Admin here. Please fork this discussion to a different thread if you want to continue it; I think it's interesting for folks, but this thread shouldn't get derailed.
I've put your original post inside spoiler blocks.
~ Piratecat
[sblock=Post inside here.]
Well, either "what makes people play your game" got misidentified and/or oversimplified, or Robyn Laws' theories on narrow focus deserve to stay academic, IMO.
The problem here can be boiled down pretty simply. If you asked the question:
"What makes you play D&D?"
Then there were many answers to that question. You can try to pick the most popular answer, but even if you pick the right answer you're still excluding all those other answers... and the people who prefer those answers.
In the case of 4th Edition, they picked the answer "combat". And it's not really surprising that the people in this thread saying "my games were always about the combat and you're nuts for suggesting that people played any other way" are... well, they're the exact same people who have adopted 4th Edition.
Nor is it surprising that the people saying "hey, there were other ways and reasons for playing the game" are the people who haven't adopted 4th Edition.
I think there can be a lot of value in Laws' focused design principles. I'm just not convinced that it was appropriate for D&D. D&D isn't
Feng Shui or
Burning Wheel. It has a larger, broader audience and I think it's a mistake to try to narrow that audience. (And a mistake to think that you can narrow the game and yet somehow keep that audience.)
It would be like Disney saying, "Pirates of the Caribbean is the most popular ride at our Disney themeparks. So we're going to add pirates to all of our rides and get rid of all the non-ride activities."
PIRATE WORLD might be a great idea for a themepark. But that doesn't mean it's a good strategy for the broadly-appealing Disneyworld.
I agree with Mr. Rouse that trying to move away from the Pirate World strategy is a good move for Disneyworld.[/sblock]
