D&D is dying. I'm almost certain. Wizards took several attempts to finally kill it. They have tried before. 3E is a fundamentally different game than D&D and the zeitgeist behind the game sees it as "old school" now. 4E was the last 6E, it just took them several years to finally tap out and make a more palatable 2nd edition of 3rd edition called 5th edition. But that's all Mainstream D&D. D&D I haven't touched much in the last 7 years, and before 5E came out I hadn't touched in 12.
But the signs are there. The doors are closing, someone's standing by the light switch. Nothing will swoop in. There is no D&D killer. Fuck Daggerheart. Fuck ShadowDark. Fuck all the PbtA trash and FitD shit. D&D is better than all of them because of the core loop none of these games have. Shit I bet if they read this they wouldn't even know what the term "loop" meant in this context. Because these creators think of game mechanics on a pre-school level. We're talking mechanic equivalent of putting the round block in the square hole because it will fit. Nobody, and I mean nobody, who has been called into serious contention to the throne by idiot D&D and D&D adjacent content creators is designed by actual gamers, understand mechanical identity, the loop, fidelity, and backwards compatibility. Hell well over half of them have been brain-rotted by TDS.
D&D will only be supplanted by D&D. An equivalent. Not some minimalist shit or Forgey trash. The Forge is dead and their design should have died with them. The actual contenders now are Pathfinder (AKA Diet Double D&D) and Castles & Crusades (AKA Diet Diet Double D&D) These are both games designed from the OGL of 3E and sadly that means we're not going to see a step back to TSR D&D times. If C&C wins we'll get closer to the spotlight but maybe only a half-step.
And I think that either of these games is still going to fail. I think the big normie audience is going to lose interest because both are sufficiently gamey to lose that interest. We're going to return to the basements of the Midwest and off the main stage. GenCon will diminish for the first time ever. RPG gamer tastes will diversify again. 5E books will start filling landfills. WotC will spend all their RPG effort to properly PoD their TSR back catalog, including separating maps from books. Virtually no overhead and guaranteed to sell and kill the 3pp collector's market. Nature will heal.
