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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brother MacLaren" data-source="post: 3933530" data-attributes="member: 15999">That wasn't my experience in the campaign I ran from levels 2-12, for several reasons due to my group of players, the PC builds, and the monsters the party faced.  The barbarian dominated in damage output, the ranger was second, and the casters were left in the dust.  The ClericZilla never happened in my game; the long setup time made it unfeasible in most circumstances (fortunately, the wizard had foresaken conjuration, so this party never did the scry-buff-teleport routine).But regardless, the splats DID increase the power level of the PCs relative to the monsters. This means you need tougher CRX monsters, which means new players can't expect to thrive with core-only PCs because the new CRX monsters are so much tougher than they used to be.  So they need to buy the splats, and then new and improved splats come out to push the arms race further along.  In the first round of 3.5 splats, the caster splats were certainly the worst, with Divine Metamagic and those awful orb spells.  There might not be a business model for D&D that would allow them to get the kind of revenues they want and would keep me as part of their customer base.  I, as a customer, will probably just hop off the edition treadmill and go back to playing by the BECMI rules forever, house-ruled as individual DMs see fit.  I'd like there to be new places to explore and new adventures to have, not new classes or spells or feats.  If WotC were to re-publish the old Gazetteers and modules, I'd buy them if I was running a campaign, but that business model would leave their revenues below what they would like (since there are many gamers who are just players, never DMs).  I like the Mystara setting and am always glad to see more of it; I like modules because, believe it or not, some professional writers have skill at adventure design and plotting that exceeds my own.  And some just have crazy ideas that I'd never have come up with.  Oh, I suppose I might buy some dice or software tools from time to time.  Software tools could be a much stronger business line, such as 3-D dungeon visualizations -- I input my map, the tool converts it to a "PCs' point of view", and I hook that up to the TV for the players to look at as we play.  Visually convey dark and narrow tunnels with flickering torches, grand ballrooms of demented wizard aristocracy -- yeah, I'd pay $50 for a "Virtual Castle Amber".  But I neither need nor want any new mechanics. I don't want to ever again buy a book because it will allow me to have a more powerful PC.  I think the game could thrive with less focus on special abilities gained at each level; I know that thinking back to the B/X and early 2e games we played in junior high and high school, the memorable things are the quests and adventures, not the abilities.</blockquote>

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