mhacdebhandia said:
The statement was "to me the whole Prestige Class mechanic was invented to both satisfy power-gamers and sell more books." The fact is that Monte Cook invented prestige classes as DM tools for fleshing out the world.
(Yes, that ain't what they are now, big deal.)
How is that not proof, or less than compelling?
You haven't proven it as fact at all. First, you have quoted Monte Cook. Assuming that your quote is correct and captures the spirit of the statement he intended to make, then, logically, there are basically two possibilities: he is lying, or he isn't. Absent a polygraph, truth serum, or other questionable means, we cannot prove that he is telling the truth, so you have not demonstrated this in a compelling fashion. Whether or not you, personally, believe what Monte says doesn't enter into whether or not something is demonstrable.
Second, even assuming that he was not lying when he said that, that has no bearing at all on whether or not WOTC itself had the motivation to sell books. Maybe Monte wanted to do a good deed, but WOTC just wanted to make money. How are you going to prove that they didn't and that their interests were only in making DM tools to flesh out the world?
You speak of "creation" as though something leapt fully-formed from Monte's mind and was transmitted directly into yours. While a nice idea, that is most likely not what happened. Instead, you most likely saw his writing in a book. The other poster is speaking, I gather, of the creation of the product, and that is a process that presumably involved large numbers of executives, bean-counters, and other people okaying things to go ahead, each for his or her own reason. Are you going to come up here and quote each person involved in the creative and publishing process, and state that they were under oath, or under polygraph, when they made their declarations? I find it improbable.
As such, I was astounded that you would make such a claim.