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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8054563" data-attributes="member: 6777454">More people played D&D in the 5 years after 3.0 launched than were playing in the 5 years before WotC bought the game. The late 1990s was a dead era for D&D. The game would have effectively ended in 1995 with a decreasing number of people playing it afterwards.The revised handbooks and the classic basic D&D set were pretty much the swan song of the old game. I can't diagnose everything that went wrong, but that really would have been the end had WotC not used the money they made off of Magic the Gathering (which was originally created to supplement D&D) and used it to buy out the D&D IP and revise the game so that characters had more depth and detail than in previous editions while also streamlining quite a lot of the disfunctional AD&D systems. AD&D had this philosophy that every time they wanted to expand the amount of detail and freedom one had in the game, they would invent all of these random subsystems that all worked in dramatically different ways. And far too often things relied on percentile die and massive tables.Granted-- there are certain ways of play in which a more basic system would have been preferable. I think when it comes to play-by-mail/play-by-post or even chatroom play, the more basic the system-- the better off you are. But that would be more an argument in favor of the basic D&D.3E introduced a whole new problem in the form of the feats. While it was a nice idea to be able to add more detail to a character, far too many of the feats were directly combat related to the point it felt that one absolutely had to take certain ones in order to play the class in a functional way. And as the list of feats expanded with ever more splat books, too many of those feats were either thematically trying to do the same thing and stacked their power or were otherwise multipliers of one another's power.Building insane powerhouse characters was enabled almost exclusively through the feat system and finding the most broken combo became a game unto itself. But-- actually sitting down at the table and playing the game with a character who, say.... had the ability to attack all enemies within a 200' radius, through walls, and do trip attacks on them multiple times a turn using their spiked chain? It certainly makes it difficult to tell much of a story. And certainly there was no way to get that sort of result within the old school D&D system.</blockquote>

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