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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 6213933" data-attributes="member: 3400">I'm going to come right out and say, "That's never going to happen." And, for the most part, it has rarely happened with any RPG with any longevity. The designers think of new things to add, the game gets cluttery with stuff from disparate supplements and needs to be cleaned up and revised, and, boom, they come up with a new edition. For the most part, this is a good process. But then, for most games, the changes are  incremental. A shift in ship building or the addition of a regular task resolution system for Traveller, an increase in the number of education-based skill points for Call of Cthulhu, the reorganization of martial arts into separate maneuvers to buy in Champions, and so on. By the time a new edition may come along, there may be hundreds of these changes but they tend to leave the feel of the game and the game play pretty close to the previous edition. You can often use the same supplements or adventures planned in one, modestly converted, in the subsequent edition, extending the life of the items you shelled out money to buy a year or two ago.And then there are less successful changes. Traveller morphs from the Marc Miller system to the GDW in-house Twilight: 2000 system in New Era, D&D 3.5 gives way to 4e, Cyberpunk 2020 goes to Fuzion. These all break with previous editions so significantly that it's very hard to use the same supplements, you almost certainly can't use the same stats from them, and the feel of game play may radically change. Your investment in other materials to support the game now requires a lot more work to continue to use unless you resign yourself to playing the older, out of print game that will inevitably have a declining player base.I may be pretty biased here since I've felt burned more than once in an edition change (I was a BIG fan of Traveller and it's follow-up in MegaTraveller - not so much for New Era, big fan of D&D though 3.5 - not so much for 4e), but I generally favor an evolutionary approach to edition change. That way the things I buy, that I may not run right away, can be brought out a few years down the road and used relatively seamlessly with the new edition we picked up and adopted because it fixed one or two sore points in the rules. We played/ran a hybridized 1e/2e game pretty much as soon as 2e came out because it was so easy to do so. The 1e adventures and source books I bought were still over 90% useful without conversion necessary. It was very convenient. The shift from 2e to 3e was less convenient but not too hard to convert, moreover many of the same assumptions could still work within the game. But the shift from 3e to 4e? Not so easy.</blockquote>

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