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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3711293" data-attributes="member: 22882">Did D&D need another edition?Probably not, except from an IP health perspective - the alternative to a new edition would almost certainly have been the death of non-setting-specific material from WotC within the next few years.  You mention that you like keeping up with the newest cool stuff - well, chances are very high that there wouldn't have BEEN much if any new cool stuff, that the design space in the existing framework was basically expended.  I know whenever I sat down to try and concept even something as small as an article for Dragon in the last couple of years, I kept bumping into the realization that either what I wanted to do wouldn't work for D&D or it had already been done.  Often, it had been done twice or more, and the most refined version was pretty close to as good as it was going to get within the existing framework.A new edition reopens much of that design space and opens more.  If it's good (which we won't know for sure until it hits shelves), it will open a lot more and do the things it does better.  It will be the ultimate in 'new cool stuff' to keep up with.Let me just say right now - I liked every single one of the 3.5 changes, but I don't think they opened up much, if any, new design space.  The Mystic Theurge, Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster constituted the entirety of the 'new cool stuff' in that release, and they were basically patches to the system.  The whole core re-release was comprised of patches to the system, which meant it was, ultimately, not cool or exciting at all.The first two Complete books (Warrior and Divine) were very similar to the 3.5 core: they were basically addressing the things that were wrong about the enthusiastic but screwy 3.0 splatbooks.  They were bug fixes.  Complete Adventurer and especially Complete Arcane actually opened up some new design space - I would assume Complete Arcane represents the first in-house '4e testbed product,' courtesy of the Warlock class.  Those two products got back on the track of bringing the awesome rather than fixing the broken.  The Expanded Psionics Handbook opened a ton of design space (some of the ONLY space that WASN'T filled in the intervening years, actually) even though it obviously started out as a bug fix, too.A new edition that focuses on the good parts of new releases - on bringing the awesome in new and interesting ways - will provide you with more 'new cool stuff' than you could ever get anywhere else.A new edition that focuses on the bad parts - on bug fixes, on filling the smallest imaginable niches - will be boring and drab as 3.5 was.We can't know for sure which 4e will be until it comes, but based on your description of your tastes and buying habits, I suspect it will actually give you MORE of what you want, rather than less - and definitely more than you would have gotten in the future without it.</blockquote>

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