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You're the one who said that anyting but perfomance may be irelevant. Ok then, everything but performance is irelevant, crack cocaine is a better rpg than any of the ones we talk about. After all, as you said, quite literally, everything but market performance is irelevant in that scenario...

Just touching on what people said above: don't sweat the finale early on, and in general, try to front load your campaign as opposed to the opposite. Don't hold back, or plan for some far off event- keep your focus on the stuff going on game by game, and making that the best you can. I'm...

Both skill challenges and monster power are key failures of early 4e design, and tbqh skill challenges should be scrapped and replaced. I would advise against the assumption that what's needed here is specialisation for a group or style- there's a lot of straight, generic failure going on in for...

In other words, you reject genuine innovation, and place impossible restrictions on it. The reason they went as far with 4e as they did, is because they realised that to fix it, they were best off rebuilding it. If you can't accept that, then you're not after innovation. There's nothing...

By this logic the best tabletop rpg in history if world of warcraft. After all, only sales matter, right? Everything else: design, content, medium- is irrelevant. In fact, by this logic, the best tabletop rpg in history is crude oil, which clearly outperforms all rpgs by a wide margin! Even...

If you drop 4e after two years and go back to a previous edition, you're not making a decision based on design. If you went to another system, that I could see as a legitimate design informed by design, but the idea that 3e or another edition is better designed is just a joke, including...

Actually that's not a solution at all, that's just a cop-out people use when they don't want to seriously discuss design in any concrete terms, but still want to bash their least favorite edition of D&D. Here's an example. Say I decide that the design of 3e is inherently supportive of...

The POL settting certainly seems like a generic 'lots of ruins' setting, rather than the savage wildnerness you might see in some other subgenres. But setting is not mechanics when the mechanics make so few refrences to the setting. Yes yes, everythng is just a matter of opinion, in other words...

I was there. I was watching through the whole thing, on multiple forums. I wasn't active here, but I was certainly lurking. And you're reading a great deal into every step of what happened, and it's not fair on WOTC, or the broader comunity to blame basically everyone for something that was...

I think modular design would be a disaster in general. The idea that everyone can have what they want, and design can simply serve endless playstyles might be pleasant, but it isn't realistic from a design pov past a certain point, and can cause a lot of sales and fanbase issues as noted...

I didn't quote you out of context you primadonna, I just snipped your post to save space. I cerrtainly didn't attack a point you didn't make, I was simply discussing broader the issue, starting with your post. I'm not trying to 're-sell' you on 4e or anything, but I will note for the sake of...

To be clear, i'm talking about 4e the way all most rpgs are talked about- including minimal, functional house rules. To make 4e more dangerous there are a few things you can do, and really they all come down to the kind of monsters. For instance, the dark sun monsters are often a lot nastier...

Implications of mechanics, for gameplay, as opposed to meaningless drivel about how fun somebody's terrible 1e rogue was despite himself, or whatever. These are roleplaying games. If they're games, then the rules have to add to the fun. Otherwise, why have them? For the sake of tradition, no...

I don't deny that their modules are popular, and i'm not going to pretend that wotc modules have been up to snuff. They totally win that comparison, although I wonder exactly who is buying modules from each company, and why, and how much of sales they account for. I don't have any problem with...

Actually it's not a matter of swaying them, or convincing them, it's a matter of giving them a starting point for a more rational assesment of the issue. Second, you assume that the concepts i'm summarising are not of rational merit, but anyone who has a rational view of game design knows...

Actually, all 4e did was remove a bunch of obstructions that prevented people from understanding the game. With the time that used to be wasted trying to divine the rules through a haze of indecipherable stats and subsystems, 4e players and gms can instead focus on making the game cooler. This...

Based on their design work for pathfinder, and the new classes? No. I don't think they could. I think they're good at maknig modules and acessories, but I see nothing to suggest that they could handle 4e, even if they wanted to. Again, really really good designers from outside of the D&D...

To be honest, it was a lot more than the gsl that drove away third party support. Fred hicks did a nice little postmortem when shutting down his 4e line, one bad egg, which he and some other decent devs were doing. Notable was the online character builder, but what was really interesting is...

Well, they did gamma world, maybe they'll just spin out a minimalist dungeon crawly game, or even a generic, multi-setting-ready game, and see how it goes? After all, 4e was preceeded not only by the bot9s, but the saga edition of the starwars rpg. They could o one book to test the waters...

If you haven't done so already, take a look at savage worlds.