UOTE=BryonD;5603832]Certainly, and I didn't suggest they should cater to "gronards".
But not recognizing the difference between prospective new players and going for the public at large was a big mistake.[/quote]
Toh-may-toe, toe-mah-to. I think that you're conflating 3.x grognards with the gaming public at large. Sure there's a lot of 3.x players, but there's also large minority of gamers that were not interested in 3.0 and were disenfranchised by the attempted domination of the market by D20. Most of those people that I know haven't been interested in 4E either, but a few have liked it as ous own game.
I'm sorry your friends found 3E to be beyond their limitations and I'm glad 4E solved that for you.
Unless you really this thread to get really ugly really fast, stop out with the not-so-veiled insults.You don't know my friends, and you have no right to make insinuations like that.
But, FYI, my friends include a grants writer, a college administrator, two technical writers and a lawyer. Most pf them have have over 15 years of play experience, with games ranging from Runequest to Hero to Exalted. When I say that they did not like the complexities of 3.x, it wasnt because it was beyond their capabilities , but because it was badly designed,in such a way to exclude casual gamers. Others, because they had a better grasp of math than 3.x's designers, quickly saw early on the basic flaws in the design of 3.x. Others, including me, saw the potential in the D20 system, but grew disenchanted with the way it was wasted in a game that seemed more heavily based on, Magic the Gathering than classic D&D.
Fanatics? You clearly don't get the point I'm making.
Meh. Honestly, anyone who uses hyperbole like "worst mistake WOTC ever made" is pretty obviously a fanatic. Anyone who says flat put that 4E isnt really D&D is a fanatic. And so on. Finally, anyone who hopes for a 5E that is a return to something like 3.x is not only a version fanatic, but also engaging in hopeless levels of wistful thinking.
No. I played AD&D. AD&D was cool for its time. And it also had virtually no competition. And 3E has been referenced as a second golden age, so I meant exactly what I said. AD&D was as well, but the market was so different then, it doesn't compare.[/qoute]
I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there was no competition for AD&D. That era was a golden age for rpgs on general, with Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Hero, and dozens of others. AD&D may have had the lions share of the market, but there was a lot of diversity.
That was of course until 3.0 came along with Ryan Dancey's plan to essentially destroy all non-D20 elements of the hobby. The OGC acted like a sneaky virus, enticing companies to abandon their own products in favor of D20 supplements.
Calling 3.x a "golden age" is like calling the Permian extinction a "golden age for life on Earth".
I loved AD&D and I think it was brilliant. But it was also a trailbreaker and learned a ton of lessons the hard way. Everything after has stood upon its shoulders and has it to thank.
But that doesn't chan[/QUOTE]ge the fact that later games DID learn from it and, in the end, AD&D was on a downward path because as competition did grow a lot of people went to other games and little more than brand was carrying D&D. 3E saved the name and actually pulled the community together to a very large extent.[/QUOTE]
First of all, don't misuse the term "Heartbreaker" in such a recursive manner. AD&D by definition cannot be a heartbreaker.
Secondly, you keep forgetting I was there. AD&D was on a "downward spiral" not because of any inherent problem with the game, but because of extremely bad business decisions on the part of TSR and Lorraine Williams. AD&D still had the lion's share of the hobby. If it revitalized the community at all, I suggest that was not due to any virtue of the game itself but to the effects of the marketing and the Open Game License. It was really very clever of Ryan Dancy to fob off the less profitable aspects of brand building onto the very competitors he wanted to destroy.
The "community building" was pretty much conning the competition to do D20 and D&D content. Though the OGC led to some actually decent games such as Mutants and Masterminds and True20, overall it had a deleterious effect on the game community, which is why gamer numbers resumed their decline after 3.5 and the glut of substandard publications.
It's interesting though that people are still buying into Dansey's "there can be only one" philosophy, which the heart of the "splitting the community" argument.
[/QUOTE]You keep talking about easy and hard.
I don't know of a version of D&D that I have ever found anywhere near "hard". I find nothing but downsides in changing the game to cater to people who do.[/QUOTE]
It's not a matter of "easy vs. hard", it's a difference between straightforward and overcomplicated. Straightforward character creation vs. "traps". Creating a character one can just play, and one that has to have their advancement planned out twenty levels on advance. Basic, easy to implement options, and a confusing conglomeration of skills, feats, multiclassing and prestige classes. It's the difference between knowing that your class pick is viable, and finding out that another class can do everything your class can do better, and be useful in a wider range of options as well.
I would rate 4E as pretty advanced, possibly at the level of Skills and Powers. However, I'd pretty straightforward in construction, and like AD&D the goal is to make a fun, useful character of any class. Compare that to 3.X where some character classes are effectively useless.
I've also found that I don't enjoy nearly as much when I play with people who think of RPGs in terms of "figuring out how to win".
Then you shouldn't be playing Pathfinder. The 3.x system is specifically designed to cater to people gaming the system to win, at the expense of elements that make D&D a good game.
If you want a D20 based game that doesn't assume that some choices are "win" and others "lose", play True20 or something. But not any of the 3.x games.
