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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5319815" data-attributes="member: 59082">OK, I'm back, child picked up, lunch eaten.  Yes, agreed. My view is that the 3E to 3.5E "debacle" was an overly hyperbolic knee-jerk reaction that hurt WotC's credibility in the eyes of those that reacted, and also helped create a partially false perspective that edition changes and revisions with regards to D&D are primarily slimy and money-grubbing activities.All well said. Sort of like the Great American Novel that will probably never be written, the Holy Grail of D&D seems to be how to create an iteration of D&D that appeals to the widest possible group of players, from Grognards to WoWers, from sandboxers to railroaders, from wargamists to narrativists, etc. Like the Great American Novel as a final omega product, I don't think it is possible, but like Zeno's Paradox we can get closer to an unreachable target. So for me it is, at the least, fun to think about what this "perfect" D&D would look like, and how one could make a rules-set that would accommodate such a wide variety of styles.And? I hear your point but my response is, "so what?" What's the big deal? In my opinion this element of the discussion is mainly due to the very human resistance to change and a limitation of human imagination and creative flexibility. I think we need to be careful with our selectivity of memory--notice how you don't mention the jump from 2E to 3E, which at the very least is in the same ballpark as 3.5E to 4E, maybe even a greater jump. If I remember correctly, there wasn't a huge uproar and people were generally excited about 3E (like the good Eric Noah site!), but that may largely be because of the "Dark Ages" of D&D in the late 90s. 3E was a huge boost, it re-vivified D&D in an unprecedented way and in such a way that wasn't as necessary in 2008. However, what was necessary in 2008, at least for WotC as a company, I would guess, was a major new burst in sales and, it could be argued, a cleaning up of the vast mess/wealth of 3.5E and OGL product.Yes, very good point. At the least, WotC could have handled things better with the release of 4E, both in terms of building it up in an exciting way and perhaps delaying it until some of the kinks were worked out (e.g. skill challenges, magic item economy, etc).Yes, true. The analogy is particularly apt in a way that you might not have intended: Despite the crap churned out by Hollywood, people still keep going to see movies. I am the first to admit that I get excited about "teh shiny" and will buy any new edition and at least half of what WotC churns out, and all of it at the beginning of a cycle and then only gradually weed out what I don't find worth the money (e.g. the "Power" books, race books, Player Strategy Guide, most Dungeon Tiles, etc). But I'd be happy to see a re-boot of D&D every five years or so, both because I think the evolution of the game warrants it and because of my not-so-latent materialistic tendencies <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification