I want to assure you that your incoherence over the last several posts has been deeply moving for me. (Insofar as I'm backing away slowly from you.)
It was cute having this conversation with you in 2011. In 2012 it's anachronistic. Nobody is disputing the publicly available sales numbers at...
The solution is simple: Stop thinking that it's the GM's job to railroad PCs into pre-designed encounters.
When you allow the PCs to choose where they're going to do and what they're going to do, the "problem" fixes itself.
Exactly. And that's why 4E was a failed edition.
Any new edition of a game is going to pick up some percentage of the current market. But when you lose at least half your customers, I find it impossible to describe that as anything other than a failure.
The key difference is not how many...
If you think that was clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction with the existing customer base for 3.5, where do you think all those Pathfinder players came from? You've already admitted that Pathfinder isn't substantially different.
I'm aware that a lot of online theorists and CharOppers...
Knowledge checks are actually one of the few check where it doesn't bug me: They represent what people know and are generally reflexive. (You see an orc. Do you know what it is? Everybody gets a check.) Basically, they're like Spot checks.
Where it really bugs me is Search checks: It's pure...
But, again, where's the money coming from for this? In an era where selling 15,000 copies of an RPG over its lifetime makes you a massive success story in the industry, these companies simply have no cash flow for what you're suggesting.
For example, here's the ad rate sheet for Game Informer...
This isn't true. The Traveller fanbase, for example, is badly fractured and if you go to the places where Traveller players hang out you can hear some pretty hot conversations about it. It's just that there aren't enough Traveller players to form a critical mass in most places.
Historically...
DPS is the one that drives me nuts: Virtually no RPGs measure things in discrete seconds.
With that being said: The key word here is "new". People new to an experience will attempt to find ways to apply the knowledge they've gained from similar experiences. As human beings we're pretty much...
Roleplaying Games vs. Storytelling Games
A roleplaying game features a system in which mechanical decisions are associated to character decisions, so that any mechanical decision is, by default, a character decision (and thus the playing of a role).
A storytelling game features a system in...