NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5298034" data-attributes="member: 87792">Gaming needs breadth of appeal. This doesn't mean that Dread, My Life With Master, or Spirit of the Century appeals to everyone or even should.  Who's this "most" you're talking about? Because the impression I have of that period is that it was an utterly incoherent mess with no real focus. Round then I was playing GURPS - which was a coherent mess with a deliberate range of focusses. And even that was ultimately tied into gritty fantasy.  Only if you were already involved. From the outside it looked like an incoherent mess that was best avoided.  3e did it right. Well, 3e and GURPS. You could tell what was mainline and what wasn't. But 3e collapsed under its own weight. If you can't tell what's mainline or core and what isn't, then it becomes far too PhD (Piled Higher and Deeper) for new people to have a clue where to look.  Keeping 4e rules tight has been one of the best advances 4e has made. It means that the DM does not need to supervise every goddamn rulebook to prevent Pun-Pun or the Diplomancer turning up (or just broken spells). It means that there's no longer an intimidating volume of Stuff for e.g. the realms being published. So new players are much more secure playing 4e settings. On the other hand they've locked down too much. More 4e third party settings and adventure paths would IMO be a good thing. As would 4e Modern (including 4e Pulp, 4e Action Movie, and 4e Spy), 4e Supers, and 4e Space Opera. But I for one don't miss Mongoose's Quintessential series. As for the PDFs, I agree about the 2e ones. People playing 2e or earlier aren't likely to switch - either they stayed with the old editions or they are having fun going retro. It's money for nothing. (And I'd bring 3.0 pdfs back with Essentials).  What WoTC does with 4e is the bits I find it hard to do myself. I've never been as keen on DMing as with 4e, and the players bubble with enthusiasm. (As someone else on these boards said "Paizo produces everything I like doing for myself. WoTC produces everything I don't like doing myself. So I go with WoTC." It's an approach that works for me - and most of what TSR was producing was far lower quality than Paizo and was dire when it tried to do what WoTC does.)  Do you have evidence that the game grew in the 2e days?  Except that TSR is known to have done no surveys about what the customers wanted, and what would sell. Therefore they ended up with warehouses full of stock with a total value of $0.00</blockquote>

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