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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3813895" data-attributes="member: 4937">Orc: I certainly hope you are right.  But I have a hard time understanding the marketing strategy that they are using or the overall secrecy if they intend to be fully open with the third party vendors ahead of launch.  I know you can't answer any of these questions, but are they just screwing up? (Everyone does.)  Are they just overworked?  Is 4e being rushed to market because of flagging 3.5 sales?  Why the decision to leak only enough information to create wild speculation, fear of the unknown, and unrealistic expectations?  It doesn't make sense."If you are talking about the 3e community and suggesting 50% wont convert, I dont know where you are getting that from."I think almost my very next sentence suggests that that is not what I'm expecting.  I expect that most of the 50% which is ambivalent or hostile initially will be won over over time.  Only a fraction of that will stay with what they have.However, I don't understand how you think the up coming edition isn't grognard hostile.  I can fully understand if they have decided that they need to avoid grognard capture in order to capture a younger, hipper, larger market.  That's just business.  But its pretty hard to convince me that decided to throw out 30 years of flavor because they thought the gamers steeped in the lore of the game would be exicted about it.  As a setting supplement, sure, it's cool.  But as core?  It might be the smart move, but its certainly not grognard friendly.  Outsider though I may be, I think I'm entitled to that opinion.Well, that depends on what we mean by 'long run'.  Over the long run, I don't think there could be said to be a significant market for Basic D&D.  I think that was clear to me from the beginning.  Yet, AD&D's lighter weight brother managed to be a successful product what, a decade?  Longer?  Over the long run, I don't think there is ever a significant market for any rules light rules set.  The economics of rules light is against it, to say nothing of the mentality of geeks at play.  Yet companies still keep trying it, sometimes with marginal success.  Over the long run, I don't think there is a market for any nostalgia product like Hackmaster.  Eventually, your customer base ages out of the market.  I certainly agree that any rules set has a limited life span, and that 4e is likely to run longer than any variant prior edition.  Unlike the OP, it's never been my position that any variant rules set would displace 4e or that its even possible for 4e to 'fall on its face' - even 2nd edition didn't do that, and its probably going to go down as the 'Homelands' of D&D (to make another WotC reference).  But I do think that there would a bigger market for a incremental package like '3.75' than there would be for a transformative package had WotC chosen to go the incremental route.  One of the reasons I think that is that alternatives to the Vancian system existed before 4e came out.  Virtually anything that 4e is going to try got tried by some 3rd party.  Some of them were marginally successful, but only marginally.  I'm not sure I can think of one that so throughly swept peoples imaginations that everyone agreed this had to be in 4e.  And the replacement of Vancian magic is probably the most popular projected change we are looking at.  There are alot of people here that are fired up about 4e, but at least for me, its not sweeping my imagination the way 3e did.  I've said it before, I'll probably say it again.  When I picked up 3e it was like Monte and company had read my mind.  Every vibe I'm getting from 4e is like hearing about some other DM's house rules.Which means I'll probably be house ruling a rules set on my own for another decade until the pendalum of change swings back in my direction.  And I doubt I'll be the only one.</blockquote>

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