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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9506132" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You have erred by the presence of the seventh word: "absolutely."I didn't argue for "absolutely everyone" getting what they want. I said that we could do a lot better than we have, and that even some of the things you have given as examples as supposedly difficult really aren't that bad.But "make money!" is, like "happiness", an illusive goal. Making that your goal is a very easy way to mess things up. In D&D's case, the abstractness of the rules and the difficulty of connectingPersonally, I think if they had accommodated other playstyles, they would instead have (a) built (sub)classes that were more resilient to wider variation in resting/combat rates, and (b) would have provided both examples and tools/advice that assist in building a table-appropriate setup, e.g. ways to compensate for missing a critical function (e.g. "the party has no healer") or for having characters who are extremely combat-shy.Most of that is quite doable, and several games I quite like (including 13A and DW) do that with no problems, at varying levels of game complexity. That's part of why I mention things like "novice levels" and the like. Those are extraordinarily useful opt-in rules that can let us have our cake (1st level is the clear starting point) and eat it too (new players can start with simple, straightforward characters) and have a second cake on the side (fans of older-school-style play can have their grim, gritty, low-survival early levels.) So long as you actually do give each thing its appropriate playtest time, and don't deprecate or hide these things, but rather put them front and center and specifically advise their use for cultivating various playstyles, it's quite doable to have a flexible system that still shares a common core but supports many different tastes.I mean, only in the sense that it's rare for anything to be considered a "classic" today. The vast majority of human creative output gets forgotten. The only reason we look back and see endless fields of "classics" is survivorship bias. If his poems weren't utterly hilariously bad, nobody would even remember William McGonagall. (Seriously, his poems are so bad they wrap around into being sheer genius, albeit for comedy rather than drama.)It's a good thing I didn't, then? I specifically said that you need more data. I also said that the two aren't the same. I never, ever said that popularity is bad, since I had figured it was obvious (and implied by the original argument...) that popularity/sales/etc. can be a proxy for quality, it's just not a reliable proxy thereof.</blockquote>

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