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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5332114" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, Tony, I think that is a reasonably good summary. Honestly I don't think there's a THING wrong with Essentials. It isn't EXACTLY the choices I would have made but I think it is well designed and people will have fun playing it. I think the real issue that I'm thinking about is tangential to Essentials. It seems like D&D has wound itself up into a frenzy of publication. I'm not really exactly sure how we got to this point. I mean consider the time period 1975-1985, the "Golden Age" of D&D and other RPGs. In this ENTIRE PERIOD we had OD&D (7 very small books), part of BECMI (I'm not entirely sure which books came out in that period but it was I think B, E, and C basically). Then we had AD&D, which up to 1985 consisted of 3 core books, FF, UA, and MM2. Basic + OD&D combined don't weigh in at as much as the 1e AD&D PHB, so we basically had about 7 books total worth of material to play with over a 10 year period. Now, there were certainly plenty of adventure modules, several settings, The Dragon, probably a few odds and ends I've missed too, but the point is the game was hugely successful and obviously made a lot of money for TSR. When did it become mandatory to come out with a book a MONTH just to stay in business and keep the game "alive" vs the book a YEAR that sufficed 30 years ago? I'm just not sure I really think that the new way is actually that much better than the old way. At this point 4e is just over 2 years old. It is already the heaviest RPG in existence with 30+ full sized hardback volumes. On top of that the crunch in Dragon and Dungeon really is pretty vast when taken as a whole. I mean 3.x MAYBE got there after 8 years. The problem is there is just no viable way for this pace to be maintained, except to keep endlessly "repaving" the whole system until it collapses under its own weight. At some point you HAVE to step back and stop with the adding endlessly to the system. A lot of the guys I played with back in the 80's and 90's are still around, but most of them already won't touch 4e. They don't DISLIKE it, they're just blown away by the sheer monstrosity of the whole thing.</blockquote>

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