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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6926303" data-attributes="member: 42582">To play a mechanically effective STR paladin in 4e you really do need a book other than the core three - you need Divine Power.I don't think this is because WotC was predatory in any malevolent sense - I think it's because there were some design flaws/limitations in the 4e PHB which the WotC team hadn't fully ironed out (due to rushed production schedules, I think).My personal experience of 4e tells me that hawkeyefan's sense of the obsolescence of earlier material is exaggerated - eg no later-published character eclipsed the archer ranger, and most essentials builds are mechanically weaker than corresponding PHB builds - but the archer-ranger in my game uses some material from Martial Power and Divine Power, and I don't think any of the other character is built using just material from the core book in which the class was published. While I don't have any personal experience of Pathfinder, everything I hear about that system makes me think that the issue of "keeping up", and of trying to keep track of mechanical balance, is a bigger deal in PF than 4e.Nevertheless, if a player or GM feels that the material available for the game is too much, and that keeping up with the current "state of play" for PC-building in the game is too much work, well that is what it is. There's no basis for saying that person is wrong, anymore than there is a basis for saying that someone who enjoys keeping up with latest splat is wrong.These are all just consumer preferences in a market for a very discretionary product; or, looked at from a non-commercial perspective, are just differing RPGing preferences in a hobby that has always had a wide range of preferred approaches to the game.And I think one of the cleverer features of 5e is the way that a single PHB has been able to appeal both to those who don't like splat (and who can experience, via that single volume, the game's mechancial growth as confined) and to those whol do like a wide variety of PC building options (because a lot of PC building options have been crammed into that book, although there is clearly debate around whether all of them are of comparable mechanical viability - eg there seems to be a widespread view that ranged options mechanically dominate melee ones).I liked this feature of 4e too, but I know that others complained about it (and complained about its precursor in later 3E MMs) because they saw it as redundancy/duplication.In 5e I think "bounded accuracy" is meant to take up some of this slack. I also think that, more generally, 5e seems not to support the mechanical intricacy that was a feature of those differing 4e creature builds.That is my baseline, yes: play game you enjoy! There's a lot on offer.The idea that there is a slight chance WotC will change its publication strategy, based on a few comments on forums like this, I think is wrong. They are clearly relying on different measures of what the market is for different sorts of products, and hence what sorts of products are worth publishing. Forum feedback might be relevant for, say, tweaking some point of design, but not for deciding whether or not to publish 32 page modules, or new campaign supplements.I think the bottom line is that WotC doesn't primarily want dedicated fans - it primarily wants to sell books at a profit. Producing a lot of material to sell to "dedicated fans" so as to maintain those "dedicated fans" has turned out to be a commercially losing strategy, so instead they have decided to produce a modest amount of material to sell to D&D players - of whom there seem to be many, and growing numbers.My favourite edition of D&D was 4e, and my purchasing of WotC material clearly peaked in the 4e era. But the fact that they now publishing stuff for a different system, that I'm less interested in purchasing, isn't a personal slight against me. It's not any sort of dismissal of me or my fandom by WotC. The relationship between us just doesn't have that sort of nature.</blockquote>

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