The Flood, Glut, and Crash

It feels strange to be bombarded by this many crowdfunding projects, and every day over on Facebook, it feels like a new game, with hardcovers hundreds of pages long, is coming out and being announced. The game glut has started, and AI tools are accelerating us toward a tipping point for gaming.

I get the feeling a 1982-style Atari-level extinction-event crash is coming in gaming.

The market can't support all these narrative, cozy, specific niche, and boutique games. Especially with multiple versions of "5E something" coming out all at the same time. Universes Beyond doesn't help; it only piles on to the sea of mediocrity and glut of things to distract us from fantasy gaming and fracture the market worse than it did when TSR went bankrupt. They will most likely be one-shot games, with no product line or future. Another option, another universe, and we will all end up playing something different.

The glut will come, 5E will be oversaturated, and the only way out will be 6E.

It feels like planned obsolescence, the end of an era, the final last gasp of the 5E market.

I have had enough of the 5E rules, and I am battening down the hatches and supporting only one edition. Right now, the current leader is the D&D 4E-like Level Up A5E, which brings back memories of my 4E days and a better time in gaming, when things didn't suck. Mind you, 4E sucked, but gaming was still cool. Those days, 2008-2014, were good times.

The books I have will be it for 5E.

A5E and its smaller library feel supportable for me, and the design is solid.

I am circling the wagons, standardizing on my favorite version of 5E as my "long-term support" version, and going back to games that I loved before the 5E mess happened. Palladium. Rifts. FATE. Maybe Rolemaster. Aftermath. Space Opera. Cepheus Engine. GURPS. BX in some version or another, but not going back to the TSR books. I'm also trying a few other games I haven't paid much attention to, like Blades in the Dark. DCC still had a few shelves, and I love the vibe around that game. Shadowdark is still a good game: small and focused, with strong support.

I'm heading toward a flight to quality and memories.

These days, gaming is a cold and jaded place, where designers use games as a platform to exclude others and push tribalism. Burn it all down. There isn't much left anyway. Take it; I have my memories. The new stuff isn't worth the hassle, or trying to fight a system to get an old-school style out of a game that refuses the concept.

Going back to older games that I loved feels right for me. There is also a glut of these cozy, narrative heartbreakers coming out, and they typically come on strong and fade quickly. It is easy to get excited and spend money, but often that is all there is. What I seek is not new games, but older memories. I want games that take me back. I know that, for those coming into the market, these will be the days, and you can never really get back what you lost.

But there are games where I open the book, and it all comes back.

I open books to remember, smile, and enjoy the yellowed, hazy, faded memories of an autumn season of gaming.