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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6214598" data-attributes="member: 59082">[MENTION=41997]Baron Greystone[/MENTION], no offense but I for one won't bother highlighting your grey text so that it can be read. I aimgine many feel the same - you might want to change your settings. Yes, and I think JM would agree with you, at least based upon that blog entry - which he pretty much said. Not to derail the main topic, but do we know why they were in financial trouble? Could it be that they thought the enormous popularity--the bubble--of the early 80s was sustainable and they, so to speak, took out a mortgage beyond their means?This is one of a few reasons why I don't like or play video games. Even when they involve "many more paths," they're still designed around pre-determined options. And even if they have some degree of open-ended randomness involved, its still based upon a formula, an algorithm.Human imagination is not a formula, not an algorithm. And this is whether I strongly empathize with JM--if not agree with a lot of his specifics: the road traveled from Dragonlance onward was geared more towards formula than it was towards inspiring imagination. This is why we see a transition from 200-page fantasy novels in the 60s and 70s to thousand-page tomes in the 90s and 00s packed to the brim with dense description. Even 3E and 4E, both of which I see as great games, were more geared towards filling in the gaps than offering advice and inspiration as to how to make those gaps come alive...and it is in the gaps that imagination lives.But this goes far beyond Dragonlance, or fantasy novels - and is a cultural issue of the Information Age. We now have this amazing technology that allows us to simulate, categorize, store, and process information in an unprecedented way. We have, as far as I can see, two choices - both in a large sense but moment to moment: We can either take the formulaic/algorithmic route of simulation and be receivers of information flow, or we can take the creative/imaginative route and be participants within the information flow.It isn't either/or, but the default--and easier route--is the former, and we have to actually work towards maintaining a balance.I've been thinking about this as I'm in the early stages of creating a sandbox environment for a 5E campaign I'm starting up early next year. Being a very busy person, I don't want to put a lot of time into creating encounters that will never be used. I love campaign setting design and take great pleasure out of creating a back-story that will, for the most part, only inform and contextualize the actual game play, but I don't have the time or desire to create intricate encounters that "might be" used.This is why I hope that 5E takes an approach of providing modular resources for DMs, including adventure modules, encounter locations, etc. So then we have a three-way co-creation of a D&D game:WotC provides...the rules, resources, modules...DM creates and tells...the setting, story, and narrative...Players make...choices that guide the course of story and narration, and what resources and modules the DM employs.For me, WotC would be most helpful if they can provide a flexible rules set that allows modularity in terms of customization, but also resources and adventure/encounter modules that can easily be placed into my sandbox setting.So I might say that there's an on old ruin in hex #17c, which is inhabited by a specter. And then I create the backstory of what the ruin is, where it fits into history, and who the specter was. Plus I can I can drop things int that ruin, hints and treasure, that lead to further adventures, even a larger plot or three. WotC provides me with a resources to either easily design a ruin, or pre-made ruins and encounters, plus easy-to-run monsters adaptable to different party levels. Then the players have an interactive environment that can meet them, yet doesn't railroad them in any particular direction.For more important sites, I can do more of the design work myself. But it would be really nice to have a suite of programs and bunch of books that allow me to grab something on the fly.There's my own tangential ramble!</blockquote>

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