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Message: <blockquote data-quote="William Ronald" data-source="post: 2634914" data-attributes="member: 426">Yes, and considering the debates on some topics in the past few months, very good jokes.  (Indeed, I think Pramas and Monte both hammered the point home that game designers do need a good sense of humor and need not be at war with each other.   <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=";)" />  )As for publishers disliking D20 or a specific rule set, I think that much of it is about subjective taste.  I have to confess that most of the games I play are D20 based, but I sometimes enjoy other rules systems.  (For example, at the last EN World Chicago Gameday, I played in a Mutants and Masterminds game, a Buffy game, and ran an event using aspects of the D&D 3.5 and Arcana Unearthed rules.)  To me, a large part of what makes any game fun is how everyone at the gaming table interacts with each other.  I think that actively disliking a rule system and publishing products strikes me as strange.  I think one problem that BiggusGeekus identified is important: many players are reluctant to master multiple rules systems.  So, D20 does have an advantage in that many gamers already are familar with D&D.  It is a shorter transition to M&M or AU than to GURPS for most players.   Unless a new rules system or a game offers something very appealing to players, or has a tie in to something that they like (such as a television show), many D&D players seem to want to stick to D20 rules.Also, if a publisher is unfamilar with the D20 rules or disdainful of the rules, it can show in the quality of the product.  Dragonlords of Melnibone  by Chaosium was a product that tied into Michael Moorcock's Elric series and could have been very popular.  However, the application of the rules was abysmal.  I am not very familiar with Chaosium's products, but I thought that book was very poorly done  -- despite good source materials and a fairly successful non D-20 Elric game.  In the end, I think such products not only hurt the D20 market, but hurt the gaming industry as a whole.  Plus, it can make the people at a company with a negative attitude seem petty.  (No gamer, especially one considering a purchase, wants to feel that a publisher is looking down at them.  So, hatred can be self-destructive.)</blockquote>

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