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I will suggest to you that you continue to read motiviation into my comments that are not present. I have no animus at all towards other designers, other companies, or the gamers that purchase their products. I'm an Adam Smithian economic philosopher. I believe the invisible hand of the...

My use of the term "desperately" was meant in this sense: "D&D is not enough fun for the time I'm investing. An option pressed on me by the industry is rules lite games, which claim to be more fun because they are less complex. My need to be roleplaying gamer is being directly impacted by my...

<ASBESTOS> Many moons ago, I suggested reasons that Open Gaming would be embraced by the market. As a result, I was excoriated for daring to suggest that the simple act of having many different RPG systems was a Bad Thing, and that the OGL/D20 project was A Secret Plan to Monopolize All of RPG...

That would be a bad study, and poor conclusions. Many people have read that report and assumed we started with the two axis concept and worked backwards - because intuitively, many people sense that the conclusions are accurate based on their personal experiences. And we've been using that...

I honestly have no good basis to issue an opinion. I suspect the answer is highly specific to the individual and the game in question.

I would say our approach would be more closely modeled on the actions of a studio producer. Our job was to listen to what people wanted to do, and sometimes figure out when they wanted something they weren't asking for, and then give them those features in a way that made sense and that they...

I'm not exactly sure from the ecommerce description but this looks like a book of stat blocks for the basic SRD mosters. I'm talking about a book that has: Orc Orc/F1 Orc/F2 Orc/F3 Orc/F4... Completely "kitted" with appropriate gear, spell lists, domains, etc. Example: Somewhere in this...

Started new thread for this response.

Originally Posted by RyanD There are so many more valuable things that could be sold to players and GMs beyond new rules that I get greatly irritated by how many "rulebooks" I see in the marketplace. I thought this topic deserved its own thread. (Wow - two threads from me in one day. Feels...

Don't confuse a statement of generalities (some rules lite games are more fun for some players) with an observation of specific application (when we studied the problem we found that the "rules density" of a game was not the primary influence on game fun in the groups we studied). Those...

Those are all excellent things worth testing under controlled environments. My gut instinct is that you are right in general that there are two many kinds of modifiers. I suspect that some of the modifier proliferation is directly linked to power inflation (how can I get some more stackable...

Answer to Question #1: No: The mission was not to alter the power balance between DM and Player - the mission was to make D&D more fun to play. The power balance shifted as a result of that design goal. (Is that a tautology? Perhaps my answer should be "yes" - it is a bit of chicken & egg...

Don't you think that's a true statement? I mean, don't you think that there are a number of RPG players who were dissatisfied with D&D, who were casting about for something "Better", who latched on to the obvious candidate pushed by the industry (rules lite) and who convinced themselves that...

I don't think it would be much help to "name names" at this late date. That was work I was involved in pre-3e, and I could not give you a complete list of games we tested as the memories are now hazy. I will say that we did test most of the games on the sales charts at the time. With regard...

Excellent and interesting thread about my comments on Mike Mearls' blog. Unfortunately, I think my point was missed. I'd like to clarify. Rather than being a specific critique of "rules lite" systems, my point was that the roleplaying game concept as a whole suffers from many problems that...

Here's the text of a message I wrote in an industry insider forum that sums up what I know about the relative sizes of the gaming industry over time: You could divide the history of hobby game retailing in North America into 4.1 phases. The ".1" is the part when Avalon Hill boxed wargames and...

I've got some stuff I really treasure. Besides various signed/embossed/one-of-a-kind 3E books that I really can't replace, I've got: L3 from the Silver Anniversary Boxed Set, the "last 1st Edition module ever!" with my name in the credits! A copy of the Ringworld boxed set + the hard to find...

I didn't say that. I said D&D was a "heroic adventure game". No "RP aspects" were deleted from 3E. Can you name any? If anything, "RP aspects" were added to 3E in the form of unlimited multiclassing and prestige classes. The point you're missing that the 3E was designed with a game...

The first "D&D" boxed sets were an excellent entry point. In the early 1980's, TSR sold more than a million of those sets in one year. They had wide enough distribution that they got D&D into the hands of a significant portion of the people likely to find a hobby in the game. At no point...

As a student in general of the concept of open gaming, I think you probably already know what my answer will be. The OGL acts to increase the efficiency of the transmission of ideas in game design. In fact, it increases the efficiency of that transmission almost all the way to 100%. Weird...