Make It Yourself

[Micah Sweet]

"In practice impossible" is not actually better to most people than "Of little value but at least slightly emotionally satisfying."

Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

 

[Minigiant]

That's on WotC. I think there's plenty of creative 3pp and homebrew out there. It's just that there are some loud folks who insist on WotC solving all their problems, and beyond venting I see no point to that.

And I never said players wanting more power was a new thing.

The big forgotten part is that many 3pp and homebrewers think like people in WOTC.

Many fantasy RPGs use the same classes, the same races, the same weapons, the same spells, the same skills, the same categories, etc. Often just renamed. Or not.

So when you look for stuff out the box, you aren't getting to use the wealth of designer experiences because majority of the veterans are focused else when using the same methodology and mindsets.

It's the same reason why D&D and some other old RPGs struggle with the same mechanical issues for decades or run face first into lore issues they never expected. All the big names and major movers share the same thought processes which where passed down from the past big names and major movers.

 

[Umbran]

The idea that the game should actually provide options...

The game has a ton of options. Just not that specific one.

 

[Umbran]

Like Snarf mentioned, not every complaint is an invitation to find personal solutions, some are 'grievances,' some issues just call for systemic solutions.

So long as we accept that one systemic solution is "use another system". The primary assumption that the solution lies in making any one specific system do exactly what you, personally, want made some sense in the 70s and 80s. But today that assumption needs to be inspected as much as anything else in the discussion.

There's less output from WotC, too. Maybe it's a symptom of a 50yo hobby? so much has already been churned out?

How soon we forget...

It turns out that high output may seem good, until we complain about bloat. Then they reboot the system to fix the bloat issue, and we complain about them rebooting the system as "edition treadmill". And also forget how high output was also part of the near death of the system in the 2e days.

It seems that the market doesn't seem to support high output nearly as much as we might want.

 

[Reynard]

So long as we accept that one systemic solution is "use another system". The primary assumption that the solution lies in making any one specific system do exactly what you, personally, want made some sense in the 70s and 80s. But today that assumption needs to be inspected as much as anything else in the discussion.



How soon we forget...

It turns out that high output may seem good, until we complain about bloat. Then they reboot the system to fix the bloat issue, and we complain about them rebooting the system as "edition treadmill". And also forget how high output was also part of the near death of the system in the 2e days.

It seems that the market doesn't seem to support high output nearly as much as we might want.

On the upside, it does seem to support a robust 3PP community, which means WotC can do what they deem is optimal for their business and we still get tons of options.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So long as we accept that one systemic solution is "use another system". The primary assumption that the solution lies in making any one specific system do exactly what you, personally, want made some sense in the 70s and 80s. But today that assumption needs to be inspected as much as anything else in the discussion.



How soon we forget...

It turns out that high output may seem good, until we complain about bloat. Then they reboot the system to fix the bloat issue, and we complain about them rebooting the system as "edition treadmill". And also forget how high output was also part of the near death of the system in the 2e days.

It seems that the market doesn't seem to support high output nearly as much as we might want.

I never once complained about bloat, in 35 years of gaming. I do not believe in it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So long as we accept that one systemic solution is "use another system". The primary assumption that the solution lies in making any one specific system do exactly what you, personally, want made some sense in the 70s and 80s. But today that assumption needs to be inspected as much as anything else in the discussion.

It didn't even make sense in the 80's, honestly. But if anything, I sometimes think the network pressure is harder now than it was then.

 

[Minigiant]

I never once complained about bloat, in 35 years of gaming. I do not believe in it.

That's because bloat is or never was a problem.

The problem was always too many bad products, reliance of selling too much to the same people to make up for bad product, and new product that didn't mesh with old product.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's because bloat is or never was a problem.

The problem was always too many bad products, reliance of selling too much to the same people to make up for bad product, and new product that didn't mesh with old product.

Which becomes almost inevitable as the amount of product increases enough.

 

[Minigiant]

Which becomes almost inevitable as the amount of product increases enough.

However that's not a problem of bloat that's a problem of designers focusing on a single demographic for so long.

You branch out in that problem doesn't happen.

The problem is not that you produce too many products is that you and no one else haven't produced any products that Johnny or Jenny want. You keep making products for Jimmy and Jimmy has no more money left to spend on product.