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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1463422" data-attributes="member: 10201">Yep. I actually agree that things are pretty good now. Thankfully, my worst fears of the effects of D20 System haven't yet come to pass. The short-term effects were bad (IMHO, 2001 was a heck of a lot worse for RPGs than '96), the middle-term effects appear to be shaking out as mostly-good; i hope i'm equally wrong about the long-term effects [as i appear to have been about the middle-term effects].I believe that 1492 is D20 System. As for the rest of the list: if you're accepting my premise that innovation in RPG mechanics is good, then trying to refute the claim that it's not occurring really requires showing new game systems. Of those above, 1 is essentially a reprint (of something that was never out of print to begin with); 13 are new editions with, AFAIK, no radical mechanical changes; and 6 or 7 use existing systems (i'm gonna guess the Palladium ones will, too, but i wouldn't know). So, in terms of evidence of RPG mechanical innovation, that list of 50 becomes a list of 30 or fewer. Still, i'll grant you, a pretty decent list. And you missed a lot (our own Four Colors al Fresco and Dread, for example <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ). Though, on the gripping hand, Cyberpunk v.3 is hardly the only one on the list that may or may not ever actually exist.And the continued--or possibly resurging--strength of Hero System and GURPS and BESM also point to this. I don't question that the RPG market has a lot of innovation right now. And some of it is directly attributable to D20 System--both innovative D20 System games, and people overreacting against D20 System. Nonetheless, i suspect that we'd have even *more* innovation if D20 System didn't exist (or, more specifically, if the market-warping muscle of the D&D trademark weren't tied to a specific instantiation of the D20 System). Actually, i think the real tragedy of this is the possibility of the bubble bursting. Only now, after around 4 years, do i finally see D20 System really producing the surge of innovation that open-content development promises. And it's happening at about the same time that i'm starting to hear from retailers, publishers, and gamers that they're getting sick of D20 System.  It'd be a horrible shame if the bubble actual burst, just as D20 System was really starting to flower, because it took the producers so long to get around to branching away from D&D (as a group--obviously there were a few people doing it right from the start). Not to mention the possibility of a burst right now taking a fair number of producers, distributors, and retailers with it, much as the bursting of the CCG bubble did.</blockquote>

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