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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8307512" data-attributes="member: 42582">There's another aspect to it too.Humans are social beings. Part of what it is to participate in cultural life is to share ideas, meanings, and experiences with others.If the relevant ideas, meanings and experiences are available only by paying WotC, well that's what people will do! I mean, Marvel/Disney seem to have worked this out to a degree of $billion+ success stories that makes the old-fashioned time-and-motion experts - the ones who really got mass production of consumer goods off the ground - look like amateurs.Of course there's an avant garde. Perhaps they go and see the odd Marvel movie (or play the occasional game of 5e D&D) but critique it; perhaps they spurn it altogether. The avant garde is always in a difficult position, because they risk being defined by the mass culture they're positioned in opposition to; and really going all out (like a full-fledged hippy, or Andy Warhol) is a hard, hard commitment to follow through on.I live near a street that was genuinely edgy when I was a boy, and then had a reputation for being edgy that attracted people to it for the first decade or so I was an adult, and that now has lost most of its edge: a street can't keep its edge when the main market for the retailers on it are people who want to experience some edge on a day trip. That doesn't stop me from still going there from time to time. I just complain about how it used to be better!Any avant garde will always be subject to these same sorts of pressures, given that mass consumerism as the basis of economic life isn't going anywhere in a hurry. So the idea of a mass RPG with indie sensibilities is probably always going to be unrealistic. (And when some bowdlerised version comes along, some of us will play it but complain about how it was better when it was coming out via independent publication from Luke Crane's basement.)I'm not offering a justification of fan outrage at the latest tweak to the colour of the hem of Elminster's robe in a FR product. And I'm not saying that there is no such thing as better or worse. But the broader phenomenon, of a fanbase in a strange dependency-yet-ownership relationship with a commercial purveyor of entertainment, and a community split between a "mainstream" and an "indie" set that exhibit their own tortured dynamics, isn't that surprising in my view.</blockquote>

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