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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5710372" data-attributes="member: 7006">I don't even think it goes that far... that anyone at WotC decided to make the new edition of D&D 'the ONE TRUE WAY'.What I think is more likely is that it was either mandated from above or mutually agreed upon by everyone involved that the transition from 3rd to 4th would include certain things that (they thought) would help generate more revenue for the company.For instance... at the time their miniatures division was still going along pretty well, plus they had good success with Dungeon Tiles.  So making 4E pretty much require their use meant more sales of those two parts of the game as well.Getting out from under the OGL was probably a requirement (because of the idea of wanting to keep almost all of the brand in house), so that necessitated distancing the game far enough that you really couldn't transfer a 3E game to 4E or vice versa (without massive overhauls of the system).  This meant those people who wanted to play 4E pretty much would only spend their money on 'WotCs' 4E... rather than the previous way where people could easily play 3E without ever spending money on any of WotC's 3E products, since there was plenty of other products available to use instead.They also probably knew they wanted to move more into the computer / social media realm for the game... and thus having a game system that was completely codified numerically and not have abilities determined by "DM fiat" (like illusion spells used in combat for example) meant you could keep better check on things like 'balance' because the math all supposedly worked.  As a happy result of that... being able to then have computer programs that do that math for you (that a person would pay a subscription fee to have access to)... was a completely new (and incredibly successful) revenue stream that generated funds as well.THAT'S what I believe is a much more likely scenario of the state of Wizards at the time they were putting together 4th Edition.  Much less of a Machiavellian "we will rule all of gaming by doing it our way!" attitude, and more of a "what can we produce that will keep people buying our products?" one.</blockquote>

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