successes like Baldur's Gate 3, it's never been invincible. And it's not outside of the realm of the possibility for the nerdiest parts of the D&D community to choose to walk away from it. That's how edition changes start.

That's what gives me hope for the immediate future. The thing that does need to change, in my mind, is the idea that there's no sense trying to beat D&D. Just because it's likely that nobody will ever truly "beat" D&D doesn't mean that we should dismiss any attempts to do so. As we've already seen, there are real competitors out there.

There's still a lot to be done, and we still don't know how things are going to shake out. But there is clearly an appetite out there for a bigger, more diverse ecosystem of RPGs. All we need to do as players is to stop being unpaid brand ambassadors for Hasbro and instead start propping up smaller game studios so they can become First-Party.

That's what it all comes down to. We all, even longtime D&D players, have a vested interest in ensuring the health of the broader tabletop RPG industry.

#dnd5e #dnd #ttrpg #mcdm #fabula ultima #pathfinder