I don't follow your meaning here. <snip> Just because you innovate, doesn't guarantee you will succeed commercially. It's more that innovation can be a force multiplier for your investment.
I'm saying, a business which
never innovates in any way is dead--and that, as you note, innovation is not, in and of itself, an advantage. Successful innovation is required merely to
survive in business. Sooner or later, if you don't innovate, you'll be outcompeted by those who did.
A thing you
have to do, and which is not guaranteed to work even if you do it, doesn't make sense as an "advantage." It's a
prerequisite.
Progression and choice are not identical concepts
...yes. I was literally saying that you were conflating the two.
My observation would be that RPGs that offered a lot of choice haven't succeeded for players as well as those that narrowed choices down. <snip> I suspect we'd agree that some choice is desirable, but how much choice is the right amount?
Insufficient data to make any determination on that front--again, because "success" is driven by an enormous number of factors. If D&D had been beaten to the RPG punch by a freeform-build game, we could easily live in a world where class-based systems are rare and do-it-yourself construction had always been the more common (and more successful) method.
And yes, some choice is desirable. I, personally, find classless games daunting, because I get lost in all the choices and can't make a decision. By that same token, I have found that there are a lot of people who strain against the restrictions of class-based design, even when they continue to play such games to the exclusion of anything else. Again, "success" and "what players want" are not strictly the same thing, so it's actually pretty unhelpful to argue "well, X pattern is historically more prevalent, therefore X pattern is
better." The vast majority of humans who ever lived were illiterate, but I don't think either of us would argue that that's superior to literacy!
Regardless, the OP's point was that two key things--"the campaign" and (paraphrasing) "the level-up experience"--are responsible for D&D's success. You then looped in subclasses
as a demonstration of this success. That's really weird, because subclasses are neither part of "the level-up experience" (they provide different options when you
do level up, but they don't actually affect
whether you get options for levelling up, which the OP repeatedly stressed as the key factor) nor part of "the campaign" (they may have setting implications, but they have no effect on world continuity or the persistent existence of the character past a single play session).
You haven't demonstrated how subclasses, feats, races, or a variety of other things have any similarity whatsoever to "the campaign" or "the level-up experience,"
other than being innovations. Since as I said innovation is
required to survive, that's not an advantage in and of itself, it's a prerequisite. I think all these things are good (to a point) but I don't see how they have more than superficial similarity to the two key points the OP made. I certainly don't see how any of them emphasizes that "the campaign" and "the level-up experience" remain
active advantages, rather than merely historical ones.
For me this really substantiates the argument for game balance. Good balance in multiplayer games is that which makes the most options mechanically viable.
Oh, no question. I'm a huge advocate for well-balanced games. It's why it infuriates me so much to see people handwave serious problems, like short-rest classes falling behind long-rest ones. Problems which were foreseen all the way back in the D&D Next playtest and dismissed as irrelevant...only to be later recognized
by the designers themselves as an actual problem. Likewise, people noted the serious weakness of dragonborn relative to other races, particularly elves and dwarves, even before official launch.
This is why I advocate so strongly for pursuing really rigorous balance
long before publication. Such balance means you don't
need to make so many post-hoc changes. 4e was pretty good at this, but even it had some stumbles (skill DCs, Skill Challenge rules, stealth, a couple other things) despite being (in)famous for its balance.
This rejection of choice would seem to me to speak more to progression and choice being not identical, than anything else. Everyone will have different lines in the sand for what should be in and out of D&D. For example, I think artificer might fit well in Eberron. I dislike it for Faerun. However, my real objection is the poorly thought through impact of infusions on the imagined economy (which, yes, was already shonky.) That has turned out to be a barrier to including artificers in my next campaign (a subject for another thread!)
Then, to the best of my knowledge, you are an exception, not the overall pattern. I have seen many, many people who think artificers and monks
could not ever have a place in D&D, and that it is borderline offensive to even
try to include them, in any way, under any circumstances, even if they can be entirely ignored and not present at specific tables if the DM so desires. We saw
exactly the same problem with the Warlord, where you had people doggedly insisting that it would
ruin D&D to permit martial healing etc. in 5e, even though they've always had the ability to just ignore classes and mechanics they don't care for.
How broad should the game be, might equally be posed. I've observed tolerances for genre-melding to have increased hugely over the years. Still, I would prefer a D&D where Eberron and Faerun feel very different, than one where both are a pastiche!
...aren't they both
already pastiches, or at least extremely heavy on the "borrowing" from other places? Eberron borrows extremely heavily from pulp action comics, Indiana Jones, astrology, Victorian-era fiction, etc. Faerun
openly copies literal real-world cultures (e.g. the Mulhorandi pantheon is
literally Egyptian, while the Untheric pantheon is
literally Mesopotamian), so even if Eberron isn't a true pastiche, the Forgotten Realms absolutely are--particularly when you start accounting for the continental areas that openly invoke different cultural tropes, like Al-Qadim being a pastiche of the myths and legends of Golden Age Islam, or Maztica being a pastiche of the Americas around the time of the despoiling Conquistadors.
