Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="M.L. Martin" data-source="post: 5086398" data-attributes="member: 4086">3.5, IMO, is neither fish nor fowl. I believe that it was intended as a cleanup, but at some point wound up running away with the designers and thus became more than a cleanup but less than a new edition. (Back when I talked to him in 2007, Mearls wondered why it was seen as such a big break by the fan community. I hypothesized that some of it was the change to monster rules, which went from minor in-play tweaks to making the vast majority of monsters technically illegal.)  It should be remembered that it was originally marketed as "3rd Revised"--and the Revised moniker is fairly standard in the industry from something intended as a cleanup that doesn't fundamentally change the game, as I understand it. Cf. WEG's Star Wars, WW's Vampire:tM, Werewolf:tA and Mage:tAsc (Barastrondo, you were there; am I understanding it correctly?) and the HERO System 5th Edition/Revised. The terminology "3.5" came from us, the fans, and was adopted by WotC.  Bad example, IMO. That's a licensed product subject to external pressures. I believe the 2002 revision was mandated by Lucasfilm to tie into Attack of the Clones; if not, it was almost certainly driven by marketing pressure. The fact that the license meant they had to essentially put the RPG in carbon-freezing to launch the miniatures line also made a difference; by the time SWSE came out, it had been three years since the last RPG supplement, and in that time, another movie and numerous other sources had been added to the SW canon.</blockquote>

Verification