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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gorice" data-source="post: 9302445" data-attributes="member: 7032863">I'm at fault for escalating this discussion. A few quick thoughts before I see myself out, because I think this issue is actually important, as trivial as it might seem.How is it possible to judge something without having a standard to judge it by? Take it as given that I don't think 'feels like D&D' is an admirable design goal. This was exactly the opinion that started this argument: I think WotC is devoted to making a game that 'feels like D&D', and this means that other aspects of design are secondary for them.I don't think popularity has much at all to do with quality. In the case of 5e: I see a lot of comments about its popularity, and very little about its specific positive qualities, even when I explicitly ask people to describe them. 'Feels like D&D', 'gets out of the way', and similar sentiments don't sound like endorsements to me: they sound like admissions that the specific qualities of 5e don't matter that much.Apologies to [USER=6801845]@Oofta[/USER] for not replying to them directly, but I guess this is my response to them, too.How many of those reviews are based on actual play experience? There's no way of knowing, in most cases, but my impression is 'very few'. That's before we get into the incentives for reviewers to give positive product reviews, which is a whole other issue.Marketing doesn't just appeal to desire, because our desires are not entirely fixed and predictable. At some level, marketing generates or manipulates desire. It wouldn't be as effective if all it did was give us factual information about something we might like -- which is, emphatically, not what most marketing is.As for the consequences... I said upthread that WotC promises all things to all people. They can't possibly deliver on this. In my (extensive) experience with 5e, it can be used for a lot of things if you're willing to put in tremendous amounts of effort, but it exerts a gravitational pull towards a certain type of DM-led play that might be called railroading. The offical adventures are pretty much all examples of this, as far as I can tell. The implicit message that this is the entirety of what RPGs are is, I think, a negative infliuence on the hobby as a whole.</blockquote>

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