WayneLigon
Adventurer
It wouldn't have been all that bad an idea.
I would certainly think it would be easier to fire the existing customer base. No worries about sacred cows, conversion, unrealistic expectations, or cries of 'now you want me to buy everything all over again'. No having to include stuff from the past to mollify those who can't live without their Bigby or Mordenkainen or Nine Hells or Vancian memorization or whatever. For a designer, it would be heaven not to be shackled by the past, both it's successes (against which you'll be compared) and it's failures (which you'll be either expected to fix or leave alone because 'it ain't D&D').
Honestly, it wouldn't be hard. No significant amount of the gaming population plays a game that is not in print; for all the noise some seem to generate here.
I like 3E; it made D&D worth my time and attention again, for the first time in a long time. But it's always been my contention that 3E is the first in a series of steps along a road that will leverage the comparatively massive fanbase of D&D towards a more modern rules set with a minimum of disruption or significant loss of playerbase. I think 4E will continue that, and somewhere around 6E, we'll have what we should have had around 1995 or so.
Now, a lot of the evolution that would have - should have - naturally occurred, didn't. This came from D&D being run by a company that didn't listen to it's customers. Lorraine Williams doesn't shoulder 100% of the blame for this, either. Regardless of the blame, what's it led to is a wholly unrealistic expectation of stability - ten years between editions isn't a feature, it's a bug. In most other businesses if you did things exactly the same way you did them ten years ago you wouldn't be praised, you'd be fired. And rightly so.
Customers who expect the exact same things out of a company for 20 straight years deserve to be fired as well.
I wouldn't mind seeing Paizo create their own gaming system. I think that might, in the long run, be a good thing. It would certainly be vastly interesting to see what they'd come up with. But I think that they'll be provided the 4E rules just like other publishers will, and they'll convert just like the others will.
I would certainly think it would be easier to fire the existing customer base. No worries about sacred cows, conversion, unrealistic expectations, or cries of 'now you want me to buy everything all over again'. No having to include stuff from the past to mollify those who can't live without their Bigby or Mordenkainen or Nine Hells or Vancian memorization or whatever. For a designer, it would be heaven not to be shackled by the past, both it's successes (against which you'll be compared) and it's failures (which you'll be either expected to fix or leave alone because 'it ain't D&D').
Honestly, it wouldn't be hard. No significant amount of the gaming population plays a game that is not in print; for all the noise some seem to generate here.
I like 3E; it made D&D worth my time and attention again, for the first time in a long time. But it's always been my contention that 3E is the first in a series of steps along a road that will leverage the comparatively massive fanbase of D&D towards a more modern rules set with a minimum of disruption or significant loss of playerbase. I think 4E will continue that, and somewhere around 6E, we'll have what we should have had around 1995 or so.
Now, a lot of the evolution that would have - should have - naturally occurred, didn't. This came from D&D being run by a company that didn't listen to it's customers. Lorraine Williams doesn't shoulder 100% of the blame for this, either. Regardless of the blame, what's it led to is a wholly unrealistic expectation of stability - ten years between editions isn't a feature, it's a bug. In most other businesses if you did things exactly the same way you did them ten years ago you wouldn't be praised, you'd be fired. And rightly so.
Customers who expect the exact same things out of a company for 20 straight years deserve to be fired as well.
I wouldn't mind seeing Paizo create their own gaming system. I think that might, in the long run, be a good thing. It would certainly be vastly interesting to see what they'd come up with. But I think that they'll be provided the 4E rules just like other publishers will, and they'll convert just like the others will.