Tony Vargas
Legend
Yep. And, for that reason, alone, WotC will never append ".5" to anything, ever again. They may very well do exactly the same thing again - or skate as close to it as they dare - but they can't ever afford to admit it.But of course, many fans have been cynically predicting a 4.5e ever since 4e was released. And no wonder - they still remember being burned by the 3.5 fiasco, even if it was nigh on ten years ago. Forcing your customers to repurchase all the core books within two years of the release of the originals is a pretty serious party foul.
Even in something as trivial as publishing time sinks for nerds, there is value in 'plausible deniability.'
Very true. For one thing, it's balanced. At all levels, even. Mind-boggling.But it's also blinding you to the fact that 4e is not 3e, and not just because it nerfed wizards. Not only is 4e completely different from 3e and 3.5, it's different from 2e and 1e and all the other D&D games that have come before it.
Not really, no. Suplements would routinely add to or override rules, and 'variants' were widespread and blythely accepted. If someone wanted to use 'spell points' instead of memorization, he just did it - and it got around and a lot of other variations on it sprang up. If you got your 'hey, let's roll a d10 for initiative instead of a d6' variant into the pages of Dragon, it got picked up by tons of other DMs.But since the rules are written in stone, or at least inked on a billion cheaply printed pages, you can't call them back and change them. Your only choice is to eventually come out with a new edition of your game.
While Dragon was unofficial, it was heavily consulted, and while new products were mercifully infrequent, new variants were a continuous thing.
It wasn't until the RPGA that D&D started getting truely 'static.' You had to have a common set of rules for all these jokers, so they settled on a set and stuck to it.
Now that we have an on-line community bellowing it's collective opinions constantly, the preasure to standardize on the 'official' line is, paradoxically, overwhelming.