D&D General IF D&D were for sale ...

[Micah Sweet]

Therein lies the problem. Put 10 gamers in a room and ask them what "not messing it up" looks like and you'll get a rotating assortment of answers most of which will come back to 4e was terrible, get your woke out of my game, that's too expensive and hawaiian pizza is an abomination.

A gamer isn't going to have a spare 2 billion on hand to buy a passion project; a hedge fund manager might.

So most gamers hate 4e, and are...anti-diversity, cheap, and unreasonably dislike pineapple on pizza? What a wonderful community you think we are.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Is "universally acclaimed" actually possible here? I'd argue no. That's not even possible with smaller system fandoms, let alone one this big.

I'm saying popularity and profit are orthogonal to making the game the best it can be.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm saying popularity and profit are orthogonal to making the game the best it can be.

I'd argue that "best" is going to always be a moving target relative to the market for it. There's no objective criteria you can make for it that doesn't assess that market. You may not like "serving the largest number of people well enough to keep them onboard" as a good criterion, but anything else is, in the end, just privileging a subgroup in a way that likely comes down to self-interest.

 

[Umbran]

Does that mean we should assume there is such a value add? To the game?

No. It means we should admit we don't know what the value add might be, and not use an assumption either way in our considerations.

 

[KYRON45]

So most gamers hate 4e, and are...anti-diversity, cheap, and unreasonably dislike pineapple on pizza? What a wonderful community you think we are.

I think we all can and should do better.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'd argue that "best" is going to always be a moving target relative to the market for it. There's no objective criteria you can make for it that doesn't assess that market. You may not like "serving the largest number of people well enough to keep them onboard" as a good criterion, but anything else is, in the end, just privileging a subgroup in a way that likely comes down to self-interest.

So the most popular game is the best game? Right..

 

[Minigiant]

So most gamers hate 4e, and are...anti-diversity, cheap, and unreasonably dislike pineapple on pizza? What a wonderful community you think we are.

I think it's less that and more are gamers tend to be very gayekeepery and not open to ideas that get what they want if they don't look like how they want it

 

[Micah Sweet]

No. It means we should admit we don't know what the value add might be, and not use an assumption either way in our considerations.

That's what speculation is though. If people can't talk about things we don't have perfect knowledge about, what's the point of the forum at all?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think we all can and should do better.

Shaming the community in a non-specific way like this is deeply unhelpful, and insulting to quite a lot of folks.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it's less that and more are gamers tend to be very gayekeepery and not open to ideas that get what they want if they don't look like how they want it

Example of such an idea?