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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5663523" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well.... yeah, maybe, I dunno. I'm not a professional game designer. I'd consider it like this though. There are 2 groups of designers over there. There are the people that have direct experience with at least 2e, and maybe 1e, because they were at TSR in the day. Then there are the people that don't, though many of them do have 3.x designer credits, which is quite a bit closer at least.I'd think if you were going to gain significant useful experience as an AD&D module designer would need to put out a module, have it on the market long enough to gauge what did and didn't work, and then do that again once or twice, which means a couple year process and a significant investment in writing adventures that are likely to sell next to nothing.I think the problem is they WERE 'cast off' years ago in the case of the OSR type people, and in the case of the 3.x people you're trying to compete squarely with Paizo, which is going to eat you alive when you compete with them in their own arena. Plus you're providing support for THEM, not for you since whatever you put out is basically pretty much PF compatible.That leaves 3 options:1) Wait until 4e ages out and write a 5e that is retro. MAYBE you can walk a line where you lose less of your 4e fans than you regain of older editions fans, but that is by no means certain. Your game could be rejected by the older edition fans for not being their favorite edition AND rejected by the 4e fans for being too retro. That could be real ugly.2) Simply abandon the 4e fans, write a rehash of AD&D and hope that somehow all the 4e fans will realize the errors of their ways and play it, and that all the older edition fans really really wanted the 'Genuine D&D' label on their books so bad that they all flock to your banner.3) Try to market more than one version of the game at the same time by say resurrecting BECMI and continuing to develop and support 4e and beyond.Well, then there's the 4th option, say nice things to all the older edition fans, throw them a few small bones with 'retro-ish' options and go on ahead with the game you've got now and just assume that being the biggest and deepest resource company in the industry you'll sooner or later outlast the competition. You could also of course try to improve the quality of your output, make money off of a digital D&D initiative, etc. In other words you could do what WotC IS doing...In other words IMHO WotC is best served by realizing that they are WotC and playing to their strengths instead of trying to somehow retool themselves into being Paizo lite. I'd say everything that Mike and Co are doing right now is basically exactly that. They're good at board games, so they do some of those. They're good at doing misc play aids, so they do those, and they do some rules and adventures because they pretty much have to.</blockquote>

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