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="Geron Raveneye" data-source="post: 3705835" data-attributes="member: 2268">Not upset about D&D 4E either. I mean, why should I? It was pretty obvious it would be coming soon. Every time they throw some completely new mechanics on the market for the current edition, it is "test the waters" time. I think Magic of Incarnum was the first test balloon, and even if it sunk more than it swam, it showed a great interest in the fanbase for some new mechanics, which was tuned in on with following sourcebooks, like the various Tome of... books. Usually, when those pop up, it's obvious that there's a group of designers behind the scenes testing a heap of ideas for the next new edition.Also getting used to people repeating the "WotC is a company that needs to make money" mantra, which simply means future editions will be already designed with the next edition in mind, and a halflife factored into the production schedules. Look at the 4E concept...online access features heavily into it. Which doesn't mean there will be even more "endless" possibilities, but only an even faster way to sell the same stuff to people, which means even shorter time until the market is saturated and the bottomline will drop, creating the need for another edition change, etcetera ad nauseam. And really...although D&D was always touted as a game of "endless possibilities", the supplements, articles and sourcebooks were always going the same direction, with only minor deviations to take more modern tastes into account. The stuff about elves in Dragon 5 years ago read like the stuff about elves in Dragon 10 years ago, or 15 years ago. The racial identities and niches, the class splatbooks, it usually focuses on the same stuff that the producers know for sure will be bought by the customers. So from a distance, nothing really changes except the way the numbers express that same-ness. 3E actually set a VERY high bar for 4E to come up with some variations on the same topic, while having surpassed 2E by a long shot in making the same seem different. The biggest exceptions are the campaign sourcebooks, which really go for variety to fit to the campaign world.So if I'm actually upset about anything, it's how blatantly D&D is adopting the Windows scheme of business, but that I've been since 3.5, which I skipped for exactly those reasons. I understand, authors, publishers and graphic artists want to have a living, too, no question. But that doesn't mean that there has to be an artificially created need for a new edition every few years. And from what I heard so far, I'm not sure that you can do something with 4E that you couldn't by now do with 3.X as well, by adding options from some sourcebook or another.The only thing I'm a bit anxious about is the fact that it'll probably become even harder for me to find a few people to play with outside the relatively static circle of friends I already play with. D&D IS the brand name nearly everybody in the hobby recognizes, and people playing it will always turn to the newest edition first if talk about a game starts. I've yet to see a discussion about "what to play" that starts with Red Box D&D, or AD&D 2E as first option, although those are all games we're just as accustomed to. I've been more successful gathering a group for a slightly modified Shadowrun 1E than collecting players for a game of C&C, or Basic D&D. :\</blockquote>

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