The Golden Age of Dungeons & Dragons is over.

What was the golden age? Well, I’m defining it as the time people spent the most money on the game. Which, according to my – likely inaccurate – calculations were the years 2020-2022, otherwise known as the Time of Covid, when more money was spent on gaming as a whole than of any other three-year period in the history of the planet.

While most businesses were doing very poorly, many propped up purely on government support, the locked-down people of the world found that they had more time for entertainment, but were deprived of many of their regular pursuits, such as sport, concerts, and cinema. So, instead they spent money on games. Computer games. Card games. Board games. Role-playing games.

And then the lockdowns ended. People went back into the streets, and enjoyed the ability to, once again, go to sport, concerts, and cinema. Compared to the disaster that were box-office returns before, Hollywood is happy to see the box office receipts going upwards again.

But on the other side of the street, in the gaming industry, accountants looked at the plummeting sales and wished that lockdowns would return.

The golden age – the time when they made the most gold – was over.

The number of people you can employ in a business is directly related to how much money you make. People need to be paid. And thus, all over the gaming industry we are seeing layoffs. These hurt. There are incredibly talented people who no longer have jobs. And while there are definitely terrible managers out there who made decisions that led to some of these events – I’m looking squarely at everyone who runs Embracer Group, for instance – there are also a lot of layoffs that are not related to bad business decisions. It’s just because of the effect lockdown – and lockdown ending – had on the economy.

Any business decision you make has risk. The bigger the company, the more people it affects. In 2019, if I had started an ice-cream selling business in Australia, the summer of 2019-20 would have been great – that was the time that bushfires were burning Australia. But the next four years, with record rainfalls and low temperatures, would have been horrible. I may have gone bankrupt, effectively laying off myself. Is that my fault for not predicting that we’d have a very long cold period?

If people had perfect knowledge of the future, the better decision from a lot of these companies would have been not to hire the employees in the first place. So, instead of the pain of them being laid off now, they would never have been employed for those three years. Is that better?

I don’t know. What I do know that it fucking sucks hearing that people I love are no longer employed at Wizards and other places.

But amongst all this horrible news, I’m also looking at upcoming products and thinking, “Huh, the game may be getting better.”

The fact is, out there in the world right now, there are people working on incredible games. For Wizards of the Coast. For Dungeons & Dragons-compatible games. And for other role-playing games as well.

It really struck me when I looked at the upcoming A Life Well Lived by Cubicle 7, the follow-up to Uncharted Journeys. Here was a product that went into a more detailed method of determining a character’s life before becoming an adventurer. But not only that, it had activities that you could do at the camp on an adventure between expeditions into the dungeon, not unlike downtime activities. It also had a long list – 61 in total! – of downtime activities for when not adventuring. And rules for what happens once your adventurer required. That last really surprised me – it wasn’t what I was expecting.

Then you have various 5E variants, made in reaction to the OGL disaster of last year, coming out from Kobold Press, EN World Publishing, and others. Well, EN World Publishing got their first with their Level Up (Advanced 5^th Edition) products, made even before the OGL disaster happened. All of which seek to give a 5E-like experience, while infusing it with new ideas. I’m particularly interested in what Kobold Press do with their Game Master’s Guide for Tales of the Valiant. Advice and tools for the GM of the game is always welcome.

There are also advice books, such as Justin Alexander’s So You Want to be a Game Master. And I’ve recently bought a couple of books that look at other aspects of DMing, such as The Living Campaign and Into the Wild – I can’t speak to their quality yet, but there were people talking about them positively.

Moving away from Dungeons & Dragons, we have the incredibly successful (from the viewpoint of funding) MCDM Roleplaying Game, which commits the dual heresy of not only abandoning attack rolls in favour of straight damage dice, but also being fun to play, based on the playtest reports I’ve seen. You’ve got Shadowdark, which is making a lot of my friends very, very excited. And then I hear positive chatter about the Bladerunner RPG (and the other titles from Free League Publishing). (On a personal level, I get very excited when there’s a new release for Cyberpunk RED).

And circling back, we have the looming release of the 2024 revision of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been down on aspects of the revision, but when I have it in my hands, I’m going to be fascinated by what the designers at Wizards have done. This is not an inexperienced design team. What excites me the most is what happens to the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which from reports will have a lot more advice on how to run the game. This is really something to be excited for – especially if it aids getting new players into the hobby.

We’re getting all of this in the shadow of it being not the best time for people spending money on the hobby. A lot of these creators won’t be rewarded as well as they should. But when I look at the quality and innovation of what is coming out in the next couple of years, it does give me reason to be hopeful. And while things are bad right now, it’s based on overall circumstances, not because the games on offer have gotten worse. Let’s all hope that it won’t be long before the hobby is growing again.