You criticized a system for the designers beginning to look for a new edition two years after release. I honestly thought you meant 3e, since that fits the criteria. After all, 3.5 hit 3 years after release, so it was being designed pretty much since 3.0 hit the shelves, and 3.5 started being reworked as early as 06, again, about two years after release.
Are you really trying to equate 3.5 to replacing 4E with a completely new edition?
Yeah, 3.5 was promoted from very early on. And it was touted as an effort to take the massive feedback that the groundswell of fans had provided and build on that. Now I’ll readily agree that it had some serious negative unintended results. But we are talking about motivation. And the motivation was the growth.
I agree that there are fundamental differences between essentials and 3.5. But if 3.5 counts for this specific conversation, then essentials counts even more. I was talking about moving from 4E to the next edition. But the motivation for both the current change and the role out of essentials were touted as efforts to expand the fan base and recover lost fans.
Yes, I said 2 years and 3.5 meets that sole criteria. But if I said “round, purple, and full of sweet juice” would you say I must mean a cue ball because it is round? 3.5 doesn’t come close to meeting what I said.
Or perhaps you'd like to back up a bit on the edition cheap shots?
You not liking it is not the definition of a cheap shot. It was an accurate statement of what happened (without even considering essentials). And it was an accurate statement of cause and effect.
I'd point out that 4e currently has Santiago in the wings (SF 4e), Gamma World, and half a dozen other alternate genre games already out there. Granted, nowhere near as many as 3e. Totally get that. OGL and all that tends to limit things quite a bit.
But, that's the point. The reason you don't have a bajillion alternate games for 4e is the OGL, not the mechanics of the game.
So what? Those setting tweaks don’t being to touch the fundamental system changes that I listed.
Yes, the GSL greatly limited supporting development. But showing me a different fact that also happens to be true does nothing to contradict other realities. The mechanics are fundamentally important here as well. 3E readily supports major rebuilds because it was designed as intended to be a tinker toy tool box. 4E was designed, and loudly praised by its fans, for not burdening new DMs with that tool box.
You know I have made that point to you multiple times over the past small number of years. And now Mearls has echoed that point in his quote in the Forbes article when he said “In some ways, it was like we told people, ‘The right way to play guitar is to play thrash metal,’” says Mearls. “But there’s other ways to play guitar.”
Repainting fantasy thrash metal into sci fi thrash metal does not meet the standard I have in mind.
And you are also contradicting the pro-4E point I directly responded to here.
“I think all of this "Oh Noes! My immersion is broked!" comes from people bring their own preconceptions into the game and not trying to instead look at it from where the game might be coming from instead.”
Do you support that quote or do you agree that the game system needs to be able to respond to the preconceptions the players in a given group have more than the players should be expected to set aside their preconceptions in order to meet the requirements of the game?