10 years was too long.

[diaglo]

Are you saying there are theaters where you live that have different prices for different movies? And I'm not talking about matinee prices either.

yes. some offer discounts for seniors, military, students, etc... some do not. some cost only $1 for matinees b/c they get the movies 4 weeks later. some offer free passes. and so on...

much like online stores do now with RPGs. and even FLGS did back in the day.

retail/list price... the OD&D books were too expensive. and all of the editions since have been. but smart shoppers can find the bargain/ price that they should be worth.

the 2000ed were worth close to what they released them at in the beginning. IMO, 10% less/ book even.

As an economist, I think stuff should be priced where most of the customers will buy it. By my logic, D&D is priced just about right, for the most part. That said, 3.5 fell under my demand threshold. The changes didn't particularly excite me, and I wasn't ready to spend that much on core books again.

as a consumer. it is painful to pay too much. it is like buying a contract on phone service or Internet Provider and then finding out they are discounting it 3 months later for new customers but not you...

 

[woodelf]

I could be dead wrong, but I believe that many of those "innovations" came from Rolemaster as well.

Monster Experience based on Character Level vs Monster Level requiring cross referencing of charts? Check.

Skills that must be purchased every level and have different cost? To a lesser extent, (i.e. combat skills aren't purchased and the wide range of skills aren't present.) Check.

Background Options that let you do interesting things with your character? We'll call those feats and allow 'em at every say, third level.

Ability for character scores to actually improve as the character goes up in level?

Now some of those may be a stretch but Rolemaster was certainly one of the building blocks of the new edition.

Yep. That's why i included "RMSS" is my list of antecedents. (That's "Role Master Standard System", effectively Rolemaster 2nd ed, in case you're just not familiar with it.)

Arguably, Ars Magica + classes + levels would also get you to D&D3E feats and D&D3E skills, without any other influences. And, while i'm not particularly familiar with RMSS, i can also see the new challenge-based XP chart as a natural evolution of the AD&D1/2 system, which already had levels for monsters (I through X) and cross-referenced monster level and character level when determining XP.

 

[woodelf]

And as I've already mentioned, mere existance of the parts in another game is not sufficient. The other games would have to circulate and percolate for a while. It takes time for folks to see the things in action, to see what bits are good, and what bits aren't, and then to realize why they are good or bad, and how they might fit with other bits from other games. Each of these other games (and also for games that didn't wind up inspriing D&D design) goes through this process separately. And the designers deal with this process while having day jobs and working on other projects.

So, let's say that the D&D designers spent no time reinventing wheels. Five years - minus the time spent doing the design work on D&D from the bits and the attendant writing, minus also the playtesting time, and the editing time, and the months between the final draft and when it hits the shelves....

What we have is probably only a couple of years between when all the bits became available and the new design begun. How is that unreasonable?

I never said it was unreasonable. Someone argued that D&D3E couldn't have happened earlier, because it drew upon influences too late in time. I'm saying that the influences it drew upon had been around for years, and there's no technical reason it couldn't have happened earlier. Or, to quote a couple gaming luminaries that i overheard at GenCon '00, D&D3E is a state-of-the-art game--for '93.

By the time these elements had shown up in commercial RPGs, the circulating and percolating and seeing the things in action had already occurred, because the ideas were already many years old. Only delay from that point to putting them into a new game is production time--a year or two, IOW. And, like i said, i can *definitely* point to all the pieces of D&D3E being "in the wild" by '96, without even gettintg up and looking at my books. I *suspect* they were out there sooner. And, while we know historically that RMSS and Ars Magica were two huge influences on D&D3E, that's not to say that they were both necessary. My own work at merging AD&D and Ars Magica came pretty close to D&D3E, back in about...'94? '95?--before Ars Magica 4, at any rate. I'm still convinced that simply incorporating the best elements of Ars Magica into AD&D2 would get you to D&D3E, so that means all the tools were already there in '92.

 

[johnsemlak]

Are you saying there are theaters where you live that have different prices for different movies? And I'm not talking about matinee prices either.

.

There are near me. I know at least one theater that charges as much as %100 more for certain movies depending on popularity (e.g. LotR tickets were at the max).

 

[JoeGKushner]

There are near me. I know at least one theater that charges as much as %100 more for certain movies depending on popularity (e.g. LotR tickets were at the max).

Wow. In America, I've seen theaters charge different price based on time or not accept passes for certain movies, but never charge a different amount based on the movie itself!

 

[Pants]

it is painful to pay too much.

Then don't buy it.

 

[BigFreekinGoblinoid]

If 2E was not around for 10 years, we may have missed out on a setting or two - certainly nothing to cry about where Jakondar Island of War! is concerned, but I wouldn't be playing D&D now if it wasn't for Planescape, which I found in 1997, after not having played the game for about 10 years.