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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 3732393" data-attributes="member: 710">The unfortunate truth is that backwards compatibility and innovation are opposing each other. When making a new edition of a RPG or a new edition of a software (especially an OS), you have to make trade offs between these two.I recently checked out some details on a Microsoft Research Project called "Singularity". It's a OS that is based entirely on managed code, designed for system security and correctness instead of performance. The OS is entirely experimental and it on itself will never be available on the market. The cool thing about it: It is safe, dependable and "very" correct. And thanks to this feature, they suddenly also manage to get a system that is pretty fast (faster than Windows or Linux) (the reason for this is that current systems also need a lot more safety/security and correctness, and can only achieve this with "expensive" work-arounds). Unfortunately, the system is absolutely not backwards compatible. Old software will not work on this system, because the way it is created is at odds with the foundation of the system. Which means, the system is totally innovative and leaps above most the things we have today, but only on a very fundamental system level. You don't have any kind of Office software for it, no game runs on it, even the simplest notepad is rendered uselss and in fact every frigging hardware driver has to be completely rewritten (a lot more work than the companies probably had to do for switching drivers from XP to Vista, and you might know that this seemed not to go as fast or easy as one would whish). No patch can fix an old application to work on the new OS. It has to be rewritten. Which is possible (and might actually make the software itself better, too.), but takes a lot of time. In the mean while, all you have is the OS. Which isn't particularly useful for anyone except tinkerers. It's hard to make a fair comparison for a game, but maybe this works: Instead of modelling D&D fantasy games, the new role playing system strives for great gameplay balance. It achieves this goal, and as a cool side effect the system is still very versatile and allows you to play any kind of character (like a spellcaster and a mech pilot in the same game). But the game system itself doesn't provide the exact rules for these characters. You still need to design the classes yourself, and you also have no adventures or campaign setings that go with it. Sure, they will all come, but they aren't there in the beginning. I don't really know if it is realistic to assume that such fundamental change would ever work. I don' get the impression that D&D 4 will be that bad. Personally, I don't really care wether I can import my old characters into the new system, because in 8 months, all current on-going D&D campaigns will probably have ended already, and even if not, it's not as if I couldn't run both systems a while together.</blockquote>

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