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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9760189" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Yeah, the OSR had been slowly gaining steam from ~2001 or 2002 up to that point, but the big change that 4E represented meant a lot of folks were ready to jump ship once it hit.  Either to 3.75 (Pathfinder) or back in time.  Yes, there's a lot of text continuity from 1E to 2E to 3E in the spell descriptions in particular, although in each iteration they got edited and trimmed, mostly for clarity.4E completely reformatted the spell descriptions and used a totally new style guide for presentation of the text, so most of that continuity didn't exist there.  I think there were some virtues to this approach, but it definitely had an impact in terms of losing familiarity and feel for a lot of longtime fans.  I've speculated that while I think there was a lot good about giving the designers a mandate to get more ambitious, slaughter sacred cows and change things up, there's a strong chance that it was actually in part motivated by the execs trying to obviate the OGL.  Making the new edition sufficiently different that people wouldn't be able to recreate the new official D&D using the 3rd ed SRD.</blockquote>