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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5263213" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, there was no real talk about editions at all back in those days. Support for 2e never wavered. The options/P&S stuff etc let you add in new stuff or replace certain subsystems/modified kits or whatever but it really didn't matter. The groups I played in when UA came out never bothered to use 95% of it, nor did most of them use 95% of the 2e options stuff, just whatever bits and pieces fit with that DM and campaign. In both cases it was basically no different from what you got out of Dragon, just in hardcover (and most of it WAS reprints of stuff from Dragon).I think 95% of the grief about 3.5 had mostly to do with the rapidity with which 3.0 was replaced. The community was used to the way things worked for 25 years with a major new version every decade+ and maybe a rules supplement every 5 years in-between. 2e had started tossing out a good number of minor supplements and there was already a feeling of annoyance about that to some extent. I think people were just totally shocked by a new edition coming out 3 years into 3.0. The blame on WotC though should go more to criticism of the fact that they released such a miserable edition as 3.0. It had a lot of interesting ideas but the implementation was TERRIBLE. Even a cursory reading of the 3.0 PHB was enough to tell me the thing was unworkable as-written. 3.5 was pretty much mandatory, they couldn't pretend 3.0 was supportable for a normal 8-12 year edition lifecycle.The thing with edition launches and then ongoing support is there are opposing requirements. It makes perfectly good sense to release 3 books as a new edition. Yes, its somewhat costly, but you can't just release a new system as a rump, it has to do most of what the previous system did. Its also pretty pointless to release a new edition as if it was a bunch of supplements, the formats serve different purposes. There's no rational way for instance that 4e could have been released as several power-source focused books, you STILL need all of them to have a game that allows all the basic stuff, but at the same time you DON'T need the more obscure classes to begin with. Supplements make perfectly good sense to be focused and can be whatever size is most easily salable, the core really can't be.So you will always run into this mid-edition sort of nebulous point where it seems like the format was 'wrong' or needs to be reorganized, but it really isn't so.</blockquote>

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