ehren37 said:
2nd edition recognized D&D's strength, that of a story/adventure focused on your character, and the army building goal started to fall y the wayside, along with the dreadful playstyle of lugging dozens of torch bearers, porters and other time wasters into a dungeon. Birthright wasnt a resounding success, so again, the interest in that playstyle had waned.
Depends on what you mean by "playstyle." If you mean keeping track of lots of fiddly details, then yeah. It's much easier to play Command & Conquer that handles that for you.
But you can have armies and castles (or other groups, guilds, churches, academies, etc.) in a game without getting a Ph.D. in logistics or being buried in record-keeping. Most of it can be abstracted away with some good game design.
As a simple "for instance", my current group's campaign has two "money systems" - a "gold standard" (normal D&D commerce rules) and fairly abstract but simple to manage "Wealth Point" system. You just dump gold into WP (50:1) until you have enough WP for certain "big purchases", such as fiefs, titles, followers, etc. WP invested in land or mercantile interests generate regular WP dividends, which can pay for lifestyle, etc.
In my group I have taken advantage of this "wealth system" more than any other PC, and the time burden overhead has been ... 2 hours, total? over the course of the campaign (~2 years). And it's been a lot of fun for me, and has generated in-game benefits (my PC gets invited to all the Noble's parties (and hence, plot hooks and quest help) because he's a man of society).
You could also have followers or troops move in group-units (on action to resolve 20+ men), or be even more abstract and resolve whole battles with a few throws of the dice.
And this can all be part of "the story" that is D&D's strength. If the system is simple enough to manage so that it's not a headache, a player can still concentrate 95% of the time on his character (as I do), but also have a Keep to defend, or armies to command (for story-based advantages), etc. This really adds to the depth of gameplay, and creates "buy in" for the players who take advantage of this system. I think D&D has missed out on a lot of what it is capable of for lack of at least providing good options and choices in this department.
ehren37 said:
WOTC has put out a lot of research into creating 3e, ... Until someone coughs up some credible evidence that a significant portion of the playerbase really wants to sit down and order 200 suits of ringmail, wage wars and build towers, I think its safe to assume that playstyle has been losing ground due to lack of interest.
I would not assume WotC is infallible. They may be asking the wrong questions. As I said above, there is no doubt that wargames as they were run and presented in the 70's are on their way out, but that does in any way mean that a well designed and presented system would not have appeal to modern audiences.
To use a computer game analogy, "First Person Shooters" are very popular, but that does not mean that "Unit Command" (or "Fleet Command") games such as Command & Conquer are totally on the outs. Even really "big picture" games like Civilization IV spend a lot of time a resources on "scenario packs" where you work your way through a particular war or series of battles from history. And they're popular despite the lack of story that D&D has! It's all just a matter of good game design. People can have fun lots of different ways.
