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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WyzardWhately" data-source="post: 3813736" data-attributes="member: 33207">I buy new games *all the time.*  If 4E manages the following two conditions, I'm most likely going to buy it.1.  It doesn't suck.2.  It seems likely to get a lot of play-time.If it sucks, I won't buy it because I try not to buy games that suck.  Regardless of what you've seen on the internet, there aren't a whole lot of popular RPGs that suck or are 'unplayable.'  I've never understood how you can rail against a game for sucking when it has a big thriving community of people who play it.  There aren't a lot of games out there with a bunch of people playing them that I'm outright too good to touch the core books for.  Specific campaigns, maybe.  Two is more complicated.  In order to play, I pretty much need other humans to play with.  If they're all playing 4E, it behooves me to have access to those materials.  There aren't a lot of really popular games that I don't have at least the basic materials for - the only one I can think of is GURPS.  And D&D is far more common that GURPS.  Hell, it's nearly as common as dirt.  So WotC is in a pretty good position regarding me buying their manual next spring.  Now, this isn't a blank check to put forth only the minimum quality to get a horde of D&D players, a horde which is big enough to give me an incentive to be prepared to play it.  See, what really matters is whether I buy expansions.  I'll buy the PHB based on the 'doesn't suck' standard.  But they need to ROCK to get me to buy the expansions.In 3.x, far too many of the expansions failed to rock.  Lords of Madness was good, Fiendish Codex II was good, most of the environment/setting stuff like frostburn and stormwrack were supposed to be good although I never got them.  Heroes of Battle and Tome of Magic (the book with the truenamer) were sadly, well, not so great.  Then they turned it around and Heroes of Horror was pretty damn decent.  And I know they want to make expansions I'm going to buy, which I won't do if the core system doesn't give me what I want.So far, I'm pretty enamored of having a real social conflict system.  Good social combat rules are one of the major things I look for in a game.  I realize that social combat is flame-bait of the first order, but I love it and that's part of what my decision will be based on.But, y'know, it's not too tough for someone to look the game over first before they buy it.  So, if you're worried, just make it clear you're going to be a critical consumer.  It's not fair to the designers to declare, at this stage, that 4E is going to be terrible.  But it's not fair to YOU to buy it sight unseen, either.  If you have any doubts, don't pre-order.  Take your time.  Someone at your table will buy it first, take a look through it and hang out.  You can wait a week after the release date to make your decision, if that's what you want.What I'm getting at here is that too many people are acting like we have to marry ourselves to the new edition RIGHT NOW or else FORSAKE IT FOREVER, and that's just not the case.</blockquote>

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