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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 300333" data-attributes="member: 2205">Re: Back to the Dungeon!No offense, but feeble is right.  You say that everyone over at RPG.net are non-players, which is a ludicrous claim, and then you proceed to build a case on that fallacious assumption.  rpg.net was just one data point I used, in part because it is really the center of non-D&D RPGing online, and because it is frequented by many games designers from various companies who chime in with their expert opinions, which arguably carry as much weight as the opinion of someone like Monte Cook.That's why I use a guarded "industry consensus" opinion here.  Outside of the occasionally somewhat myopic D&D world, there's a lot of other stuff going on, and much of it is in direct response to what folks don't like about D&D, especially past editions.  Now I know Ryan Dancey claims that besides D&D the market share of the rest of the guys put together is insignificant (and I don't know what he means by insignificant -- 2%? 20%?) I don't believe that to literally be true.  There are a lot of people I know of, both personally and online (yes, some of them via rpg.net) who play lots of games but who won't touch D&D with a ten-foot pole.  Despite what Dancey says, GURPS and the Storyteller system, for instance, have a lot of adherents.  Things like hack-n-slash, dungeon-crawls, tightly proscribed character classes, HP, levelling: these are often their complaints.  That's why I say it was foolish for WotC to not offer these as alternatives in the DMG.  It could have been done relatively easily (for those of you who complain about playtesting: you think WotC playtested things like the witch spell list?  All the monster PCs available in the DMG?  All the alternate chargen and experience systems?  I really doubt it.)  They could have really brought more people "back into the fold" than they did, and they could have really kept them as well.  They could have really made d20 into the universal system, easily customizable into any genre imaginable, yet they somewhat dropped the ball.  They decided that most people really wanted D&D so they weren't even going to worry about making the mechanics useful to someone who wasn't going to play something very much like D&D.  Only with the release of d20 CoC did I really believe that the d20 mechanics were tweakable into anything that wasn't heroic, two-fisted, pulpy action tales.  Now, I just lament the fact that although the window's been opened and we can see what the system can do if it stretches a little, nobody much has made an effort to stretch it.Instead, we get pages and pages on dungeons, which *in my experience, which is not a scientifically valid sample, but which is pretty broad* few people really want or use anyway.And yes, I wasn't heavily involved in the marketing campaign or the D&D internet sites as 3e was gearing up: I moved to ENWorld right as it was being released.  So, I guess I'm wrong about the "back to the dungeon" focus.  Still, I think the reason 3e is so popular relative to early editions is not because of this focus, rather its because the game is now so flexible that it doesn't have to be a back to the dungeon game, and it still is miles ahead of 2e or other systems.</blockquote>

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