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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5025067" data-attributes="member: 3820">Where you see spin, I see two things that are both (except for the "great majority" rider) true. There are players who didn't like 3e who don't like 4e and there 4e players who didn't play 3e. And also, 4e brought in players who didn't like 3e and there are a lot of 4e players who used to play 3e. There are even folks who went from "love it" to "hate it" with 3e — which can be a bitter topic of conversation if you still love it. The only spin I think you can take from these situations is by trying to apply something like poll results on a site like this as if they were market research. The only truly objective statements I think I've seen regarding these polls are "these aren't really representative of anything beyond the specific few hundred people voting in them." This is something I'd be interested in if it's true, but I'm not sure there's anything but the anecdotal to back it up. Where were these "latest fad-ers" when 3e was born? Did they stay loyal to it during the time? Do they try games other than D&D at all, and if so, what else have they been looking at? What is the "latest fad"? If this is true I know several marketing folks who would give their eyeteeth to be able to track it with any accuracy. I'm curious about that. Is there a good way to separate out, say, the people who "came back to D&D with 3e" from the "most long-term loyal," for instance? Clearly they weren't the most consistent buyers if they weren't picking up much 2e stuff. Would they be "lastest fad-ers"?It's more interesting than just that. You can game the system, so to speak, by purchasing a month here and there but cancelling thereafter. When you do so, you get insane amounts of content — pretty much all the rules that have been published since your last dip into the system — and you get to keep it when you're not subscribed. The character builder works just fine offline; you only update it every month if you're into that. And tools like the monster builder are outright competition against the Monster Manuals themselves.It's not just a "sign up and have your card charged monthly" deal. Once they got it running, it really became a whole new model for doing business. There's still the books for people who prefer them, but people who are growing up with "patch day" and "microtransactions" have an RPG that is evolving with regular downloads. Speaking as someone in the business, I'm really impressed at how it not only works, but is commonly (and I would say rightly) perceived as a bargain even if you don't game it and just subscribe.It's pretty telling that one of the biggest obstacles to creating third-party 4e products at present, even if you're fine with the GSL, is that there's so much more indifference from the player base because third-party products don't get fed into the Compendium. You could publish a brilliant necromancer class tomorrow, and it would be tepidly received because it doesn't have the added value of the character builder. This is a situation that has never occurred before in tabletop RPG publishing: the e-tools are cannot-be-ignored significant. This is a big thing. Pretty much. The real dividing point is how people define D&D in their heads, which is always tied to key experiences. The circumstances surrounding your most memorable experiences with save-or-die, for instance, have a lot to do with whether you think the loss of save-or-die is a bug or a feature. It's just kind of tragic, though. At the end of the day, all game preferences should amount to is "I like playing X game in Y fashion." Unfortunately, somewhere along the line comes "I don't like playing X game in Z fashion and I'll tell you why in aggressive terms," and then that's one step to reading it as "and if you like playing it in Z fashion you are wrong," and look, it's the Internet.</blockquote>

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