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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5331405" data-attributes="member: 4937">I admire the stance because its unconventional, counterintuitive, and hasn't been said before.  I love listening to people move against the flow.But if you are an old hat at moving against the flow (like me) sometimes you know that you are just going to turn out to be in the wrong afterall.   I think this is one of those times.First, I don't think you can make such blanket statements about what people, of any age group or at any time, want or wanted.  You aren't dealing with remotely homogenous groups.Second, you might be right about people's perception of Conan, but Conan is a much more complex character than that.Thirdly, that's not how successful properties actually work.  D&D was successful when it was introduced, because it worked as well for me - the elementary school kid - as it worked for my cousin who was as old as my dad.  I think this probably took the designers of D&D somewhat by surprise, as I don't think they concieved of elementary or junior high school kids being a significant market for the game.  However, most any thing that is extremely popular is extremely popular because it works well on several levels.  You can appreciate 'Star Wars' at age 3 or age 30.  You can appreciate the 'Avatar: The Last Airbender' cartoons at age 4 or age 40.  Walt Disney made a fortune off the realization that you succeeded not by marketing your product to kids or adults, but to both kids and adults.  You had something in there for everyone.Lastly, I think you might be wrong about which audience 4e has most alienated.  On the boards here, I think its 'old' guys like me who grew up with D&D that are more likely to reject 4e than 'young' guys who got into the hobby post 1e.  I'm not sure that you can make the argument that 4e was designed for me.  Third edition clearly was harking back to AD&D 1.5 (post Unearthed Arcana) as its model for the game and billing itself as an updated version of that (with a pretty high degree of honesty in my opinion), but 4e I think clearly was not.   I think 4e looked not to the history of the game, but towards the history of RPG divergence from D&D for its design inspiration.So, wonderfully argued and great for provoking thought (an attribute that is both overvalued and scarcer than is claimed), but I think pretty much entirely wrong nonetheless.  On the bright side, keep thinking like that, because most of the time going against concensus is more likely to be correct than not in my opinion and experience.As for 4e being the best designed system, I think that's correct for certain values of 'best designed'.   I think its the tightest, most cohesive, most focused set of rules D&D has ever had.  I think its the only version of D&D that has ever had a tight coupling between the intention of the rules and the actual results.   I think it is the only version of the rules to ever go through a comprehensive design process.  I think that it would be the edition of the game most likely to win a design contest judged by people who hang out at FORGE.I just don't think any of those things are actually or at least necessarily good attributes for an RPG.  In terms of fun, I'd still rather play the organicly created undesigned hodge podge that is 1e AD&D because its rules didn't exist to meet design goals, but to address in play issues.  Sometimes evolution just beats the pants off design, in the same fashion that free markets often beat command economies.  There is a wisdom in crowds.   And there is a wisdom that comes from years and years of actually functioning RPG groups that can't easily be distilled in a design or a designer.  And incidently, yes, that is a contridiction.  However, I find that sometimes contridictory things are both in fact true.</blockquote>

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