Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brother MacLaren" data-source="post: 3925729" data-attributes="member: 15999">Yes, they have to attract new gamers.  But they don't have to change the game to do that.  By and large, the people who don't play D&D now haven't turned their backs on D&D because they don't like the mechanics; rather, they're just not into tabletop RPGs as a whole.  They're not going to notice "hey, you tweaked the fighter's class abilities" and start gaming.  If you show a non-gamer a great time, he might become a gamer whether you were playing 3E, 4E, or Moldvay Basic.D&D is a game.  My other favorite games, Scrabble and Monopoly, have continued to make money for their company despite being fundamentally unchanged for decades.  Shiny new board games come out all the time, but these two classics are still going strong.  Poker has a number of variations, but you don't need to say "Okay, we're ending Texas Hold 'Em forever and starting Night Baseball" to get new players into the hobby.  WotC decided that D&D should follow the business model of computer games, with planned obselescence and a totally new version every few years. I see D&D as more like a board game or a card game.  I can play Scrabble over and over, and it's never the same game twice.  I could happily play in BECM forever.  As long as the mechanics are good enough to allow the story to be enjoyable, and I have a good gaming group, the game is going to be fun.  There's no need to keep tinkering for some mythic perfect system.The fact is that new rulebooks allowed WotC to sell MUCH more material.  New splatbooks in particular.  That opens up a much wider market than just selling campaign settings and adventures for an existing system.  And I can't blame them for wanting to make more money, but it is NOT true that this approach was the only way to bring new gamers into the hobby.  You KNOW that 4E will be obselete in a few years.  It will get burdened down with splatbooks, as 2E and 3E did, the power balance will be out of whack, and they'll want to wipe the slate clean.</blockquote>

Verification