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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5844256" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, but you don't win by chasing someone else's taillights. And again, since there has been a long term downward trend exactly what would you be chasing? A product like PF that has the same ultimate problem? It doesn't lead you anywhere you want to be in the long run.I don't think so. I think there's a lot more to it than that. Even if they decided that the OGL was a factor in THIS edition (4e) being the big break with the past it was still inevitable. Better to move forward from a position of strength than from one of weakness.And when your product isn't able to support the kind of sales you need to continue in that business, then you still have to change. It is irrelevant what the analogy tells you. Intel is not WotC. There's a huge difference between a CPU who's instruction set compatibility with virtually all existing software virtually requires you to maintain that compatibility and a game which all the same people can play regardless of how similar it is to last year's game. It is just not that good an analogy.Really? 4e seems to me to clearly have a number of characteristics intended to make it more suitable to modern tastes. In fact if you look at other popular FRPGs you can see a number of similarities. Even PF has moved a good bit in the same direction 4e did. 4e is much more amenable to supporting things like DDI than 3e was. Clearly that was no accident. As for board games, 4e's regular modular rules worked quite well as a basis for board games, which are mostly just simplified 4e rules with canned options. None of this is an accident. Of course even 4e is going to be selling to D&D fans, and so is 5e. That's still the basic core audience, but the fact is that audience has been shrinking slowly for more than 20 years. You can't succeed in the long run selling basically the same product to the same closed group of people over and over again. Sooner or later your product has to adapt to modern tastes, technology, etc or die. Make no mistake, 5e faces exactly the same market realities that 4e did. It will inevitably have to solve the same problems and it would be highly unlikely to adopt radically different solutions to most of them. People who want a museum piece are going to be sadly disappointed. People who want a modern RPG that takes the elements of 4e, mixes things up a bit, and presents it in a better package are likely to find 5e to be just that.</blockquote>

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