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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5663762" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yes, I agree with you, in a theorycrafting sort of hypothetical way. The question we would then want to ask is WHY in the entire history of D&D (and pretty close to every other RPG I know of either) has each new edition marked the immediate end of all support for any previous edition? I think the answer is just sheer practicality. There is a minimum 'overhead' level of cost involved with each product you roll out and add to your product catalog regardless of how much of it you're going to sell. There is also obviously a fixed development cost for each product as well. Many of these costs are somewhat subtle. The big ones are just explaining to your distribution and retail chain exactly what it is that each product is, how much of it you believe they should stock, etc. There's also the question of clarity with your audience. Is the new guy coming along wanting to play D&D supposed to buy 4e, 3.5, 2e, 1e, or Basic? Look at the confusion sown just by having Essentials on top of 4e. This is all on top of the fact that since you now have to provide support for 5 product lines instead of 1 that sales of any one given item for any one given edition is going to sell less. You also have to maintain some level of skill base available to develop for each one.Suffice it to say that these and other considerations have pretty well limited EVERY game company to support one edition of a game in the vast majority of cases. You just hurt yourself a LOT in a business sense, and you don't necessarily actually increase the overall satisfaction of your customers with the product due to both confusion and simply lack of focus on one of them. There's a very real danger you simply hurt yourself far more than you help yourself.Even if WotC sold nothing but some old PDFs there's marginally some of this. I could see them doing that though since they can more clearly explain the different products online (if they are careful) and at least there's very little cost involved.Yeah, it is nicely put. I'm skeptical about your conclusion though. I mean you can make some very modest nods towards different play styles, like describing a few different XP systems or having some optional narrative control mechanisms used with say APs or whatever. I'm not really sure that makes the game a narrativist or storytelling or more gamist system in any significant sense though. For instance I know a lot of people make much of the difference in XP between 1e and 2e, but in practice the two systems are effectively just about the same. Very few people ever used training costs in 1e for instance, and given that all characters both work together and generally need to advance at about the same rate the difference between XP for treasure and XP for 'various adventuring activities' was usually pretty moot. Nor was the idea of specific rewards exactly foreign to players of 1e anyway. So, while I don't deny that there's something to what you're saying, I think the linear improvement in mechanics is by far the most relevant and apparent aspect of the evolution of D&D and other variations are second order at best, and usually not even visible in play. Instead the variations that matter to players have more to do with activity focus and style. Does the game spend a lot of time on combat, or does it emphasize exploration or 'other activities'. How does it provide the player with different playable archetypes and what kinds of decisions and resources are emphasized, etc. In this respect different versions of the game are more varied, but I'm not convinced these things are fixed to little bits of the rules. I think to a large extent they are emergent properties that you can't just summon up with a slightly different skill module.</blockquote>

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