NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 3702950" data-attributes="member: 11999">I think there a number of reasons why they are choosing to release 4th Edition in the near future, other than the cynical "they want to make us buy everything again" stuff that keeps coming up.  Product cycles have changed in pretty much every industry; customers generally have far more options to choose from than they did 20 years ago and the access to purchase pretty much anything from anywhere in the world.  Nearly every retail product is being refreshed far more frequently than in the past, or they simply get buried and forgotten under newer products.1.  Like 2nd Edition before it, 3.5e has gotten rather bloated and unwieldly, in terms of game mechanics.  This is certainly part of a cycle, where expansions beyond the core game keeping adding to it and increasing the complexity until such point as it becomes very intimidating for new players. 2.  3.5e was a relatively minor revision to 3.0, and other companies have advanced the "state of the art" of RPG design in the past 7 years, such as Green Ronin with True20.  WOTC's own d20 Modern and Star Wars: Saga Edition also illustrate this.  Most of these other games are more streamlined than D&D 3.5, and a common complaint of old-edition grognards is that 3.x has too many rules. 3.  Launching 4th Edition in conjunction with the Digital Initiative is the smoothest way to integrate the two.  Online/Web support for 3.x was always a bit tacked-on, despite the character generator included with the 3.0 PHB.  4th Edition is going to be built from the ground up with the Digital Initiative in mind.  This will hopefully make it a lot easier to get support for supplemental rules than it is now.4.  3.0 and 3.5 are not perfect, my any stretch of the imagination.  I do think that they are a dramatic improvement over 2e, but there are a number of elements of the game that have emerged over the past 7 years as not working particularly well.  3.x/D20 gives them a solid foundation to build on, and with 7 more years of feedback from millions of players, we may see a game that both better serves our needs and is more approachable for new players.  (I can dream)</blockquote>

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