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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 6213007" data-attributes="member: 11365">You made some really great points in your response. I really enjoyed reading them and mulling them over, thanks! To the above, I have issues with "inconvenient to their business plan". Every responsible company has business plans. Every company should want profit and most should want to grow. Customers should want companies in their hobby to grow. I wish upon every RPG company plenty of growth and profit, because that grows our hobby. But, the RPG model has so far shown that after a while we see stagnation. Every RPG wrestles with the problem that each successive book will see declining interest. Out of 1,000 gamers, 500 might like the core book. Only 200 might care for the DM book. Of those 200, only 160 might like the book on undead. And only 100 might like the book on a forest setting. RPG companies wrestle with that, because it is a cycle that kills business. With 3E, that cycle had fully played out. And the customer base was already seeing Wizards as having pressed too far with 3.5 on top of 3.0. Only an outside competitor could, under the very true auspices of "you don't have to leave 3E", update the rules and republish everything. That was key. Now it wasn't evil WotC republishing our game for money-grubbing reasons, it was Paizo swooping in to republish our game so we could keep playing the edition.The same is true for 4E. It's a complete edition. While we can each consider a book or two that could be added, or a setting, all of those would have very poor sales. Wizards did try to reinvigorate the edition with Essentials, but that clearly did not work. (Could it have? Maybe. WotC certainly mismanaged and mis-marketed Essentials - any time you have to constantly explain what it is, it was poorly done.) I really don't think the chances are high that 3E or 4E could have been successfully relaunched, or that enough interesting material could have been added to keep the company afloat. (And we should all want WotC to remain afloat). They have. But as I wrote above, I don't think the issue was a lack of imagination. After all, look at how incredibly creative 4E was! It was the most radical reinvisioning of D&D ever and a deliberate attempt to change everything problematic about previous editions. Wouldn't work for everyone, of course (no edition does), but the WotC staff did not at all lack in imagination. (We could perhaps also talk about how Skills & Powers didn't reinvigorate 2E's flagging sales and how Book of Nine Swords did not reinvigorate 3.5's sales. Visionary products don't seem to save an aging line. The same will most likely be true of Pathfinder some day... we already see many repeated books with diminishing returns... one Paizo designer said at a recent convention "I wasn't sure I could find something interesting to write, but the book ended up pretty cool." That's a sure sign of those diminishing returns.)</blockquote>

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