Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

These three posts are the story of this forum :( Some smart, well-informed people, and a lot of disrespect when they take the time to comment. I understand why you and the other SJG staffers don't post very often.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Agreed, we kept 4e secret for a few years. I can safely tell you, though, that we have no plans at all for a 5th edition of GURPS. We have discussed a second boxed set to follow Dungeon Fantasy -- which you can pre-order https://dungeonfantasyrpg.backerkit....sted_preorders -- but no discussions at all about a 5th edition game.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Still not so far away. I wonder if the forums will make it till then though.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Yeah there really isn't. 4E isn't broken in any appreciable way and the industry is as far moved on from GURPS-style gaming as it was when 4E was new, so it's not like there's additional drift that "requires" some horrific hybrid monster like D&D 4E was.

The only thing I'd ever want to see is a consolidation, integrating the most important rules expansions and addenda back into the main books (for example, the Create advantage from Powers, and a good chunk of the Social Engineering stuff). But that would be another Compendium-style book and SJG is most definitely not moving in that direction. It's moving in more or less the exact opposite direction.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Do you not remember everyone in the know outright lying about 4th edition being a possibility right before it came out? Their business, their rules. But please don't rewrite history.

(I seriously hope I don't get an infraction for stating a basic fact, but if so, then I'll accept it.)

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

I understand how it would be an unsound business decision for a still shiny edition, but that's not quite what I meant.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Pretty sure the marketing was "We don't have anything to announce about a Fourth Edition," not "We aren't doing Fourth Edition." I'm pretty sure because a lot of that marketing came from me or people who reported to me, and I was careful NOT to say we weren't working on something that we very definitely were working on.

SJ Games does not, as a rule, discuss unannounced releases (particularly major products such as GURPS 4E) before we are good and ready to do so. We have been burned too many times by premature announcements of things that, for one reason or another, never made it to market. It is our experience, however, that simply ignoring the "When are you doing XXX?" question just makes people ask it again, louder. And sometimes the honest answer is, "We don't have plans to do it but we aren't ruling it out down the road," which satisfies nobody.

Having said that, Phil's flat statement that we are not working on or even really thinking about GURPS Fifth Edition is true. We wouldn't be putting a LOT of time, effort, and money into a new Fourth Edition-compatible boxed set if we were moving on to 5E in a couple of years. In any event, the reasons we updated to Fourth Edition just don't hold true right now -- the system is NOT overloaded with options, we have NOT figured out enough different ways of doing things that we could fill two books and then some with house rules, and (most important) we do NOT believe that a Fifth Edition would be a good use of our limited time, effort, and money. If we did, we would have done that instead of the DFRPG.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

Just pulling out this quote to shine a spotlight on it. I can't think of many decisions that would be dumber than investing a ton of resources into producing a Fourth Edition-based box set, followed by deprecating those rules in favor of a new edition.

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

It seems like there's a little bit of contradiction in the explanations of exactly how 4e compatible the DFRPG actually is. Kromm said that is more compatible with 4th edition than 4e is with 3eR, but also called it "4.5". If that means it is as different as D&D 3 and 3.5, that is probably significant. I honestly don't have a really good feel for how compatible it actually is based on the statements that you all have made, and probably really won't until I read it for myself...

Re: Is a 5th Edition coming soon?
 

OTOH, if the DFRPG fills the same niche that the Third Edition Compendium books (which were sometimes called GURPS 3.5ed) did, then Fourth Edition is roughly halfway through its lifecycle, and we should stop pestering SJGames for statements about a Fifth Edition for a decade.