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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 7674150" data-attributes="member: 177">Okay, that seems like a very different statement. I was responding to the following assertion:  "I don't think there's a market for different *frameworks*."  Period, full stop, absolute - no desire for other frameworks.  You did not say, "I don't think there's enough market for other frameworks to be as successful as D&D." I don't think D&D does any more, any better, or satisfies people all that more than it has ever done.  I think what you see is not so much a matter of qualities of the game.  It isn't that D&D does more, better, than other games.  It is a matter of ecology/market behavior.  You can see this in, for example, fast food chains.  The market is very large, there are many players of roughly equivalent quality.  But, there's still one or two major player, and then a whole plethora of notably smaller ones.In a given environment, there are some things that are large, and many others others that are small.  This is normal, and healthy.  You do not want, or expect that naturally all things to be the same size, even if they are of similar qualities.  The size variation aids the long-term stability of the environment.  As we have seen with D&D and Pathfinder, once you reach a certain size, innovation is *hard*.  These games are large, and entrenched, and if they make dramatic changes quickly, their fans will scream bloody murder.  D&D and Pathfinder cannot easily experiment, and to put out a new version is an effort on the order of years.  Real innovation is brought in by the smaller, experimental games.  And ideas and experiences from those games feed up to the larger games, so eventually they may adopt some of the ideas - you can see a lot of this in 5e.So, for D&D to remain vital and healthy, it needs and wants those smaller frameworks around to be the laboratory.  Luckily, the existence of the big fish creates the environment that fosters the smaller frameworks, and allows them to exist.  You see that here on EN World - a whole lot of talk about D&D, yes, but under that umbrella, there's talk about entirely different frameworks, too.</blockquote>

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