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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5845506" data-attributes="member: 82106">Again, it isn't a good analogy. Who's the fancy new toothpaste here? It sure isn't Pathfinder, which is dead on 3.5 basically. That isn't some new kind of anything, it is the old thing, the buggy whip. PF hasn't 'pioneered' anything at all. In fact basically every minor thing PF changed in 3.5 made it more like 4e, lol. You'd have to tell that to WotC. Clearly they'd rather be GM than the buggy whip factory. Those people didn't sell, they just plain went out of business. Adapt or die, that's the lesson.There's no market for M68k or really even PPC personal computers anymore. Apple adapted, and it was painful, but they also successfully ascertained what was actually valuable about their product and separated it from what was not. They created a new product which appealed to a lot of new people who weren't already their customers too (IE iPods and whatnot). Notice that selling PCs is now only a small and rather insignificant part of their business. Again, when your existing product is no longer relevant to the market place, which has moved on, you have to reinvent yourself. That means determining what you do that is unique and valuable to the market and putting that into new products, combining it with new business models, and going forward. That's what 4e represented. What you're suggesting is like simply switching to selling generic PCs and competing with Dell or something. Apple didn't do that and they would probably be out of business right now if they had.There is a huge difference between similar and functionally identical. 4e was still very similar in many ways to earlier editions of D&D. Nobody is suggesting that 5e won't be either. I think if you carefully read what WotC has said in the last year you'll see that they understand this as well. There is the essence of the product, and there is the way it is implemented. Much like those Macs, the object here seems to be to have a better and modern implementation that is viable going forward and will work for new customers, and which will continue to 'evoke' the traditional product in a way that maintains brand continuity. I see nothing they've said which indicates that they're thinking of going back to the old stuff in any particular way. If you aren't getting a new audience, then you're dead. Its as simple as that. Adapt or die. Buggy whips aren't a viable product anymore at all. RPGs are. Your analogies are simply flawed. The change from 3e to 4e wasn't an attempt to create a bigger core audience any more than Apple switching to x86 processors was. It was simply a way to create a game that is designed in a way that can be supported using the incremental and service-driven 21st Century model of business. There isn't a choice there for WotC to make. Just like Apple continued to sell its computers to the same people and also created a technology that would work for iPods etc WotC created a game that would sell to its existing base and be appropriate to creating new business models that would allow it to appeal to new customers.They can either go backwards and recreate 3.5 and basically chase PF's taillights or go forward. Even if they were to catch up with PF (which is quite possible) they're right back where they were in 2006 when this exercise started and they'll be forced to do the same things they did then, except it will be 2016 and they've wasted a decade. It solves nothing.Or they can go forward, take the lessons learned from 4e and continue the evolution to a product and business model that might actually succeed instead of being a dead end. At least they have 6 years on any possible competitor. PF and OSR games seem like a big deal right now, but those vendors face the same issues in the long run. Only they have far fewer resources and far weaker brands.</blockquote>

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