Does it now?! I think that there are a whole host of homeless or working poor here in the US and Canada that would decidely disagree. The gap between rich and poor is widening in nearly every country, but it is widening more quickly in the ultra-capitalist ones like the States, so perhaps a case could be made that Socialism is slowing the effect of rampant greed.
My friends in Germany laugh because our notion of success means 'more money' instead of the 6 weeks of paid holidays they get when they start a job. I have to work ten years at my current job to get that amount of time off. Who is the success and who is the corporate slave?
I know that this isn't you, Celtavian, but I thought it bore a response. Every socialist country I have visited has used money, so I don't know what the heck you are talking about here. Socialism, btw, has and is working on a large scale all over the rest of the world. With the exception of the US and the petty dictatorships, most modern countries organize their finances around a more or less socialist model. Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Britain and South America all do. Remember that being socialist means the government owns 'some' aspects of the economy while some are owned by individuals. That 'some' can be a large amount or a small amount, so socialism varies widely in practice.
and that brings us back to clueless, er Bagpuss
To make it appeal to a mass audience, a product is changed in some fashion. I think that you and I can agree on that. The minute a product is changed, people will make up their minds on whether the change is good or bad. This is an opinion, essentially, and my posts express mine. I don't personally like when companies cater to the average because soon enough there ceases to be products to suit anyone *but* the average.
As for the specific aspects of 3e I don't like: feats, xp, prestige classes, hp, leveling every two sessions on average when using the suggested amount of experience...
When working backwards from the 'features' to the everyman that the features were meant to appeal to, it becomes apparent that I was, as the customer, expected to have a short attention span (otherwise why level so often), to love power-ups (feats) over psychological character development, and to love the title/abilities (prestige classes - what a name!) of my character's occupation more than my character itself. With hp, I am assured that my character is either fully functional ... or dead - and even death isn't too far to come back from. Who is this everyman? To me, it seems like this system was tailored for the munchkins of the world. Of course, non-munchkins can make use of it (you all do), but it leans most definitely in their direction:
They have a system to measure their march through the dungeon (xp and levels) so that they can compare with their friends, kewl titles to toss around for some 'prestige' in their gaming group, and a bunch of power-ups so they can turn their dwarven fighter into a ninja with an axe. They have a damage system that ensures that they don't have to put up with annoying real-life traits like nagging injuries or slowing down when your leg gets chopped off. Top this off with a rapid system of progression and you keep the munchkin tied to D&D on paper instead of Final Fantasy on the PS2 - not an unadmirable goal in and of itself, but certainly not a game designed for a 33 year old divorcee that reads Medieval History in his spare time for fun and who prefers low fantasy (George R. Martin), realistic characters and believeable cultures.
And yet, up until I read the quote of Ryan Dancey's earlier in the thread, I was still OK with all of this. I was going to take what I could from it and leave the rest - what I do with all my gaming stuff. Once that quote hit the thread, though, it became clear that the percentage of useable material in WotC offerings was going to decline rather than increase, because this new direction was a carefully chosen design decision and not just happenstance. Why should I stick around when WotC is clearly courting a different customer than me?
Which is why I am kicking myself for buying into 3e instead of sticking with the Harn I have used for most of my life. I must have had a bunch of nostalgic rocks in my head that day for the good old days with the Basic set and Keep on the Borderlands. Note to self: Chevy people do *not* buy Fords.
LOL, I am not a utopian, though I am often labeled as one because people confuse 'preference' with 'blind adherence'. To me, it is enough that quality at least get a nod somewhere in the equation. My complaint is not that mass-marketed products exist, because they have existed in one form or another since the dawn of the first commercial enterprise. It is that in our current day and age, they exist literally everywhere you look because our culture valorizes low cost instead of high quality.
The world's products seem to be polarizing into mass-market on one end and ultra-elitist on the other, and I am bemoaning the lack of decent quality products somewhere in the middle. If all the products are marketed to the masses or the millionaires - both of whom don't really exist except to demographers - where does that leave lil 'ol me? Out in the cold, I guess. I can't afford the elitist stuff and I generally don't want to buy the mass market stuff because it doesn't appeal to me.
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