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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 9225390" data-attributes="member: 7023840">First, I appreciate the honest (if somewhat unsparing) assessment.With that in mind, I really think that this gets to the crux of the issue. We've seen many people on this thread note that they tried 4e, and bounced off of it for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it was because they didn't like the way that it played. Sometimes it was because it wasn't good for one or more people in their group. The point is- it wasn't just a loud contingent of people who were dead-set against 4e and complained about. There was also a number (that number is undetermined, of course) of people who tried the new edition, and it didn't stick.Which brings us back to the OP, and the point of this thread. 4e was the fastest edition to be abandoned. As I've noted previously, it was already dead within Hasbro prior to the release of Essentials ... which means that it was dead within two years of its release. We don't know the exact trend lines, but I would suspect, based on that information, that the trend lines were not good; that a number of people that originally purchased 4e chose not to continue playing it. Obviously, while this is trivially true (there are some number of people for whom this is true), without knowing the actual numbers, we can't know how much of a factor this was.But it comes back to what you are saying in this quote. This is the essential divide. A game can be incredibly well-designed for some people, but not for all people. You had a massive generation of players raised on the TSR model of D&D that were still around. You had the recent generation of players who had fully bought into the newer mechanics of 3e. Telling these people that they just deserve their fate ... well, that's not likely to go over well with them. That's why 4e was rocket fuel to PF and OSR. People often get caught up in a senseless debate. 4e wasn't a bad game; I know that I have repeatedly said that 4e was a game that had a strong P.O.V. from a design perspective, and it was a well-designed game! But (IMO) it wasn't a well-designed game in terms of being "The D&D game that would appeal to D&D fans in the broadest and most commercially successful way," which is a different design task. I think that the revelations that we've been seeing speak to an insularity of the design team, who made well-intentioned decisions regarding design that were nonetheless incorrect given their task; it wasn't their task to make what they thought was the best design- it was their task to make a game that would be popular and sell a lot of copies and support Hasbro's other initiatives. I think it would be interesting to find out what drove this design process in more detail. For example, we all know that WoTC looked extensively at what players wanted when designing 3e, and we are all familiar with the playtests and consensus model used for 5e. Neither of which is likely to produce cutting-edge or innovative design, but it likely to lead to safe, boring, and commercially successful decisions.</blockquote>

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