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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3725427" data-attributes="member: 4937">On one level, this is just more 'Not liking 4E = BadWrongFun' and 'if people aren't liking what they are seeing from 4E, then there is something psychologically badwrong with them', only it is a little more explicit about it than most.  At least it is explicit about it, but at that level its hardly worth responding to.On the other hand, it is a bit more intellectual of an insult than the usual fan boy crap, and on that level its interesting."Getting entrenched people to go along with change is one of the hardest things in the world to do (this is also the reason I beleive that 3E, 4E and probably 5E are all just signposts on the road to where D&D will ultimately end up as a fully-fledged modern game"I'd be really interested in hearing your definition of a 'fully-fledged modern game'.  It seems to me that it would require quite a bit of contortion to claim that D20 is not a fully-fledged modern game system representing the latest tried and proven technology in the RPG world.  Yes, RPG's are new and the technology that they run on is therefore new and like all new technologies it is rapidly evolving.  But RPGs are going on 40 years and D20 is hardly a 1st generation game system.  It is (and especially was when it came out) every bit as cutting edge technology as any other universal system out there, and based on comparitive sales I'd suggest that it probably has advantages as well as drawbacks compared to rival game platforms.  It's not like we are still talking about a 1st generation game like OD&D.  It took D&D longer to divorse itself from its 1st generation roots and embrase (what are we at now?) 4th gen technology, but that's understandable from a business perspective.  No since in fixing what isn't broken, and only when the limitations of your technology are causing you to shed customers do you need to risk a big transformation of the underlying technology.Change has costs.  Change has risks.  It's not like all fear of change is irrational.  Ask anyone who programs large software applications about the cost of change.The thing is, at some point we are going to have a highly evolved paper based RPG technology.  Paper based RPG technology is highly constrained by the real world platform it runs on.  At that point, change won't be about progress.  It will be about change.  It will be about someone deciding what sort of game that person will want to play and adapting the technology in ways that are well understood to achieve the effect that is desired.  It won't be about making things better, just making them different.  So when 5E, or 6E or whatever comes out after that point, the design goal won't be to make the game run on a 'better' paper based technology (and that's even assuming you agree that 3rd edition represents progress over OD&D, which some don't), but will be simply conforming the game more closely to the designers idea of fun or else simply change for the sake of having something new to sell.  You see this problem alot in the software world, where new editions of a utility application come out, and its not always the desire to make the application better which is driving the most apparant changes in the app, but things like whim, personal preference, and the need to keep selling software.What's to say that 4E represents progress, or just whim?Change is not inherently good.  Change is not a virtue any more than stasis is a virtue.  (Can you tell that I'm nuetral with respect to the law/chaos axis?)</blockquote>

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