D&D (2024) GenCon 2023 - D&D Rules Revision panel

[Kobold Stew]

While true, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, appeal to authority is the weakest form of argument.

I am going to use and re-use this over and over again. Thank you.

 

[Mistwell]

What edition did you first play is quite different from what is your preferred edition though.

What does that have to do with whether or not market researches are experts in the field of market research?

It was not an appeal to authority. Very clearly it firmly does not fit in any definition of that logical fallacy.

 

[Parmandur]

I am going to use and re-use this over and over again. Thank you.

Even better: he establishes that by citing Aristotle as the authority who originated thst principle.

 

[Maxperson]

False premise. What was said was, "I am sure one of the key questions that they have tried to assess is "are old 3e/4e players happier now than they were with the older systems?" And I'm pretty sure the answer on the whole is yes."

He's right that they are definitely surveying on which system you started playing D&D and tying that to the results of surveys so this is specifically something they ask every time.

There was nothing about what he said which doesn't also encompass "that other system or edition [guards against similar problems.]" IF the player who liked system X is even more satisfied now with system Y, then it's fair to say the things system X did might in fact not be viewed as superior to system Y. It was not a dismissal, he's directly answering the challenge you posed.

Bottom line: you're talking past each other, dismissing his opinion as if it were a dismissal of yours, rather than directly answering the premise he poses with his answer.

There are lots of reasons why someone might be playing 5e now, but still like 3e better. Just because someone made the switch doesn't mean that he liked the new edition better than the old. I really like 5e and have been playing it since just before Covid hit, but it still only ranks #3 for me in editions. 2e and 3e are editions that I like better.

 

[see]

At a certain point I'd look at the supplemental books that SJGames was releasing for GURPS-- some of the oddest and probably least marketable concepts or brand extensions you could find-- and just realize that a person was probably tasked to write this thing purely to keep them paid and on staff and just hope against hope it would bring in some amount of cash later on to then get funneled into some other GURPs project. The product wasn't needed, but writers gotta write.

Nope, not at all. Steve Jackson Games, to a first approximation, hasn't ever had any RPG writers on payroll. Everything's been freelance, per-project contracts. And Steve Jackson has always kept a sharp eye on per-product profitability, which 1990s TSR definitely did not have -- which is why TSR went bankrupt and SJ Games never has.

That doesn't mean some products weren't experiments, or that Steve Jackson didn't have a somewhat-skewed vision of what would sell (he had a definite personal tendency to grab the licenses to mid-list literary SF properties). But the idea that books were written just to justify a staff salary isn't just wrong, but, given the lack of staff writers, not actually possible.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Nope, not at all. Steve Jackson Games, to a first approximation, hasn't ever had any RPG writers on payroll. Everything's been freelance, per-project contracts. And Steve Jackson has always kept a sharp eye on per-product profitability, which 1990s TSR definitely did not have -- which is why TSR went bankrupt and SJ Games never has.

That doesn't mean some products weren't experiments, or that Steve Jackson didn't have a somewhat-skewed vision of what would sell (he had a definite personal tendency to grab the licenses to mid-list literary SF properties). But the idea that books were written just to justify a staff salary isn't just wrong, but, given the lack of staff writers, not actually possible.

I'll defer to your knowledge of the specifics of the SJ Games staffing situation.

That being said... I don't know if that neccessarily cancels out my actual point, which was books getting written to bring in money to then use to write more books. The ourobouros of game sales. Whether that's specifically true of SJGames I have no idea (and I admit having no real knowledge, but rather just guesstimating based upon the massive numbers of GURPS sourcebooks that got written.) But I do think it was true of TSR at least (if I recall the Game Masters book correctly), where they had to keep churning out product to bring in money to fund keeping their lights on which allowed them to churn out product.