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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7664895" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm focusing on sales and profits because that was what the posts I initially replied to were talking about, and that was what I wanted to talk about.I have opinions on why many people who have, in the past, bought D&D books from WotC did not buy 4e ones; and why people whom WotC might have reasonably expected to have an interest in playing 4e turned out not to care for it.  And I've expressed those views on multiple occasions in the past, including in threads that you have started or posted in.Given [MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION]'s caution upthread, I'm hesitant to go too far down this path, but I can give some simple examples:* 4e does not emphasise world exploration in the way that classic D&D, and much of 2nd ed AD&D, does; * 4e relies fairly heavily on metagame mechanics, which make the relationship between mechanics and fiction looser than is the case in 3E, and generalises the Gygaxian looseness around hp and saving throw (which many players of AD&D seem to have ignored) across more parts of the game - you can see this issue coming up in the discussion about bounded accuracy upthread, because while 4e's maths is pretty similar to 5e's, it's different relationship to the fiction produces very strongly worded assertions that the two are very different; * 4e's default orientation is towards a certain type of player-driven gaming and against "illusionist" GMing - but it's player-driven default is quite different from the player-driven default of Gygaxian D&D, so it doesn't necessarily resonate with players of either Gygaxian D&D or later, 90s-style AD&D; * 4e drops or downplays certain mechanical tropes traditional to D&D (eg spell slots for most casters) and even where it retains elements of them does not emphasise them (eg 4e wizards still memorise many spells, but this is subordinated rather than emphasised in presentation); * I could go on but I think you get the general gist.These mechanical features of 4e tell us little to nothing about edition wars, however. After all, there are any number of other games which have mechanical features that can be usefully compared and contrasted to those of classic D&D, 2nd ed AD&D and/or 3E (including those systems in relation to one another!) And some of those systems were published by companies who might reasonably have hoped for more uptake from people seemingly interested in buying D&D products than they actually got. (Eg my sense is that this might have been true of Trailblazer during the "edition-war period", and in the 90s might have been true of Rolemaster.) But those other systems aren't associated with edition warring.</blockquote>

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