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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4541759" data-attributes="member: 710">But is a game defined by how long you can use its core products, or by how much supplemental products you can get. A Complete Warrior or Martial Power is not a spare part. It's a new thing.I think a game system is more akin to an Operating System. You don't expect an OS to have everything out of the box and to have no new applications to come out. You want to get new games or new programs for it and use them. If someone told you there wouldn't be coming out much, you would actually say that this is probably not a good OS to use.We are currently running four 4E campaigns, and I think they would be playable just using the Core Rules till 30th level. Before that, we haven't tried out everything. That's a long "bang for my buck". But i am also looking forward to the supplements, because I get even more things, some I might just find more inspiring or allowing me to explore character options I haven't thought of before or always wanted to try out before.I remember some people saying that they had enough supplements for 3E to probably last them a life time. If that's true, then 3E fans should be pretty content, because there is enough stuff that they don't even have to remotely care about the fact that there is no longer any 3E support. (Except of course, there is - Pathfinder and other OGL products still exist) But it seems some 3E fans do care - do they expect to live longer then the others? Or play that much more? I think there is nothing wrong in planning an edition to be easily extensible. There might be something wrong in holding stuff back, though - at least if it was already finished on release date. And I think that's not how it is for most things (Frost Giants and Gnomes, perhaps; Druids and Barbarians - I think not). The extra time a later release gives the designers will affect the quality of the products.If I look at 3E, I see a few classes that might have benefited from a longer development cycle - Monks and Bards were always very weak classes, and barely seemed to work. Rangers were criticized a lot and probably had the most number of variants for all classes (Spell-Less Rangers, Rangers without or with different weapon styles and so on). I don't think it would have bad for the game if these classes had been published a year later in a separate book. Similar - the multiclassing rules in 3E were interesting - but unfortunately, they tried to have a unified system from the get go, and it worked badly for multiclassed spellcasters. Only by later creating Mystic Theurge like classes they found a at least somewhat workable fix. It wouldn't have hurt if the had the multiclassing rules built in a more "open-ended" way, like they effectively did in 4E - the core concepts like multiclass feats and paragon multiclassing are set, but the multiclass feats are inherently suitable for expansion. This is a great design choice to sell more books later, but also a great choice to ensure that you can expand and improve on the multiclassing rules later.</blockquote>

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