Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Whatever floats your boat, I guess."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."In practice impossible" is not actually better to most people than "Of little value but at least slightly emotionally satisfying."
The big forgotten part is that many 3pp and homebrewers think like people in WOTC.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 idea that the game should actually provide options...
Like Snarf mentioned, not every complaint is an invitation to find personal solutions, some are 'grievances,' some issues just call for systemic solutions.
There's less output from WotC, too. Maybe it's a symptom of a 50yo hobby? so much has already been churned out?
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.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.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.
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.
That's because bloat is or never was a problem.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.
However that's not a problem of bloat that's a problem of designers focusing on a single demographic for so long.Which becomes almost inevitable as the amount of product increases enough.