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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4577286" data-attributes="member: 2067">Of course not. That would be patently silly. You seem to think I am a gibbering idiot. That I imagine Mike Mearls sitting in his dark tower on his throne of bones from those who have been layed off, petting his cat, and laughing evilly as his Mind Control Helmet sparks with black lightning.I'm not an idiot and WotC can't control our minds.What WotC can do is tap into the collector's mindset. It's an advertising technique: by buying more things, you will feel better! By buying more books, you will have a more complete game! Without all the books, well, you aren't having ALL THE FUN, are you?! I guess in as much as any advertising/marketing technique is mind control, this is, but it's hardly maniacal or consistent.Not everyone has a collector's mindset, but I'd wager there are a lot of gamers that are susceptible to it (do you own more D&D supplements right now than you've ever used at the table? CONGRATULATIONS, YOU'RE A COLLECTOR!). It's not inherently bad, and it's not inherently evil to try and capitalize on it (indeed, it's a little silly to NOT try to capitalize on it), but if you capitalize on it, it can reach a breaking point. Heck, this was part of the reason 2e is decried: so many people felt their games were incomplete without the different rules references hidden in various 2e books. "Argh! This book mentions a supplement I don't have! So useless!"That's why 3e's decision to blatantly NOT do that was so refreshing, even if they moved away from it a bit at the end. I never said they weren't trying to do that. I just said they were tapping into the collector's mindset as an attempt to get people to buy more books. It's pretty unrelated.I think 3e was chugging along just fine with the SRD and sites like d20SRD.com. Totally legal, totally awesome sites. Totally things that WotC kicked to the curb in favor of the fee-based DDI. "Ah! They're giving away things we could charge for! Gotta stop that!"The big thing about it is that it is for completists. If you want all the rules in a convenient index, give us $6 (per month), or else no, you can't have that. You can game without it. But, you know, you don't have have EVERYTHING then.Hard-wiring minis into the game and giving them minis-exclusive powers isn't responding to "players want minis." It's responding to "how can we sell more minis?" You can produce and sell little pieces of plastic without dipping into the "Gotta Catch 'em All!" By calling them "core," they are tapping into that collector's mindset. "All these books are essential for REAL D&D! If you play D&D without them, you're playing some sort of jury-rigged, half-arsed D&D that obviously isn't up to snuff with our Platinum Edition Insider All Core Books Exclusive Membership. And you don't have $30 this month? Aww..."I mean, those are pretty cartoonish hyperbole, and I don't think WotC is literally saying any of that, but to someone who has a collector's mindset, who wants to have a "complete" game or nothing, each additional purchase is a burden, so if there are going to be a lot of additional purchases needed to complete the game, they'll just go do something else. New material is all well and good, but by making new material required (even just by implication and branding) you trigger that collector's mindset, which says "I need everything that is required." If they can't GET everything that is required, they'll just abandon the whole thing.If you do need to drink to have fun, I don't think I'm the one with the problem. <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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