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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5332078" data-attributes="member: 996">I think I see what Al is getting at.  So there is a problem with 4e that it's getting too complicated and confusing.  There are too many feats, too many powers - classes that were relatively simple when you picked 2 of 5 at-wills and 1 of 4 each encounter & dailies have become almost nightmarish, with alternative class features, 5 or 6 'builds,' a dozen powers at each decision point, and litterally thousands (OK, only 2 thousands) of feats./As a business that wants to sell products/, what do you do?  Re-set the game with a new revision?  Tried that (3.5), it worked, but there was a lot of animosity.  Nix large swaths of redundant feats and marginal builds?  People paid you good money for all that crap, you can't just banish it from organized play or reccomend DMs stop using it.  What do you do?Well, what WotC did was to launch a 10-product adjunct to the game that, /taken alone/ would be simpler.  Of course, we're not taking it alone, because we're a bunch of geeks who not only use every scrap of info published for our beloved games, but also go around obsessively grid-filling anything we deduce might be 'missing.'  So, yeah, used that way, it's gonna suck.I don't know how much better it would've been, but I can think of two possible solutions.The first is no help, because it amounts to "if it hurts, don't do it."  Slow down the production schedule.  Release one - really good, thoroughly playtested, carefully-previewed-to-generate-buzz - book a quarter, at most.  The goal would have been to generate sales of each suplement comparable to those of the core 3, by leaving demand for new material high.  The problems with this are myriad.  3rd party providers would swoop in with offerings; fans would complain that the flagship RPG of all time was 'going unsupported,' even with staggering sales it just wouldn't deliver the same revenue as producing crap books every month.  The biggest problem, of course, is that they already didn't do it, so it's not a solution.The other solution would have been to take the Essentials aproach - a simplified 'on ramp' to 4e - but, instead of salting it was a lot of 'new' material to maybe attract current fans, make it 100% compatible with the game as it already existed.  The same game, just in smaller, more easily digested bites.  Instead of coming up with new class advancement mechanics, just have builds with powers pre-chosen and laid out in an advancement chart.  If a player 'graduates' to the complete game, his character converts cleanly to all the new options.</blockquote>

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