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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4857659" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, for one, I don't think it's as good a treadmill as all that. Every edition fragments the player base, injects bad blood into the community, causes confusion in the newbies, and fans the flames of debates that would otherwise die down. This is only going to get more true as the editions themselves get better, and bigger, and more challenging of what "D&D IS" (tossing away sacred cows and the like). It creates instant competition in the form of retro-editions, because you can't copyright rules. If you're WotC, and you're smart, you realize that the healthy, happy player base is the way you get the most money. You expand the core game, you get everyone to buy your rules/books/online subscriptions/software/whatever, appeal to the biggest crowd of this niche little market, and you expand that niche because people will bring their friends in. Think of the final edition something like the Flat World Knowledge Publishing people: you'll take bits and rules you like, and publish your own customized book for your own personal games.Or think of something like a "patch" system where most of the rules are online, and books are only published as fancypants special collections of those rules, and more rarely. Or think of it as the OGL turned up to 11: "we're giving all of our rules away for free, and we're making money on software and subscriptions, and on "customized content" for your home games written by professional developers."New editions are a shot in the arm financially, but they're detrimental to the social networks that the game thrives on -- this is a negative externality so huge that I'm pretty sure dodging that bullet is infinitely preferable to taking it. It's also a tremendous risk, because if a new edition doesn't pan out like you hoped, you're committed to a dying horse for at least a few years, trying to prop it up and make it walk again, even though it wants to fall over. Heck, the whole "incremental improvements to the game" are showing up in 4e stuff right now -- how MM2 fixes solos, or how rules updates apply to the CB and the compendium, or how the new psion tries to poke a hole in the heremtically sealed valut of the powers system. I'm not sure 4e quite has the strategy for updating where it should ideally be, but they're certainly dedicated to trying to get us consumers to accept that the game ain't complete after the first three books.  Actually, if they stay on the treadmill, it can only get worse. The more big editions there are, the more the community breaks up, the more people assume that there will be another edition (how many people, if they don't like 5e, will just say "let's wait five years!") so they don't need to buy into this one, the more people mistrust WotC and the D&D brand, the more they loose community goodwill, the more retroeditions pop up to compete, the more people look to other RPGs aside from D&D ("well, WotC stopped supporting the game I love, so I switched to Vampire...or to WoW!")The edition treadmill is not a strong business model -- planned obsolescence never really is. I'd love to talk more about what the "final edition" could be in a thread, actually, but I think that would probably violate the 5e ban. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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