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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8832772" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Of course, this falls into the "never fix something if it seems to work" pitfall: "Well it's currently working, so clearly there's no reason to change anything at all or consider alternative approaches or address any concerns people might have."Or, more simply put, something can be widely used and selling well despite, and not because of, its characteristics. Consider, for example, YouTube. Content creators really have no choice; if you want to make money by putting out content for other people to watch, it's YouTube or bust,* and Google is quite well aware of this. They can do basically what they like, and people on the platform have to put up with it or shout into the void and hope it inspires the end user to do something that will negatively affect YT's revenues. Content creators often grumble about the platform (or, more commonly, the algorithm), expressing how frustrating and often frightening it is to have one's livelihood so easily tossed about. If there were meaningful alternatives to YouTube, people WOULD pursue them. But they basically don't exist,* so people take what they can get.This is part of why I stress the "only game in town" issue so often. Frequently, it is somewhere between difficult and impossible to find a game that isn't 5e D&D or 3.X/PF, so if you want to game, you have to tolerate whatever those games contain. If you really love classless systems...tough luck buddy, hope you can stomach never ever getting to play a system like that. If you dislike vancian spellcasting, I feel you, but we're pretty much SOL when it comes to finding games that don't use it. Etc. And that's just macro-scale mechanics; there could be any of dozens of little nagging issues that aren't enough to make you refuse to play, but which annoy you when they come up...and your alternatives are "deal with it, or never game" in many cases.I don't mean to characterize this as some looming "everyone actually hates 5e, they just play it because everyone else is." That would be patently ridiculous. Instead, my point is that "popular," "selling a lot," "widely-used," and "genuinely liked from top to bottom," are all distinct from each other. A game can be popular and sell poorly, or popular but criticized. (Consider Cyberpunk 2077!) A game can sell poorly and yet still see widespread use. Don't mistake "most people play this," nor even "most people have a positive attitude about this," for "this is an unequivocally successful design with no issues." That's a major mistake, one I have seen WotC itself make multiple times over the years.And that's to say nothing about the potential pitfalls of exclusively pursuing popularity over other concerns. I think very poorly of arguments that resort to accusations of "pandering," but we cannot ignore the fact that something designed to get the maximum number of butts in seats often results in one-hit wonders and enjoyable but empty experiences. Consider James Cameron's Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time...which completely disappeared from the public consciousness within a year of release.)*A very small handful of alternatives exists for certain things, e.g. Twitch...but Twitch is if anything in a worse position than YT right now.</blockquote>

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